{"id":27752,"date":"2020-01-02T14:22:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-02T19:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=27752"},"modified":"2020-01-02T14:22:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T19:22:48","slug":"the-falling-ladder-of-abstractions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/02\/the-falling-ladder-of-abstractions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Falling Ladder of Abstractions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/tonsky.me\/blog\/good-times-weak-men\/\">Nikita Prokopov<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=21932049\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/tonsky.me\/blog\/good-times-weak-men\/\">\n<p>Every year Apple releases a new operating system and every year it needs a flagship feature to promote it. This year it was a long-overdue standalone Music app. Well, what could be simpler, right? List of files, categories, filters, smart lists. All that has been around in iTunes at least since 2001. But even if it wasn&rsquo;t, how hard is it to build a decent music player? Many companies order of magnitude smaller than Apple have done it successfully in the past.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Yes, these particular bugs are pretty minor and probably do not affect business in the short run, only Apple&rsquo;s reputation. Still, <em>it is a big deal.<\/em> Imagine how tall, opaque and unstable that ladder of abstractions is that it&rsquo;s even possible to fail such a simple thing as selecting an item in a list??? It is a freaking list and if you click it, it should select a thing that you just clicked.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>At this point, you might think I&rsquo;m just picking on Apple or Catalina. God knows what went wrong there. Maybe they did change priorities and re-hired all the programmers. But no. This problem is universal.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon can&rsquo;t <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nikitonsky\/status\/1206562961688596483\">make a screen with two checkboxes<\/a>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Twitter newly rebuilt UI <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZkxBzJ8lYAY\">takes 7&#xD7; longer to load first tweet<\/a>, giving you essentially the same stuff but much later and with much more effort[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I think this is less a failure of abstractions and knowledge transfer and more a choice these companies have made not to prioritize the user experience.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/21\/itunes-xml-and-music-in-catalina\/\">iTunes XML and Music in Catalina<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/04\/music-app-on-macos-10-15\/\">Music.app on macOS 10.15<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/24\/software-disenchantment\/\">Software Disenchantment<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nikita Prokopov (via Hacker News): Every year Apple releases a new operating system and every year it needs a flagship feature to promote it. This year it was a long-overdue standalone Music app. Well, what could be simpler, right? List of files, categories, filters, smart lists. All that has been around in iTunes at least [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-01-02T19:22:51Z","apple_news_api_id":"7036608d-8470-4f7b-9c08-4e0ea512ee0c","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-01-02T19:22:51Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AcDZgjYRwT3ucCE4OpRLuDA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[19,1143,131,1621,30,1666,1816,49],"class_list":["post-27752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-apple-software-quality","tag-bug","tag-marzipan","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-15","tag-music-app","tag-twitter"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27753,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27752\/revisions\/27753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}