Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.
You actually can define custom functions as named templates, but they're definitely not pretty, and would almost certainly push you towards the "just allow us to write code using a normal programming language" side of the argument.
My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.
One of my favorite UX stories is about my first Mac, a 12" g4 mbp. One of the best things about it was that I could open the lid and it would immediately be awake and ready to use. I would use it, do what I needed to do, then close it and put it away. It was great because it consumed so little of my time.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
I was recently raving about how NYC's metro payment system OMNI doesn't require an app, so you can use whatever contactless payment device you already have to get around NYC. That characteristic makes it so easy to just slide into the metro without having to deal with unfamiliar apps and all the mental overhead that comes with them on top of all the mental stress and sensory overload that comes with traveling.
Oh dang, you're right. Mac OS X was my first Mac OS, but it looks like the Drop Box concept existed long before OS X. Here's a reference from 1991 titled "AppleShare Drop Box: Access for System 6 and 7 Clients" https://www.savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL09033.pdf
I thought it was a reference to the Mac OS X `~/Public/Drop Box` directory, which was a write-only place for people to send files to your user, which has been around since the first OS X beta came out in 2000.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that the pay-to-play even applies to multiplayer within your own LAN. I just verified that nothing had changed since I last played: you are unable to join LAN games unless you buy a monthly xbox pass. Complete BS.
Another thing that is crazy to me (and maybe this is a premonition) is that if you play MS games online on Xbox, you have to have a subscription, but if you play on other platforms you can play for free. They are literally punishing their own users with additional fees. I thought this was just Minecraft, which is why my kids and I always play Minecraft on our iPads instead of on the Xbox, but when I recently bought Forza Horizon 6 I was amazed to see that I could play online with other players for free, whereas on Xbox I had to pay to play online in Forza Horizon 4 and 5. So they are basically saying "you gave us a bunch of money for hardware? Cool, now give us more money every month to use it online!" It's absurd, and it's one of the things that drove me away from Xbox. I also have friends who have been lifelong Xbox fans who have had enough and are leaving for Steam.
Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.
It sounds interesting, and surely there would be some awesome things that would come from it, but on the other hand, MS could use this to take control of linux APIs through their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, so it would not be without risk.
We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.
Adobe did this with their perpetually licensed software. If you install Lightroom 6 today, the face detection and maps features do not work because they didn't pay for perpetual licenses for the libraries they used.
Before electronic POS systems accounted for this, we'd just split the bill evenly. I didn't like that solution either though because it rewarded people who ordered expensive food or lots of food, and that was never me. I even quit going to lunch with big groups of coworkers because of that.
There is a part of Ghost in The Wires that is pretty close to that:
Ring me up, Mate.
Neill.
That made me smile. But what the hell? I figured: he already knew he had been hustled, so I had nothing to lose.
I called.
“Hey, Neill, what’s up?”
“Hey, mate.” No anger, no threats, no hostility. We were like two old friends.
We spent hours talking, and I shared all the intricate details of how I’d hacked him over the years. I decided I might as well tell him, since it
wasn’t likely to work on him again.
We became telephone buddies, sometimes spending hours on the phone together over several days.
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.