For instance, the product Microsoft created for that use case is actually called OneNote and autosaves everything automatically to the cloud by default.

This discussion is bizarre.

Sizzler, use google sheets for your todo list.

Definitely, there are about a million different get things done applications for the Mac you should take a look at some of them.

Nope I love my spreadsheet - it has about 20 tabs. Everything I ever need to know is in there. I used to work heavily with Excel and I'm very comfortable with it. I think in Excel.

Tried google sheets but it was annoying for some reason. Hmm now I can't remember why. Maybe I will try it again. I think I remember why now. I like having Excel as its own app in its own spot on my monitors, and I can alt-tab to it whenever I want. Yes I am aware I can drag the chrome tab to make its own window. No I don't want to do that for a host of reasons - mainly that I have to kill chrome sometimes when it gets laggy. So having my spreadsheet as part of my chrome tabs is annoying, especially given that Chome tab toggle is so ****ing useless.

I could go on about that for a while. Candybar maybe you can write an essay about why it's actually a good thing that Chrome won't let me toggle between two tabs and every plugin that says it can do it is buggy and inconsistent. I have one now that works on most pages, unless focus is in the url bar (which it often is) then it just pastes a sum sign. Also why Chrome insists on owning all the Ctrl/Cmd shortcuts, so I can't just bold this text with Cmd-B like I can with any other browser. Note this does not mean I hate Chrome - just this stuff.

Fair enough. I get the annoyance of it being a separate window in the same app.

Forgot to mention that depending on autorecovery to save your work in Excel is a great way to lose a morning's work (or your entire todo list). I also recall that there is a maximum that it will try to recover as well, but definitely, hitting ctr-s got automatic.

??

Ctrl-Tab, Ctrl-Shift-Tab

Edit: I guess you mean non-consecutive tabs? Can't you just rearrange them?

I want to toggle back and forth between two tabs. Like text editors do. Firefox has an extension that works seamlessly. Very very common that I'm copying from one tab and pasting to another, multiple times.

Re-arranging the tabs then ctrl-shift/ctrl-tab-shift is a nightmare. I like my tabs in a certain order. 2p2 and stupid crap on the left, work stuff on the right.

This is the best working plugin I've found so far. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...icalpigimhdcll

I have to remember to use Alt-W though. And unfortunately Cmd-W, which I sometimes hit accidentally, closes the tab. Alt-Q is even worse, as Cmd-Q kills Chrome. So I change it to alt-W.

It's hard to remember different toggles for different apps though. Ctrl-Tab for Chrome would be awesome. But Chrome demands full fealty from the Ctrl keys.

Ctrl-Tab does cycle through tabs in Chrome, at least in mine and I don't think I have an extension for it. Cmd + <number> will jump to whichever that numbered tab (1-8), with 1 being the far left, just like a text editor.

Right. I want to toggle back and forth between two tabs - like Ctrl-Tab does in Sublime and every other text editor.

I just mean it's hard to remember to switch in the moment. I have so many alt-tabs, ctrl-tabs, alt-W, cmd-` stuff to remember for each situaiton. I'm old and it gets confusing.

I've actually found this quite inconsistent between different programs (for example, Xcode has the "browser" behavior) and your "text editor" behavior annoys me; I much prefer ctrl-tab to go right and ctrl-shift-tab to go left.

Anyway, fun news, I'll be starting a new role within my company soon - sounds like I'll be learning Go and using a lot more Python than I have in the past. Should be fun to change things up.

btw, I saw in last week's Hacker Newsletter that Stack Overflow launched a salary calculator - how accurate do we think this is? https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary

I put some data in for me (San Francisco, 10 years experience, all developer jobs get basically the same results within a few k) and it said 75th percentile = $150k. Seems low? But maybe that's just because companies that pay $$$$ like Google or Netflix get all the attention in salary discussions, I dunno.

This can be true. MSFT likes to put out features that are crudely implemented and "enhance" them in subsequent versions/updates.

Where I work I get a Win 7 notebook and a Win 10 workstation. I use Remote Desktop at home to log into my Workstation at work. I'm able to share clipboards seamlessly. MSFT has probably fixed this issue since you used it I am guessing.

....

Congrats! How are you enjoying Go?

Try switching your location to any big city in Europe

I've always wondered this, but why is it that salaries are so much higher in the US? Is it just a factor of GDP?

The European city we have an office in has about an extra 33% of the employees salary in employer costs.

There are generally more favourable to the employee employment laws in terms of hours worked / overtime / on call duties / firing / holidays / etc.

And of course the US is restricting the supply of talent while having a huge amount of investment money to spend and a very healthy ecosystem for starting companies.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other reasons too.

If you're describing this as sort of a "happy accident" (in which case "genius" should probably be reworded to "fortune"), then I agree. But I guarantee you if Apple could be making their products any amount better, they would.

Iphones are substantially faster for meaningful processing tasks. This has been increasing for a few years and probably will continue to do so. So the "little bit better" is pretty weird. If you wanna play games or do video encoding, an Iphone is gonna be much faster than competing products.

I think the OnePlus 5 has been the first phone in the last 2-3 years that is faster than an iPhone. It was also released 8 months later. (Very impressive reopening of apps. Apple dominated this feature for years.)

NB: This is based on actual usage, not inane synthetic arguments. Save that for the ranting about clock speed for which processor is faster.

OH. And jj is spot on about the salary stuff. Euros work less and there is a different allocation of employee/employer taxation that doesn't make things as clear.

Lol. How many people do video encoding? Negligible, probably. Playing games? Probably going to be identical. You're probably thinking of LOADING games, which is substantially faster on an iPhone. But how that metric translates into overall relative quality of the product is also negligible, IMO. And games are also the biggest factor in skewing the BS video speed tests that you're likely thinking of with your OP5 and reopening apps comment.

Using this type of stuff to say iPhones as a whole are much better (which I'm inferring from your lol at "little bit better") is pretty dumb. There's many other dimensions of smartphone enjoyability like overall UX, customization, camera, other features, etc. Top of the line Android phones and iPhones do 99% of the same things 99% as good as each other (except for the big areas of customization and freedom Android offers), so not only does that mean that neither can be more than a "little bit better" than the other, but also it's basically all about personal preference.

More importantly, this seems irrelevant to my original point: Apple is not intentionally releasing inferior products for the purpose of closer competition.

This is fair and I think a lot of this is that hardware is still much more easily commoditized. Of course Apple is also a software company but on that front, they are kind of conservative and rarely build the kind of durable advantage that can translate into a monopoly. They kind of straddle between an Asian electronic conglomerate and an American tech company in that regard. Even when they seemingly get ahead, for instance with iOS, iTunes store, Siri, FaceTime, etc, they seem unable to convert that to a near monopoly like others have done.

This is pretty much the definition of a little bit better when you consider whole products, when you compare this advantage against, Office vs its nearest competitor, Google Search vs its nearest competitor, Facebook vs its nearest competitor, etc. If LibreOffice did everything Microsoft Office could do, but was just substantially slower, MS would have to drastically reduce the price for Office otherwise everyone would use the free one. If Bing returned equivalent results as Google but was just substantially slower, Google would have a major problem on their hand. I don't even know what Facebook's nearest competitor for its use case is - there are a few little social networks for specialized use cases, but no one really comes close for what it does.

goofy, salary thing seems accurate for LA.

One potential good argument here (which counters my own, but so be it) - is iMessage. iMessage is substantially better than the competition, which is technically nothing until all the carriers fully implement RCS Universal Profile.

Note: I'm not including "3rd party messaging apps" - FB, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Allo, etc. While this makes this post utter garbage for people outside the US, IME in the US everyone "texts" and no one is willing to consistently shift to a 3rd party app. So we're basically looking for SMS+ solutions.

To me, iMessage seems to be SMS + better consistency and reliability (while intra-iMessage at least) + read receipts + dumb ****. I bet if iMessage didn't exist a lot of people could very very very happily switch to Android. My fiance would probably switch to Android if it wasn't for iMessage, because she needs the read receipts and "currently typing" indication for work purposes.

iMessage on the mac changed my life. I can type faster on the computer, pasting screenshots is much easier. It also gives me an excuse to tell people to text instead of call. "I'm on the computer, phone died, just text me."

I don't even bother arguing which phone is best, it's been essentially a tie for years. Pick the one you're comfortable with.

That seems reasonable.

Pretty much. I think people in general have a hard time acknowledging that there are others who do the same type of work that they do that get paid much more than they do.

saw,

Video encoding is done by FB, whatsapp, IG, and Snapchat. It is a core feature of snap. Games are the bulk of apps and app revenue. You have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry.

candy, kero,

If we assume that programming is basically a glorified text editor and that is what a programmer needs. I'd agree smart phones are virtually identical in terms of the usage. I think using a desktop with 8/16gb RAM is comical. I also think using one of the non-PCI SSDs that runs at like 500mb is for the p00rs also. Is this representative of a normal use case? Obviously not. In the same way if you are doing tasks on your phone that can't be done on virtually any device (we're veering into MyPhone ~ S8 territory, which is prob true for 99% if we're on that level).

Its pretty much whatever. But the Google Search comparison is pretty apt. I guess their ad stuff is what provides all the real value.

What does this even mean.

Sure, whatever, but this seems to be mostly about how demanding you are as a customer or your ability to imagine a demanding high-end customer, not about the objective merits of the products in question. Also more about wants than needs. Which is another way to frame this - Apple's key products are more about wants than needs, which elicit a more positive emotional response because you feel less entitled and more in control.