Why is it that Apple can set up an API and leave it running for a decade but Google has to change their way of doing the same thing every 2 years and every consumer of it suddenly has to migrate to the Next Thing?
I've had to migrate Pushover to a different Google thing (push notifications, billing library, etc.) half a dozen times now and it always goes like this:
1. Receive e-mail that I have to migrate to some new version of a thing
2. Ignore it
3. Login to one of Google's dozen dashboards for something unrelated and see warnings that I have to migrate by such-and-such date
4. Read the documentation and see it's now much harder to do the same thing I was doing before with no benefit to me or my users
5. Nope out of it
6. Receive more dire e-mails from Google as the migration date gets closer
7. Read on Stack Overflow how to do it in a succinct way that condenses Google's awful documentation into a few steps, pointing out all the gotchas
8. Finally do the migration and hate Google just a little bit more
Something I really like about working on my Macintosh Plus is that event loops in the system and applications often respond to the mouse and keyboard before window redrawing, so as I remember where things will appear in a window I'm familiar with, I can click or use a keyboard command to do something before the window is even fully redrawn. When I'm closing a dialog or an old window that was just brought forward, it saves time not having to wait for it to draw just so it can be dismissed.
It makes me feel like I'm able to think faster than the machine which seems like it would be a negative but it's rewarding.
On a modern machine, I'm so often frustrated at web pages that are mostly drawn but blocking on some stupid Javascript or font download that won't let me interact with it yet, even though I'm just trying to click something to get off of that page anyway.
Experience in programming comes not only from building things at lower layers, but also from the betrayal of trusting things someone else built at the layers beneath your things.
Those of you that like vintage computers: do you also like vintage cars? If so, do your styles align regarding preferred eras, restoration, preservation, modification, "daily" use, etc?
joshua stein
via
@jcs@jcs.org (Mastodon)
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Dec 18 2023 14:08:51
