Linked List: November 7, 2016

Monday, 7 November 2016

Pramit Nairi, comparing Microsoft Teams to Slack:

The thing with Slack is that using it doesn’t feel like work. The UI and the experience is designed to be as effortless as possible with everything feeling natural and human. From subtle things to the more overt, the service feels likable and encourages interaction and participation. Sure, it has its shortcomings — what software doesn’t? — but at the heart of it, it is truly reimagining how things get done. It keeps the computer-y aspect behind the curtain and, consciously I’m sure, delivers an experience that feels almost magical.

Long ago I wrote about how bad user experiences feel like fighting your way uphill and good ones feel like you’re coasting downhill. An uphill UI feels like you’re fighting against the app; a downhill UI makes it feel like the app is helping you along. I spent an hour or so kicking the tires with Microsoft Teams, both on the Mac and iOS, and it’s definitely a fighting your way uphill feeling.

I have many complaints about Slack, but 95 percent of them are about the lack of a native client and truly native UI for Mac. If I brush those concerns aside — and I acknowledge that most people don’t feel nearly as opinionated as I do about native Mac apps — and just accept that Slack is a web app running in a web view, I would describe it as delightful. Slack is a “going downhill” experience.

Slack looks and feels like an app that was made by people with taste — albeit very different taste than mine. My taste is for native UIs. Slack’s taste is for web UIs. Microsoft Teams looks and feels like it was made by people with no taste.

Nairi, on Teams:

It’s certainly not user-centric and definitely not user-friendly. It has no heart and will not elicit love back in return. It truly is the PC and Windows in response to the Mac and MacOS. It is 100% Microsoft and is something only they can create. While there are many things Microsoft has done right and arguably functionally superior, creating software that makes people feel good when used is certainly not one of them.

This is my impression as well.

Reaction to the ‘New’ 13-Inch MacBook Pro ★

MacRumors forum member, in the first comment after the announcement of new MacBook Pros:

Well, I’m sure I’ll be attacked for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway:

Tiny harddrive, barely enough RAM (and not upgradable to the “enough” level), no dedicated graphics, only dual-core processors. It certainly isn’t bad, but Apple just took the “pro” out of the 13-inch line. And come on - it’s freaking expensive. […]

The 13” is NOT a pro device in my opinion. It’s more like a beefed-up and slightly heavier MacBook Air. For that, it just costs way too much.

This isn’t a new comment. This was posted 4 years ago, in response to the last major MacBook Pro redesign. Déjà vu. (Via.)

Explaining Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, and Everything in Between ★

Glenn Fleishman, writing at TidBITS:

I anticipate that, now that Thunderbolt 3 is out and available in a mainstream Mac, other manufacturers will ship more new high-end computers with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C. USB 3.1 Gen 2 tops out at 10 Gbps, which will be fine for lower-end systems, which don’t require 40 Gbps performance and aren’t intended to support more than two displays. Mobile devices outside of the Apple ecosystem will stick with and continue to adopt USB-C without Thunderbolt 3 for simplicity, power consumption, and controller cost.

With nothing else like either USB 3.1 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt 3 on the horizon and the broad industry support of the USB-C connector, USB is finally living up to the Universal part of its name — even with Thunderbolt thrown in on top.

Great explanation of a surprisingly complicated situation.

HP Spectre Laptop: All Ports Are USB-C ★

I asked the other day whether any other computer maker offers a notebook that doesn’t have at least one USB-A port. HP does — their ultra-thin Spectre is USB-C-only. Spec-wise, it’s clearly more of a MacBook competitor than a MacBook Pro competitor, but still, points to HP for being forward-thinking.

Testing the Limits of 16 GB of RAM on a MacBook Pro ★

Jonathan Zdziarski, pushing back on the notion that “pro” users need more than 16 GB of RAM:

I fired up a bunch of apps and projects (more than I’d ever work on at one time) in every app I could possibly think of on my MacBook Pro. These included apps you’d find professional photographers, designers, software engineers, penetration testers, reverse engineers, and other types running — and I ran them all at once, and switched between them, making “professionally-type-stuff” happen as I go.

Here’s a list of everything I ran at once:

VMware Fusion: Two running virtual machines (Windows 10, macOS Sierra)

Adobe Photoshop CC: Four 1+gb 36 MP professional, multi-layer photos

Adobe InDesign CC: A 22 page photography-intensive project

Xcode: Four production Objective-C projects, all cleaned and rebuilt

Microsoft PowerPoint: A slide deck presentation

Microsoft Word: A 20* page document with graphics

MachOView: Analyzing a daemon binary

Mozilla FireFox: Viewing a website

Safari: viewing a different website

Preview: Three PDF books

Hopper Disassembler: Performing an analysis on a binary

WireShark: Performing a live network capture as I do all of this

IDA Pro 64-bit: Analyzing a 64-bit intel binary

Apple Mail: Viewing four mailboxes

Tweetbot: Reading all the flames and trolls in my mentions

iBooks: Currently viewing an ebook I paid for

Skype: Logged in and idling

Terminal: A few sessions idling

iTunes

Little Flocker

Little Snitch

OverSight

Finder

Messages

Veracrypt

Activity Monitor

Path Finder

Console

Probably a lot I’ve missed

The result? I ran out of things to do before I ever ran out of RAM. I only ever made it to 14.5GB before the system decided to start paging out, so I didn’t even have the change to burn up all that delicious RAM.

I think it’s a legitimate complaint that you can’t get a new MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM, but agree with Zdziarski that the practical effects of having “only” 16 GB are overblown for most typical use cases, even with “pro” software.

The Macintosh Startup Chime ★

Michael Agge, writing for The New Yorker, on the removal of the iconic startup chime from the new MacBooks:

For me, the startup chime has always been a pleasing sound, suggesting a child suddenly striking the keys of a power chord or even the excited microprocessors themselves, getting organized, springing to life. The chime represents beginnings, fresh starts, new plans: the start of a pop song, the first turn onto the highway, the title page of an unread book. I often re-start my work iMac during the day to hear the chime — it’s a reset, the virtual equivalent of taking a shower.

The chime is dead; long live the startup chime.