Yes, occasionally using old systems from decades ago can drive this home.
Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar.
Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous.
Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search.
Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth.
Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…
Also, the Excel Labs formula editor. But it needs a way to tell it "I know I have too many cells! Just let me trace over the 100 nearest rows."
The old scripting language can still be handy if you can keep people from opening the online version of Excel. Especially if you have a certain debugger addin[1]. Excel's JavaScript features are of limited use, if you're offline.
I keep wishing for a spreadsheet to implement all its scripting and formulas in something like Forth behind the scenes, so that every time a competitor announces n-more functions, we can just be like "Oh, really?" and add it.
[1] Related to waterfowl of the plasticised yellow variety. I'm not sure I can mention the name in a post anymore, since ages ago when I tried multiple times to post a properly-referenced (overly-hyperlinked?) message while my connection was very flaky. Note to self: should probably mail dang about this, some day.
> The drawback to using vector images is that it can take longer to render a vector image than a bitmap; you basically need to turn the vector image into a bitmap at the size you want to display on the screen.
Indeed, would be nice if one of these blogs explained the caching solution to tackle the drawback.
Another issue, I think, especially at smaller sizes, is the pixel snapping might be imperfect and require "hints" like in fonts? Wonder if these icons suffer from these/address it
At work, when we send stuff From USA to Canada for repair, we just need to put the correct Canadian customs code and "For warranty repair" on the packing slip.
Wordperfect still exists and can be purchased. It's part of a suite that includes Quattro Pro, the spreadsheet program that fought Lotus 1-2-3. WordPerfect has special features for law firms.
WriteNow is gone, but Nisus Writer is still around, too.
OS X and later are derived from NeXT Step, which makes it derived from BSD. And thus, UNIX-y. Macintosh system software versions less than 10 are Apple original development. The earliest versions were designed for hardware with only 512 or 128 kilobytes of RAM and without physical support for protected memory.
Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.
True. And if it's from SAGE Software, .1 is .nope. They never release a .0, because they thínk that'll trick customers into using it instead of waiting for patches. I've had so many customers tell me they won't upgrade a SAGE product to a .1 release because "I'm not paying to be their beta tester.".
<rant>
They had an SQL driver bug where, if you turned on record-level security, running a query with one set of credentials, then another query with different credentials without first unloading the driver, you'd get access to things you shouldn't. And their response was "won't fix".
</rant>
My gran's power company doesn't like this. When I flipped the main breaker, they saw the load drop and scheduled a crew to investigate and repair[1]. We found out when they called to tell us off after they saw the load restored in few minutes.
[1] It's an old house and hard to tell which outlets and lights are on which circuits, and which of the multiply-rewritten labels in the breaker panel are true, so the main breaker seemed the easiest way…
Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar.
Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous.
Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search.
Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth.
Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…