15 years of the iPhone

[dstrauss]

@Dellaster

Don’t you know, you can go ahead and kill Hitler or your grandfather with a hypothetical time machine. It just creates a new timeline where they’re dead and leaves the original timeline unaltered.

You obviously never watched the Back to the Future Triology…

Back To The Future II Timeline Scene

[dstrauss]

@Desertlap

But I also agree he was a complete and utter a-hole as a person. including years ago to me when he was at Next and I was still with Radius.

Just look how he (mis)treated his own daughter…

[Dellaster]

@Desertlap

… I admire Jobs as a businessman to a point. But I also agree he was a complete and utter a-hole as a person.

@dstrauss

Just look how he (mis)treated his own daughter…

A famous success in business (after iPhone anyway) but a total loser as a human being. Yup.

[JoeS]

@Desertlap

Had to insert that because as we know all internet arguments devolve down to Hitler/Nazis eventually

Known as Godwin’s Law:

Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.

[dstrauss]

Didn’t know where else to park this, but found it interesting that among lawyers more than 80% use iPhones. Hard to believe (and it is limited to ABA members, which has been a declining number), but seemed high nonetheless.

https://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2022/11/aba-survey.html

[WillAdams]

The really telling statistics are:

• iPhones represent ~20% of the market
• iPhones bring in roughly 80% of the profit seen by the smartphone market

I really wish Serif’s Affinity Designer was as usable as Macromedia Freehand (but they still won’t implement features as basic as control-dragging w/ the pen-tool to move a just placed node properly (it retracts the control handles which is just annoying).

That actually brings us full-circle, since Macromedia FreeHand v4 was essentially Altsys Virtuoso 2 ported from NeXTstep to Mac OS/Windows — I really miss amazing NeXT apps/ports such as Lotus Improv and Quantrix and FrameMaker (the only implementation which didn’t make me actively angry to use) and esp. TouchType.app which was just delightful to use.

[Desertlap]

Oh, Framemaker, the WordPerfect of Desktop Publishing apps back in the day. Incredibly powerful app with an equally steep learning curve to go with it.

OTOH, if you wanted to get the most out of your incredibly expensive Linotype typesetting equipment, you ultimately ended up using it like it or not

When I briefly worked for Linotype back in the day, it was the only time I got treated with the respect and deference that Field Engineers dream of

And part of the "secret sauce " of Framemaker was that you could edit/embed custom postcript code, which was quite useful back in the early days of the LaserWriter

[dstrauss]

@Desertlap

When I briefly worked for Linotype back in the day, it was the only time I got treated with the respect and deference that Field Engineers dream of

[WillAdams]

@Desertlap

And part of the "secret sauce " of Framemaker was that you could edit/embed custom postcript code, which was quite useful back in the early days of the LaserWriter

Exactly — Display PostScript allowed such code to be executed and displayed on-screen.

Altsys Virtuoso had the same ability to do custom PostScript strokes and fills — I had one which would put dimensions on lines when working at a box company, but of course on Windows or Mac OS one just got an endlessly tiled “PS” and couldn’t see the result until one printed to a PostScript printer, or wrote out a .ps file and viewed that in GhostScript or distilled It to a PDF.