The whole video/movie industry is rife with mature, hardware-implemented patents. The kind that survive challenges. They are also owned by deep pockets (not fly-by-night patent trolls). Fortunately, the industry is mature enough, that some of the older patents are aging out.
The image processing industry is similar, but not as mature. I hated dealing with patents, when I was writing image processing stuff.
I’ve been doing public speaking for my entire adult life, but not for a living.
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.
I’m comfortable doing it, and generally receive positive responses, but I’m not “a natural.”
If I have something that I need to “get just right,” like a class or main speaker gig, I have to practice a lot, and can come across as a bit “stiff.” If I don’t practice, I do well, but not predictably so, which makes me a bit of a “wildcard.”
I know quite a few folks that can walk up to a podium, in front of hundreds of people, at little notice, and knock it out of the park. They often practice.
Steve Jobs was one of the best public speakers I ever heard, and I’m told that he used to practice for hours. I knew a woman (I’m friends with her ex) that used to regularly appear on TV, and keynote finance conferences. She has an “aw shucks,” casual style. Her (ex) husband told me that she’d practice before each gig for many hours.
The folks that make it seem to be “natural,” at anything, generally practice a lot. I speak frequently, but it’s not structured practice.
I suppose it's a combination, some people are more comfortable speaking and improvising on the spot but everyone needs to practice. I can add to your list a CEO of a big bank, he speaks freely and it's a pleasent to listen to him, but I heard that he practice using a private instructor as well
Personally, I don’t like to use icons in menus. I do like them in tab bars and toolbars. I’ve learned (the hard way) to be sparing about using icons. Way back in the 1990s, I designed a scanner driver plugin that used an almost purely iconic interface. Looked great. At the time, I was gaga over Kai’s Power Tools[0].
Our customers hated it, and it was quickly taken behind the woodshed, and buried in a shallow grave in the desert.
Icons are really difficult.
Designing icons is really hard. They need to be immediately recognizable, when very small, and also, retain coherence, when made very large. They need to be recognizable, when displayed as transparent, monochrome templates, and they need to be culturally relevant.
In some cases, there may be legal ramifications for icon choices. For example, branding. I remember someone complaining about Apple rejecting their app submission, because they changed the tint of the Sign in with Apple button to match their color theme.
Selecting from a set (like SF Symbols) takes a lot of thought. I have to be careful not to use one that is already a common icon for something other than the feature I’m attaching it to. I often see apps that make weird choices.
One of the apps I wrote, uses a “long press to learn more” feature. If you long-press on almost any item in a screen, you get a haptic, and a small popover appears, displaying the accessibility label and hint. Works nicely. Ensures that I have good accessibility support, doesn’t interfere with other gestures, and also forces me to be thoughtful about accessibility text.
Kind of a pain to implement and maintain, though. I don’t do it in most of my apps.
> Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?
Not in my case (I never used SO like that, anyway). I use it almost exactly like SO, except much more quickly and interactively (and without the inference that I’m “lazy,” or “stupid,” for not already knowing the answer).
I have found that ChatGPT gives me better code than Claude (I write Swift); even learning my coding and documentation style.
I still need to review all the code it gives me, and I have yet to use it verbatim, but it’s getting close.
The most valuable thing, is I get an error, and I can ask it “Here’s the symptoms and the code. What do you think is going on?”. It usually gives me a good starting point.
I could definitely figure it out on my own, but it might take half an hour. ChatGPT will give me a solid lead in about half a minute.
I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.
Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
I have, however, really come to like Face ID.
[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
> My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
That sounds great.
> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.
I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
>I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
Samsung phones have had a perfectly working finger print reader under the screen for many years now. There is no more progress to be made, it is complete.
Face ID is severely lacking compared to MS Hello, simple as. It's at best 50:50 hit/miss compared to Hello which logs me in always. Granted, that figure doesn't include false positives, but the difference is substantial and makes Apple's implementation look really lame, to the point I'd like to see it removed.
> particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship
I can get on board with this. I feel as if that has fallen off a cliff, in the last decade.
I just released a rewritten version of an app, and spent many days, running it over, and over, and over again, looking for subtle "pain points." Sadly, some will remain, because SwiftUI is so limited, but I think it came out well.
I do feel that "polishing the fenders" is a big deal. I spent most of my career at a company that would have day-long cage mat- er, meetings, over seemingly insignificant details of user experience.
I will say that SourceSafe had one advantage: You could create "composite" proxy workspaces.
You could add one or two files from one workspace, and a few from another, etc. The resulting "avatar" workspace would act like they were all in the same workspace. It was cool.
Don't remember exactly. If I think about it, it could be quite complex.
Git has the concept of "atomic repos." Repos are a single unit, including all files, branches, tags, etc.
Older systems basically had a single repo, with "lenses" into sections of the repo (usually called "workspaces," or somesuch. VSS called them something else, but I can't remember).
I find the atomic repo thing awkward; especially wrt libraries. If I include a package, I get the whole kit & kaboodle; including test harnesses and whatnot. My libraries thend to have a lot more testing code than library code.
Also, I would love to create a "dependency repo," that aggregates the exported parts of the libraries that I'm including into my project, pinned at the required versions. I guess you could say package managers are that, but they are kind of a blunt instrument. Since I eat my own dog food, I'd like to be able to write changes into the dependency, and have them propagate back to their home repo, which I can sort of do now, if I make it a point to find the dependency checkout, make a change, then push that change, but it's awkward.
But that seems crazy complex (and dangerous), so I'm OK with the way things work now.
Your workflow is fascinating! What languages do you work in, if you don’t mind me asking?
Both git and jj have sparse checkouts these days, it sounds like you’d be into that
Do you vendor the libraries you use? Python packages typically don’t include the testing or docs in wheels uploaded to PyPI, for instance
These days in Pythonland, it’s typical to use a package manager with a lockfile that enforces build reproducibility and SHA signatures for package attestation. If you haven’t worked with tools like uv, you might like their concepts (or you might be immediately put off by their idea of hermetically isolated environments idk)
a repo is a repo - you're describing what is nowadays known as a 'monorepo' and it's a perfectly reasonable and desirable even exactly for the reasons you mention, except the 'distributed' part makes it very inconvenient to handle on dev boxes if it grows a lot.
in a centralized VCS there are viable CICD options like 'check the compiler binaries in' or even 'check the whole builder OS image in' which git is simply not able to handle by design and needs extensions to work around deficiencies. git winning the mindshare battle made these a bit forgotten, but they were industry standard a couple decades ago.
No, it let you continue to follow the main branch for most files, while files you edited would have their changes saved to a different location. And was just about as horrible as you might imagine.
We moved from VSS to SVN, and it took a little encouraging for the person who had set up our branching workflow using that VSS feature to be happy losing it if that freed us from VSS.
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tarsus.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Gym.png
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