Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false.
That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.)
I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads.
Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice.
Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads.
So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox.
Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning.
The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.
Is your deliberate misspelling of "Macintosh" spell-check or the same sort of intransigence that compels some people to misspell "Micro$oft" thinking they're clever?
I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface.
These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse.
The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I can transition between typing and pointing much faster than with a mouse, where I have to grip the mouse or release it.
I configure the tablet in "Relative" mode, where the operating system sees it as a mouse and there is no difference in behavior between it and a mouse.
I configure the stylus to emit a "left click" when I touch the tablet with its tip. The stylus has 2 buttons that can be pressed with your index. I configure one to be "right click" and the other to be "double left click". You can choose any other behaviors.
Holding the stylus is much, much more comfortable than holding a mouse, because of the natural position of the hand.
Moving the cursor with the stylus is much faster than with a mouse. I can move it across the screen from corner to corner instantaneously, because the stylus is much lighter than a mouse, and there is no friction, since it does not touch the tablet, unless you use it to select an area.
The positioning accuracy is much better than with a mouse. If you desire so, you can do handwriting, e.g. signatures, or make drawings with it, which of course is not surprising as this is supposed to be a graphic tablet.
I tried this initially only hoping for a better comfort, because my hand was hurting from the excessive use of mouse all day long. But then I discovered that not only it is very comfortable, but also much faster and more accurate than a mouse can be. Therefore I do not intend to ever use a mouse again.
Trackpads are more comfortable than mice, but they are much slower, so they are not competitive for things like drawing electronics schematics, which I do from time to time. While trackpads, like touchscreens, do not have the inertia problem of a mouse, it is absolutely impossible to move your fingertips with the speed with which you can move the tip of a stylus, which amplifies the amplitude of your finger movements.
There are too few programs which know to use "mouse gestures" for the user interface, e.g. some expensive CAD/EDA programs or the Web browser Vivaldi.
Mouse gestures are already better than any trackpad gestures, but when you use a stylus they become even better, as they are pretty much the same movements as in handwriting.
I do not think that any of the programs that I use daily supports radial menus, but the shape of the menus has really no importance, because with the tablet in "Relative" mode and with reasonable values set for the acceleration and sensitivity of the cursor I can reach instantaneously any point on the display, with a very small hand movement, no more than one inch for going from one corner to the diagonally opposite corner of my monitor.
I think that radial menus could have been useful when used with graphic tablets used in their default "Absolute" mode, where the position of the stylus on the tablet corresponds directly to the position of the cursor on the screen, which makes more awkward the cursor movements in locations that are far away from the center of the screen.
No such problems exist when the tablet is in "Relative" mode, when the stylus behaves like a mouse, except that it has neither inertia nor friction and your hand rests in its natural orientation.
Using a graphic tablet in "Absolute" mode is equivalent with using a stylus on a touchscreen, e.g. on a smartphone or tablet, so in those cases using radial menus might also be convenient, unlike in my case, where the shape and position of menus do not matter.
As a anti-social person and a misanthrope, these are all tips for amateurs that assume you must be in a relationship with other people. This is not true. One can be a hermit and enjoy the solitude. My comment here is not designed for replies and social interaction. I'm making it to test my idea against the wisdom of the crowds in case someone can enlighten me about where I might be wrong. I'm seeking information, not society. This is grating to me even as I write it. Who do I think I am? That doesn't make it any less true.
You are forced to see the world through your own biases (including things like having two arms and seeing the visible light spectrum, not just who you vote for).
Many of these biases are common in humans, and humans can exchange ideas.
It can be enlightening to test your biases against real human being to see which ones are valid and which ones are things you've picked up along the way and might not be fruitful to you now.
Because you only see life through your own eyes, you definitionally can't examine yourself in isolation, and you can't know how you are affected by yourself.
I've found exchanging with others fruitful, even when I don't want to and find it repellant.
John Donne said "No man is an island" but other poets and philosophers have said we are essentially alone in this world. I understand the first point, but experience the second, but not fully because I do have a few valued connections with others. There are always exceptions to the general condition. You have a good one too.
> I've found exchanging with others fruitful, even when I don't want to and find it repellant.
Agreed. It's almost like taking bitter medicine for me- I loathe the idea of going to outings and meeting new people, but however tired I am afterwards from masking, some part of me comes away better off for it (assuming I'm not being forced to do it all the time).
Then why are you posting here? You must require some kind of social interaction. Is arguing with people on HN meeting your needs, or are the alternatives all too scary and alienating to consider?
In general, I am skeptical when anybody says, "I am a ______." We vastly overstate what aspects of our condition are innate and which are merely habitual. I have seen many people with misanthropic tendencies find balance, and many others sink into the mire.
> I'm making it to test my idea against the wisdom of the crowds in case someone can enlighten me about where I might be wrong.
Which is the same reason everyone else seeks relationships with other people. That is the value social interaction brings. Now that you've cracked the code, so to speak, do you find this behaviour grating because you don't normally like to have your thoughts and ideas challenged/enlightened?
By all means, continue learning how to enjoy yourself alone, and stop feeling like you "should" be more like everyone else. That's actually healthy.
At the same time, though, consider the possibility that there may be more for you outside your house, and you just haven't found it yet. You don't have to force yourself to be social, but try different things that sound like they might be appealing to you.
It doesn't have to be either/or. Keep enjoying your solitude, but budget a small amount of your energy to exploring in case it unexpectedly pays off.
Is it not contradictory to value isolation but also to peek outward from it to access information? Surely reading books is some admission that there is value in experiencing the perspectives of others, albeit a one-sided experience.
I don't think reclusiveness is a moral failing. I don't think we owe society participation. But I do think that hermithood forgoes unbounded unforeseen possibilities for a known, bounded experience. I'd call this "the safe bet is not necessarily the best bet" argument against isolationism and towards social/collaborative open-mindedness.
If you are an "anthrope" (human), then the position of hating humans (misanthropia) is inherently contradictory, hence not valid. Disliking/not wanting to be part of what groups of people do is valid, and striving to keep yourself separate yourself from those groups is also valid. It doesn't make you a misanthrope, though.
What you really want to hate is time, because that's the true limiting factor. Given enough time, anything is possible, but you {insert any modal here} run out of it. Hence, why projecting things onto descendants is a thing. Writing and other methods of symbolic information reproduction have been great inventions to facilitate this.
it started before that, the openai president donated 20mil to trump the month prior... ellision and kushners also pretty heavily involved with openai and altman is tight with peter thiel
the whole public debacle was planned, the tos isn't stopping the pentagon from doing anything (as we seen with openai now)
Employees are the ones with the real power to make this hurt. The customers switching over are easily offset by the DoD contract. But losing talent over this, and having a harder time to attract future talent? That could hurt them
Sam probably expects to solve this by just offering more money. It worked in the past
Yeah, they will have to raise salary by 10% to attract people. This will no doubt hurt their bottom line. Poor starving SV text workers will have no choice but to accept working for them, lest they starve.
Maybe my sarcasm is not justified, but I don't think most people care that that work for a company that does unethical things. In fact I think all large companies are more or less immoral (or rather amoral) - that's just how the system is built.
I really doubt that at this point. Developers have learned that everything Microsoft says to do for Windows, since 2012, will be garbage within a few years. Guaranteed.
Learned Silverlight for Windows Phone development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.
Learned WinRT for Windows 8/8.1 app development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.
Packaged your App for APPX? Too bad, it's MSIX now.
You learned how to develop UWP apps? Too bad, the User Interface layer has been ripped out of UWP, it's now called WinUI 3, and it doesn't even run on UWP. Better port your UWP app back to Win32 now, I guess. Why did you even learn UWP again?
You went and learned WinUI 3 like we recommended? Well, unlike WinUI 2, it doesn't have a visual designer, and it doesn't have input validation, or a bunch of other WinUI 2 features. So, depending on what your app needs, you might have a mix of UWP and Win32, because WinUI 2 is UWP-exclusive and WinUI 3 is Win32-exclusive and neither has all the features of the other. Progress!
You built your Windows 8 app with WinJS? Well, sucks to be you, rewrite it in entirety, WinJS was scrapped.
You ported your app from iOS with Project Islandwood? Well, again, that sucks. It was brilliant, it made pulling apps over from iOS much easier, but it's dead. Rewrite!
You decided to hang it all, develop for good old WPF, but wanted to use the Ink Controls from UWP? Great, we developed a scheme for that called XAML Islands which made so you could have some of the best UWP controls in your old app. Then we released WinUI 3, completely broke it, and made it so complicated nobody can figure it out. So broken; even the Windows Team doesn't use it and is writing the modern Windows components for File Explorer with the old version.
But of course, that would require WinUI 2, for UWP, inside Win32 which is the main feature of the broken WinUI 3; which means that the Windows Team has a bastardized version of XAML Islands for their own use that nobody else has (literally), to modernize the taskbar and File Explorer and built-in apps like Paint, that nobody who wants to emulate them can borrow. Their apps don't look modern and their users complain? Suckers, go learn WinUI 3, even though our own teams couldn't figure it out.
You wanted your app on the Microsoft Store? Well, good news, package it together with this obtuse script that requires 30 command-line arguments, perfect file path formats, and a Windows 10 Pro License! Oh, you didn't do that? Do it 5 years later with MSIX and a GUI this time! Oh, you didn't do that? Forget the packaging, just submit a URL to your file download location. Anyone who bothered with the packaging wasted hours for no real purpose.
Did I mention Xamarin? A XAML dialect of its own, that supports all platforms. But it runs on Mono instead of the authentic .NET, so you'd better... work around the quirks. Also it's called MAUI now, and runs on .NET now. But that might break a few things so hang around for over a year's worth of delays. We'll get it running for sure!
Oh, and don't forget about ARM! The first attempt to get everyone to support ARM was in 2012 with a Windows version called... No, no, no. Go past this. Pass this part. In fact, never play this again. (If you want to imagine pain, imagine running Windows and Microsoft Office on a ARM CPU that came three generations before the Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch. Surface RT ended with a $900M write-off.)
And so on...
Or, you could just ignore everything, create a Windows Forms (22 years strong) or WPF app (17 years strong), and continue business like usual. Add in DevExpress or Telerik controls and you are developing at the speed of light. And if you need a fancier UI, use Avalonia, Electron, React, or Flutter.
He had opened seventy-seven positions across sixty wallets, betting on our product announcements before they were public. Over three years. Total profit: sixteen thousand dollars. Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Sixteen thousand dollars. That is two hundred and eight dollars per wallet. The man had access to the most valuable product roadmap in artificial intelligence and he used it to make less money than a good weekend at a Reno blackjack table.
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