i have a deep and irrational hatred for the fact that some people call computer programs "apps" now of days
"Some people"? The operating systems themselves call them apps now.
And it's really not that unreasonable. What the user thinks of as an app could be more than 1 program. It makes sense to put an abstraction between users and programs because lots of sophisticated software use separate programs that the end user doesn't care about, just the whole.
I don't think anyone's saying we should only refer to each individual executable file. Just that 'apps' arbitrarily replaced the word 'program' with absolutely no change in definition to make it sound New and Marketable tm.
An application program is a computer program designed to carry out a specific task
A howitzer is a projectile weapon designed to fire a specific projectile
Rejoice, your paint guns are now all howitzers!
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Thankfully the dictionaries get a little more specific. I do want an artillery capable paint gun though, that sounds rad
I presented the above as a joke and I had faith that the definition of a howitzer wasn't that vague to begin with.
I used to think howitzer was a specific model or even brand of artillery piece, like the Gucci bag of artillery.
The Task Manager in Windows always had an "Applications" tab and a "Processes" tab, going back to Windows 98 at least. "Programs" was always too broad and restricted to being colloquial; the specific word was either application or executable.
What's worth ranting about is whether people have stopped understanding "App" as short for something.
The l33t w4r3z d00dz were calling applications 'appz' since at least the '90s. Then there was that brief period where Apple tried to claim "app store" was short for "apple store" so no one else could say it..
When I was a kid, I thought it was pronounced WHERE-AZ.
Then there was that brief period where Apple tried to claim "app store" was short for "apple store" so no one else could say it..
I'm only surprised they didn't succeed.
"Some people" includes almost all devs who actually make the apps applications programs though.
Many of the projects I work on use app to refer to the main object or entrypoint.
The browser represents a political statement that the rendering of the web page ought to be under the control of the user. The app is a capitalist reaction to that statement.
The web browser is under the control of Google. The app is just a thing actually designed to run on your computer that can actually utilize its features.
And then the "app" "actually designed to run on your computer" is actually just chromium
I weirdly get depressed about this a lot. Like I just imagine some programmer guy, with the best intent in the world, adding in code to let websites know you're using a phone so that you can make super good content that fits a phone perfectly and increase experience to every user.
Only for the next day some rich monopoly company being like "lol let's use it to block access to our website, and force people onto our app". :(
I know a couple of old head programmers in their 60s who deeply lament the world they've created. So... you're not alone lmao.
I'm [redacted]-years-old and I resent nearly all code I write or read or have to execute anymore.
Is any developer both happy with their salary and also developing something not resent-worthy?
I think developers for Valve specifically have very high salaries and an incredible amount of autonomy to determine their own projects. A lot of Valve devs get paid a lot of money to contribute to upstream open source projects like Linux and Proton so games can run better on Linux; that sounds like a very specific example that fits this.
I have heard these claims too. If true, I dig it, that'd make oooone company..
"This website would look better if you downlo-"
NO! YOU WILL FEED ME IDIOT FASCIST TAKES FROM MY LOCAL CITY SUBREDDIT ON MY MOBILE BROWSER, AND YOU ARE GONNA LOAD IT!Having to keep using the "desktop site" setting on mobile Firefox so that every website can just work without needing an app.
It's so fucking anti-user that you can't just permanently force the setting or have it on a per-site basis
Even worse nowdays is shit like react native apps. Some of them are so slow and buggy it's unbelievable. I installed one of these apps for a supermarket chain (only because they said I'd get free stuff if I install their app, and free food is free food), and it said my balance on my supermarket card was NaN. And it scrolled though the catalogue of groceries at around 15 frames a second. To think this is the delivery and purchasing app for the biggest supermarket chain in South Africa!
"Looks better in our app"
app is just repackaged website
> browse the web"I'm sorry, this feature is only available on our app"> talk to customer service: "is it an Electron app or native"?> they don't understand"It's a good app sir"> download app> it's fucking Electron
I miss when absolute cranks had their own websites. Give me ten Time Cubes over any website app
TIME CUBE. Yes. This was the perfect website. Along with the various anti-time cube and pro-time cube websites and the wars between them.
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I keep a list of the weird guy home pages I find in the wild so I can check up on them.
What do you mean? Like post 2008? Weird guys still do this?
Yeah its cool. Some haven't been updated in a couple years but some are as recently updated as 2022.
Check my other reply, one of them is the inventor of YAML.
anyone else remember findingmyrepublicangoddess.com
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/republican-goddess-website/
What are they up to at the moment? Could you post one of your favourites as an example?
this one is one of my favorites: https://www.wussu.com/
English dude named weed who runs the classical guitar tabs site. He's also into activism for causes like squatters rights.
ingy.net has gotten weirder since my last visit, wingdings are now the font but most of the content seems the same, the ssl cert has expired.
https://www.mindprod.com/ This person wrote the guide to writing unmaintainable code, a long winded comedy masterpiece. They're also into a lot of other stuff they write about, including their sexuality, politics, life being HIV+
http://www.adrian-kingston.com/index.htm I found this guy looking up information about IR blaster protocols but I liked how he's been continually updating with his vacation photos for like 20 years.
https://www.quarkcentral.net/home this person just writes about their theory of the universe along side their resume and tech blog.
I find most of these people through esoteric tech blogs, almost all the guys posting their blogs that have been around for a while have other weird stuff that's worth looking at. Honestly finding these guys is one of the best reasons to browse hackernews.
If anyone has any more cool ones I can add to my list, i'd be appreciative.
It's hard to explain. It was a website written by a very strange man based around a central idea that all science is wrong because one rotation of the Earth should be considered 4 days instead of 1 day. The website itself was a long string of text explaining his positions in very strange language, but since it had no home page or anything, the information wasn't separated. And it was formatted poorly so the most basic information was at the bottom and subsequently added updates were at the top, making it impossible to read.
Warning though, Time Cube guy used a lot of slurs for some reason
Personally I would be okay with "make every single goddamn bit a software an 'app" if and only if this shit actually worked. 99.69420% of app don't even do what they they say on the tin. So many of them are either mobile version of websites but their APIs don't work correctly or just better off going to the actual mobile version of the website and just doing it there.
I also forgot to amount of the amount of digital snooping and snitching these apps do. They all talk to each other hand-off your data to some cabal of E-demons whose soul purpose is to make your life annoying. Don't even get me started on locking features behind paywalls either.
Tech was supposed to make the future cool.
I am waging protracted people's war against installing apps and creating accounts in order to do things that shouldn't require a fucking app or account. I have used my browser's console to scroll wepbages with JavaScript when shitty sites would disable scrolling to force me to sign up. Death to enshittification.
Obviously, have the uBlock addon, but then make sure all the 'Annoyances' boxes are ticked, and even better install the webAnnoyances ultralist - https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances
Far from perfect, but it will override a lot of website's faux disabling of your scrolling, to save you the trouble of F12-ing.
I swear by uBlock, gonna need to check that list because as I run it now, there is the occasional soft wall that requires manual F12 intervention. Thanks, comrade.
oh yeah it's so fucking cool we had a perfect system for representing hypertext and then they added multimedia (cool) and interactivity (okay) and eventually just decided that it should have a cross-platform language for sending any and every possible computer application over the internet and simultaneously it become so totally unusable that developers needed 999,998 different frameworks to make anything with it and they just gave up and made shitty reduced functionality versions for toddlers and called them "apps" and now the web browser takes up 14GB of RAM and no one can ever program a new one again unless they have 20 years and a billion dollars.
you dont need frameworks at all, devs are just lazy and execs are happy to shove garbage code out at breakneck speeds
I used UAS on Librewolf specifically to say I'm on Firefox and Linux (which I am). I want to properly represent what I'm using and not support the Google/Microsoft monopolies, even if that means some websites throw around unsupported browser or OS errors.
I'm willing in this case. The less people hide their actual user-agent (and not use chromium or windows in general), the less valuable that information becomes anyways. I like to think of it as sacrificing myself for the benefit of all.
does that work for sites like twitch? i haven't figured out how to get past twitches "supported browser" log in detections
Thank fuck early desktop GUIs used the resizable windows multi-tasking paradigm.
Potentially having tiny browser windows means that every website will have to be somewhat responsive just to get usage in corporate offices. I'd much rather have to spoof being a smol bean chrome window than install every shitty app.
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Wow, that's a very good point, I've never considered that before.
This very simple thing you said would stop global warming AND cure cancer with no downsides whatsoever!
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The modern push for PC 'Apps' are just PC 'Secret Browser Windows' because a good portion of apps nowadays are just webpages packaged with 30MB web engine.
Discord, spotify and even my fucking graphics card driver, is a web app in a browser
The amd software at least has an option to browse with tabs etc.. not that i want to.
even my fucking graphics card driver, is a web app in a browser
wait what? what driver on what platform?
I remember when they were called widgets and everybody googled how to delete them.
Here in the outskirts of the Bay Area, charging stations each have their own specific bazinga app and each app is hostile to each other app and expects space on your phone to charge your vehicle. It fucking sucks and there's no reason for it except
The "app" also has extra built-in user tracking capabilities, beyond the dreams of what they can deliver with a mere webpage.
