The "apps" that appear in the menu bar are called Menu Bar Extras. They are supposed to be an optional UI to provide quick access to functions of regular applications that are not running in the foreground.
They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.
I thought for a moment I was missing something here. I always just use winget for this sort of thing as well. It may kickoff a bunch of things, but it’s pretty low effort and reliable.
The product I make deals with passwords. We’ve had several bugs over the years that came down to Unicode usernames and passwords containing unexpected characters. Solving them was simple, we just had to be sure to get the encoding and character sets right, but as an American it was eye opening to find so many people with the Euro symbol in password strings.
This also reminds me of the situation with my TV antenna. I made an antenna years ago and put it in my attic. Using the old antennaweb service I aligned it with the stations we cared about and then never touched it again.
I installed the antenna in the winter. Everything worked great. In the summer, we lost a few channels. Rain in the summer and hardly anything would come in. The answer I realized, like in the article, is trees. Leaves are already full of water so they are good at attenuating signals. Leaves that are also soaked in rain doubly so.
Back when I had cable internet we had a bizarre problem where the service would often stop working if it was very cold and raining. It had to be that specific combo as well.
- Just rain == good internet
- Just cold == good internet
- Cold + rain == bad internet
After a lot of head scratching the provider finally sent someone with a ladder to climb the poll. What they found was that the protective boot on the coax connection was bad. When it rained for a while water would seep into the coax connector. By itself this wasn’t too bad, but if it was also cold outside it would freeze. This would then force a gap between the threads of the socket and the cable, breaking the ground connection.
Previously, the connector had been replaced, but nobody had noticed the torn boot. This tech replaced both the connector and the boot and the problem was solved! It honestly was the best interaction with the cable company I have ever had. Only returning their hardware when switching to fiber felt almost as good.
“Cadova builds on the ideas of OpenSCAD, but replaces its limited language with the power and elegance of Swift. It’s inspired by SwiftUI and designed for developers who want a better way to build models through code. It's cross-platform and works on macOS, Linux and Windows.”
For a lot of people the benefits show up because they have more devices sharing that connection. Before our kids moved to school we had 5 people on our home connection. Each with multiple devices, all trying to work or play games or stream content at the same time.
For one person with one computer it’s probably delightful overkill. For a modern family unit it can make everyone happy.
A lot of blogs get hung up in the math, even when it is just supporting evidence for a broader point.