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The only real answer for this is self-imposed handicaps.

Title shortened for HN.

Original: "You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths"


> I respect that Apple has every right to completely destroy the legacy of the Macintosh

I disagree. Apple's various machinations to control the best available supply lines (deals with TSMC, etc...) make me feel quite entitled in saying what is and is not acceptable behavior on their part. This feeling amplifies with every "courageous" announcement they make sunsetting some useful feature they no longer feel like supporting.


I would also add that since Apple chose to lock their software and support of various file format/data storage to their own hardware solely; they have a responsibility toward their longtime customer to provide a good long-term experience. Otherwise, the only "solution" is to get stuck in time at a particular OS release and it doesn't work in IT for many different reasons.

There is a large difference in computing devices versus other simple objects, in that they need software and software can change which is problematic but should not be a problem for the customer/user...

In my opinion Apple is largely failing at providing a worthwhile platform, when they don't just discontinue stuff for their bottom line, most of the changes are for marketing reasons or increasing lockdown to extract more money from customers.

There is not a whole lot of useful stuff that have been added in the last 5 OS iterations but a lot of major annoyance or downgrades/roadblock/complications for usage, etc...


What a pompous and annoying message you’ve written. Apple is one of the most successful businesses in the history of the world for good enough reason — providing value to customers.


As posted elsewhere, making $107k is illegal. Making $107M is legal. Lots of people made thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. In aggregate, they made single-digit billions based on the losses Citadel had to report. DFV alone made north of ten million (realized then) and is up north of $200 million right now (currently unrealized gains).


> There’s so many areas of medicine where we don’t see progress because the ROI just isn’t worth it. Do we want to risk making all medicine like that?

You can have a market for R&D and see progress. You cannot have a market for lemons and expect the same. For every Ozempic, you can expect one or more Nexium, where the company (AstraZeneca in the case of Prilosec/Nexium) uses the first research win to pretend to have a second win (or third, or fourth, or even first because acquisitions) using marketing and distribution channels to bury the cheaper med.


I don't know about "paid" but his column has moved from "shill who sometimes has a point" to "rabid fanboy" recently. As a recent example [1], he claims Japan's primary reason to punish Apple and Google is protectionism for Sony and Nintendo. His point is so strained he (intentionally?) fails to mention Microsoft, a check notes American company.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/06/15/japan-app-store...


I’m glad I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Gruber’s take on Apple is generally good but politically his comments are often cringeworthy, to the point I don’t read the website regularly any more.

It’s not protectionist to force Apple to open up the App Store in your country. It might be disagreeable, for some people, and that’s fine, it’s ok to have an opinion. But if you’re going to throw around big words you should know what they mean.


He mentions the reason for being protectionist because rules are not applicable to Sony and Nintendo. It might be disagreeable but you have not given any reasoning.


If Japan applied tariffs to iPhones to raise the price of them relative to domestic phones then it would be protectionism. That is the dictionary definition of protectionism.

They didn’t, in this case, so it’s not.


Microsoft would welcome a law that forces Sony to allow Xbox Game Pass on PlayStation.


eh - I'm not a fan of Gruber, but Gruber is fairly consistent here. He strongly believes in low-government intervention into companies. He strongly dislikes regulation, especially of tech. You don't need to be an Apple shill to have those opinions.


Sony Interactive Entertainment (which I believe is the "Sony" he's referring to) too is an American company.


> I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing.

Apple tells a pretty compelling lie here. Rather than execute logic on a server whose behavior can change moment to moment, it executes on a device you "own" with a "knowable" version of its software. And you can absolutely determine no network traffic occurs during the execution of the features from things announced this week and going back a decade.

The part that Apple also uploads your personal information to their servers on separate intervals both powering their internal analytics and providing training data is also known, and for the most part, completely lost on people.


Are you claiming Apple uses personal user data (e.g someone’s photos or texts) as training data for their server-side models? That’s a massive claim and there are some journalists you should definitely shoot a message to on signal if you have proof of that and aren’t just blowing smoke.


Apple's claim (per public statements) is:

- They upload your data to their servers. This is a requirement of iCloud and several non-iCloud systems like Maps.

- Where analytics is concerned, data is anonymized. They give examples of how they do this like by adding noise to the start and end of map routes.

- Where training is concerned, data is limited to purchased data (photos) and opted-in parties (health research).

My point is that Apple's code executing on device can be verified to execute on device. That concept does not require trust. Where servers are involved and Apple does admit their use in some cases, you trust them (as much as you trust Google) their statements are both perfectly true and ageless. Apple transitions seamlessly between two true concepts with wildly different implications.


The iPad is a "pro machine" or a "personal computer" when 17Lands[1] is usable on the device. Having article after article try to pantomime the details of what Apple is missing here is futile. Not only is Apple not listening, even implementing 100% of your personal wishlist isn't enough.

[1]: https://www.17lands.com/ - 17Lands is a website that tracks win-loss (and other) data in MtG: Arena games by installing a small program that reads logs from the game itself. It's the perfect example of the iPad's failings: it's too esoteric for Apple to provide directly and covers the kind of program extensibility needed to make hardware pro-usable.


An app like this, that interoperates non-consentually with another app to modify or augment its behavior, is complete anathema to Apple's desired model of computing. In their view app developers have more right to control how your iPad operates than you do. Of course, Apple themselves have more control than app developers (and you), but don't worry, Apple will use their position to make sure that only good developers take control of your iPad!


That's why the iPad isn't a personal computer. It's a computer that Apple lets you use, for purposes they approve of, only if they get paid a percentage of any commercial transaction that happens on the device.

It's a nice reader and portable second display, though.


They were setting the goalposts for a “pro” computer, though, not a personal one.

I mean this is a site for programmers. Surely everyone here has the experience of bumping their head on annoying IT-approved vendor-supported software limitations, right? It could be a pro device where your company locks down everything inside an Apple provided framework. They could even (since they are going to need to put together the plumbing for this anyway to comply with EU) have an internal IT department provided company store.

People here want iPad libre. I want that too. I don’t think that’s what Apple means by pro, though.


From the parent's description it sounds like it just parses log files, doesn't seem like it would augment the behavior of the app generating the logs at all. Curious to know more about why something like that isn't possible on ipadOS though.


In this specific case it's because the log file (if the iPad version of MtGA even generates a "file" for its logs as such) exists in a location only accessible to the app, not to the user or other apps. And the iPadOS model means that there is no way to reach into that app's data to convince it to cough up the data you want.


> Apple's desired model of computing.

That is, complete control over what the users can do.


> An app like this, that interoperates non-consentually with another app to modify or augment its behavior, is complete anathema to Apple's desired model of computing.

And yet, 17Lands works on a Mac!

> Of course, Apple themselves have more control than app developers (and you), but don't worry, Apple will use their position to make sure that only good developers take control of your iPad!

That's a prosecutable abuse of power by Apple.


I don’t really know what pro means I guess, but generally I’d expect professional apps to provide some sort of plugin API to integrate with them in an officially supported manner.

Hacking around these sort of barriers is more of a gamer thing I think.


That would be 2005 when Google Reader launched. RSS for people who didn't know what RSS was.


No, I mean: "Google" moment as in what Google originally was. Let me rephrase in edit my original comment to "Google Search" moment.

Basically, when Google came on the scene in 1997, it blew away Yahoo Directory. Do I have my dates right? Hahaha :)


RSS if anything is in decline, rather than its ascent, because of the fact that in many ways it offers access to content in a way that diminishes ad views.

It's not impossible that it could come back from this state, and indeed, outside of this issue, there's nothing wrong with it as a system, and podcasts make heavy use of it. But it's worth being aware of this headwind.


rss is the advertising.

It allows me to conveniently keep track of tens of thousands of websites.

If you don't have a feed, no problem. Ill just read something else.

With few exceptions I can't be bothered to keep looking at a web page hoping something new has happened.


RSS advertises the content, but not the actual sponsors of such content (i.e. commercial ads). It's also pretty hard to make it track readers.

That's why the likes of Meta and Google just don't like it.


you want to advertise your sponsors in your advertising??


No I totally know it's in ascent, that's my point! Haha! :) Hmm, how to express what I'm saying more clearly -- seems it's been missed? Haha! :)

I mean, like RSS seems like where the web was in 1996 - on the ascent! - waiting for its "Google Search" moment, whereas these types of RSS curations in this product and others like it recently, a little bit like Yahoo Directory!


> No I totally know it's in ascent, that's my point! Haha! :)

How do you "know" this? Show some proof! RSS has two well-known use cases: news and podcasts. It is fighting a pitched battle against players with deep pockets who want you to consume content where they can monetize it with ads.

Google Reader survived for as long as it did because such a service is incredibly cheap to run. Google only ended it to push people to Google+. Many of the various competing providers that popped up during that period are still around, but I would not say it is flourishing.

This is what Google thinks of RSS:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=R...

Note a rise and plateau centered around 2005 and a brief peak in 2013 (when Google killed Reeder).


I agree with your view, but if we put down our old greybeard hats for a minute - isn't it nice to see a new generation of people potentially getting excited about RSS? The parent comment is clearly by an optimistic youngster, who has just discovered an awesome technology that (he thinks) could change the world. And maybe it can! Just because we've seen it beaten once (well, a few times), it doesn't mean it's dead, and maybe, just maybe, there is something we can't see that will be the real RSS killer app.

Take podcasting - when RSS was first devised, nobody thought of such a use-case; it just happened that the media-attachment hacks tacked on top of it merged, at a particular time and place, with some other emerging tech (the iPod), creating something so good that it's still around.


I keep wanting to build a PICS rating service and (humorously) add it to my feeds.

https://www.w3.org/PICS/

The use as parential control is clutter to me. The referring to content selection as filtering was a terrible idea.

The content labels can exist on a different website, they can live in the html document and there is an rss element specifically for it.

You make up your own rating label and put a score behind it. There was an example for example that rated by canadiannes

https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-labels/#Example

As usual they spend a lot of words explaining something simple.

In its almost most simple form:

(PICS-1.1 "http://www.example.org/ratingservice" label for "http://www.example.com/foobar" rating (javascript 5 php 4 mysql 6 bloomfilter 10))

Looks a lot like hand crafted weights to me. If widely adopted you could make a fascinating tag cloud from your 100k rss subscriptions.


> The parent comment is clearly by an optimistic youngster

My only objection is when the "youngster" had his viewpoint questioned, his response was "no I totally know it's in ascent". Objective evidence points in the opposite direction.


Youth be youth, innit ;)


Hahah yeah based on your misinterpreted comment thread hahaah! :)


Ahahaha, yeah the original cykros comment was "If anything RSS is in ascent" because he took my parent comment to mean it was going down somehow, then I replied and sometime later he changed his comment. Then you guys came along hahahaha@! So funny hahaha :)

You know mercury is retrograde right now so there's a lotta confusion on here hahahah! :)


It's so funny how people take this stuff, it's so funny. Yeah I was resopnding to that vibe but it's more like the greybeards who love RSS who keep it alive, but what I see is it keeps building over time.

Hahahaah and it's so funny to see contrarian or animosity against RSS on HN because usually it's the total opposite. I guess it's just 'cause I'm saying it people love to disagree, right? Hahahah! :) so hilarios hahah omg :)


Hahaha, this is so funny because the original cykros comment was like "RSS is in ascent", and I was just agreeing with that in the course of the discussion. And then he changed hahaha! :)

So like the whole conversation became a non sequitur after that so I understand if you're confused. Hahahaha! :) The issues with async I guess hahaha so funny :)


I think you are being slightly over enthusiastic here.


Hahah! :) yeah in the context of the negativity on this thread and the changes in the comments it might seem like that but in a different context it will look right hahaah! :)


> It is possible to export iMessage threads by purchasing an Apple computer and enabling "iCloud for Messages"

And hoping Apple's broken client actually downloads full history or by forcing it to download by scrolling up through years of chat by hand.

And hoping Apple doesn't interpret a read lock on the db as malicious activity and temporary ousting you from iMessage and causing every message you send on unrelated hardware to drop to SMS until you login / logout from every device you "own".


nothing you’ve cited has any factual basis in reality other than that you have convinced yourself that it’s a possibility. it’s purely a mirror of your own personal preconceptions and fears, none of which have a supportable factual basis.

gotta love when someone is so deep into fanboyism that they go through life utterly paralyzed and victimized by the apple that only exists inside their head.

literally, unsarcastically, why do you do this to yourself? it’s a fearsome depth of parasocial attachment in a way that’s incredibly unhealthy and warping. Why do you choose to get this bent out of shape about what phone other peolle buy? it doesn’t matter.

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html


I'm someone who has primarily used OS X, iOS, and Linux for pretty much the entirety of my life. The story about getting data out of iMessage comes from 100% personal experience. This isn't fanboyism — Apple's hostility toward people like me is palpable and factual.

Interacting with Apple's products as a software developer who cares about open source, data portability, etc. is getting harder and harder to justify. The same goes for Google.

What drew me to Apple initially was that they had an actually-existing polished POSIX-compliant desktop environment that was far more open than anything Windows had (or has, to this day).

What you're seeing here are the lamentations of early adopters witnessing all those great features, and the philosophy behind them, slowly going away.


Everything above is an anecdote that happened to me personally when I pointed a SQLite client at chat.db on my Mac.


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