I develop iOS, Android, Web and Mac apps, and I was honestly blown away by the quality of the intelliJ and VSCode plugins available for Flutter. In fact, they've kinda ruined me for other language SDKs now.

Granted, the lack of material, demos and discussions makes it difficult to tackle some problems, but that seems to be changing these days. It's hard NOT to enjoy coding in Flutter, though, and I think that end up being its biggest strength.

Other manufacturers are doing similar things. In fact, Trix Cereal has quietly switched away from artificial colors recently, and other General Mills "kids" cereals are expected to follow suit soon.

Although the community version of IntelliJ at PHPStorm's core is open-sourced, PHPStorm itself is not. Regardless, the productivity gain it provides is WELL worth the cost and inconvenience.

It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely not intentionally) discouraged from updating their apps once they launch.

It's designed to be the "anti-professional" means of app distribution, and it never reaches any higher.

Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even scope in the SME market in terms of rolling up licencing and deployment. Hell there's even a use case for families.

I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, automatically, with 30 seconds of box-checking.

I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is what web browsers are there for...

Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.

Indeed. Except that, to get it, you-developer actually had to ship an updated browser with your "app" -- basically the same as any native app, except that instead of being "just turn on this setting in a plist and recompile", it means refreshing your little in-house fork of a massive browser project that barely anyone understands. Clearly Valve cannot be arsed to do that, so Steam keeps looking like shit more than 3 years after these screens appeared.

The universal toolkit is not so universal if every app ships its own custom version.

Most tags actually seem to be spot-on and quite helpful, so the data is already there.

> I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

I've wondered that as well. A bit of data munching together with user feedback, in a similar manner to online fashion stores ("I found these size 11 boots a bit on the small side") would be quite helpful.

The problem with that is that dev's stated minimum system requirements are -frequently enough to cause trouble with such a check- either substantially too high, or quite a bit too low. After all, not every studio has enough cash to discover what is actually the lowest-powered machine that one can play the game on.

What would be the problem with finding a curator? It's not unlike how music industry has always worked -- from the era of finding a radio producer you like to the era of following a playlist on Spotify on some genre you like.

I agree that this is not a particularly novel problem, though.

You should have even more trouble finding good curators than finding good games.

But the idea is that you need to find a curator ONCE, and then they suggest lots of games for years.

A curator not being 100% perfect it's OK too -- after all even one's self buying games they read about or even try their demos, will pick some dudes. It's unreasonable to expect a curator (or a recommendation) service to not do that too.

I have been reading movie reviews for close to 20 years now; in all that time I have found just two people whose reviews I respect and whose taste mirrors mine so much that I can follow them blindly. With games it's just as complicated, if not more so.

Of course. You first need to do some work (find a curator you trust), before you can check a game they suggest.

But what would the alternative be? Either you ALWAYS search for yourself, or you search first for some curators and then follow their suggestions (occassionaly checking out stuff on your own too).

The ability to simply blacklist one or two handful tags would make discovery dramatically easier for me. That's all it would take.

The whole point of the discovery queue is to expose you to a variety of options. If you want to search just those things you want, there are already filters you can manually use. These filters don't have all the options (please, no 'early access', I agree), but they give you the filtered lists that it sounds like you want.

Quite trivial, actually. They already do the necessary data-gathering at your end (i.e. their periodic automated survey), the only "hard" bit is data-gathering at the other end (when a game is listed).

It's so trivial to implement, in fact, that one has to wonder whether there are commercial considerations overriding the technical aspect. Maybe they don't want to piss off hardware and game vendors, maybe Valve would rather have you buy their console to bypass these considerations altogether... who knows.

It doesn't, really. It has the ability to run the game at its original (1998) level of quality. But the developers chose not to enable this as a fallback. You have to rely on some guy on the Internet that figured out how to hack it so that it would work.

It'd be great if I could, for instance, filter out everything that won't run with the Intel HD3000 graphics unit on my cheapo laptop.

I always buy games on Hubble if they're available on both. Sure my save games don't get backed up, but they are drm free. I'll even pay more if the humble price is higher for drm free.

The key is that Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet, and worse they haven't really internalized some of the things that make App Stores "good" or "bad". As a result, people are leaving.

The response though will be even more interesting, either Apple can give application delivery the focus it needs and become the best in class example, or they can continue to languish, or worse they mandate by fiat use of feature which negatively impacts the brand.

App Stores try to be too many things at once. They started off as discovery, distribution, and payment processors. They have evolved into sort of microservice delivery applications. When the sandbox + App starts looking like a container instance running a unikernel, you've really supplanted the OS entirely. But that model doesn't work well for what many people think of as "productivity" apps.

I hope Apple chooses to give this problem the focus it needs. I could easily see this as the "feature" on which a lot of OS seats are sold.

They really did, for the first year or two of the Mac App Store's existence. It was great. All of the "$10 utility apps" would be there today if not for Sandboxing.

Maybe this wouldn't have included the apps where the 30% or poor support for upgrades/subscriptions would really impact sales (Adobe, Microsoft, perhaps, interestingly, Sketch...), but sandboxing is the only outstanding issue that prevents you from shipping an app to the Mac App Store.

I realise this is still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands.

With Steam, I can open a fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.

Between Steam's library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don't want to buy games any other way. There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.

The "whole app" is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month. It's not worth complaining about.

Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.

In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.

MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.

Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.

* Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications.

* If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you have to do this for every game in your library that has annoyingly frequent updates. :( Also note that you can configure Steam to not download updates when a game is running [1] and that Steam makes the update game you're trying to launch the highest-priority download.

* Run Steam in Offline mode (assuming you're not playing multiplayer games ;) ) : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGC...

Sadly, I don't see any way to run some sort of "Steam client and game updating" service that runs in the background and just keeps the client and your games updated even while you're not logged in to either Steam or your Windows account.

[0] Right-click on the game->Properties->Updates, change the value of the "Automatic updates" dropdown menu to "Only update this game when I launch it".

[1] IIRC, this is the default setting.

Implying that Steam only runs rarely.

Yeah, that complicates things. :( Best of luck!

if you don't want steam to be a distraction but still install updates, run it and put yourself in offline mode. the footprint is pretty small, except when it's actually installing.

Steam uses ~120 MB of RAM on my system. Google Chrome uses 300+ MB of RAM with just the Google home page loaded.

> ...with a task manager icon as only UI,

You can configure Steam to only display a system tray icon when you don't have the Steam window open.

There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.

Odd. On my six-year-old potato PC, Steam takes 10 seconds from the time I click on the Steam icon until the time the UI is up and I can interact with it.

> ...if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy?

Probably in the name of downloading and applying the most recent game patch. On the off-chance that you weren't talking about patch downloading, I started a game in my library that was installed, but that I hadn't played in over a year. It loaded just as quickly as any other game in my library.

If patching bothers you, run Steam in Offline Mode.

> ...I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

If you want to go that route, you can probably find any number of methods to spoof the Steam DRM.

It's not totally straight forward though. You need to unplug your network device (or turn off wifi, etc) so the initial startup times out, and gives you the option to use Offline mode.

There might be a command line switch way to do that too, but I've never looked. ;)

It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.

So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed.

Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.

http://store.steampowered.com/software/

2) Steam "updates" itself every time I launch. I see others saying it only happens once a month, but I literally cannot launch it and have it not update. If I quit and immediately relaunch, it says it's updating and starts downloading stuff. WTF?

3) It shows me ads. Note - it's not like the App store which opens to a list of "what's hot/what's new/what's promoted". It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface.

4) It shows me ads for games that don't work on any system I've ever used Steam on.

5) Support from Valve is non-existent. If you try to get support for a game, they will by default tell you it's the game vendor's fault, even before figuring out what the problem is. If you try to use their support forums, you are required to use a different login and password than the one you use for the store. WTF? Why would they ever do that?

The list goes on. It's just a terrible app. In my opinion the Mac App Store is lightyears ahead of it in just about every dimension I care about. I no longer use Steam when there's any other option available.

This is pretty easy to disable, there's an option within the Interface tab in the settings.[0]

[0] http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/28415/is-there-a-w...

I don't think it's a terrible app given everything it's trying to do (and primarily that it's a retail outlet, not a social network), but it can definitely do with a bit more polish.

Not only encourages, but forces. Any non-sandboxed apps that were released in the App Store prior to the sandbox mandate can be updated for "bug fixes", but any new features can explicitly not be included.

I know if they did they'd lose me as a customer for anything other that (maybe) phones, but maybe they don't care about that market.

The only way they wouldn't would be if they grew up iOS into something you can do real work with -- allowed end user app installation, emulators and VMs, containers with full Darwin installs that could run homebrew, etc.

It could be done, even without sacrificing ordinary user experience -- just hide the advanced stuff from regular users and require a little magic incantation to unlock it. But it would run counter to the padded room you-don't-own-your-device philosophy of mobile so I can't see the iOS team going that way without being pushed from above.

Of course they have been updating OS X fairly well, so maybe not. Maybe the poor App Store experience is just like the poor Podcast app and other things -- an internal problem with motivation, direction, and focus in certain areas. Organizations can easily forget about things that are important but not 'hot'.

  > I keep wondering if Apple wants to kill OSX and take everything toward iOS

While the Surface and iPad Pro continue to improve, I have a really hard time seeing tablets "killing" laptops like, for example flash drives and cloud storage "killed" CDs.

I'm not quite sure this is a winning strategy for them. There has been hype for a while that tablets will replace laptops. But looking back, there was a huge backlash against Windows 8 and the touch elements of it. Android tablets continue to vie for a segment of the market that feels like they're competing with iPod Touch, iOS, like you mention is still locked down.

By mainstream I mean non-tech-savvy users, non-hackers. That's most people. I can completely understand how wonderful a "managed platform" like iOS is to a non-technical user. No malware! (Or at least greatly reduced risk of it.) No OS rot! No IT! No complicated system administration! It's like replacing a hand-cranked car by one with electronic ignition and an engine that doesn't constantly need retuning.

For most people "freedom" means the freedom to get crapware and malware, spend hours that you can't spare futzing with your computer and getting nothing done, and have to reinstall your OS every year because it gets borked. Non-hackers hate platforms like that with a passion that it's difficult to understand. I often try to communicate it by comparing it to cars: how would you feel if you had to tune your engine every week, manually inspect every tank of gas for adulterants, and periodically stop your car to perform an inspection as you drive down the highway?

At the same time, the car analogy is deeply imperfect. In the computing world when you trade Windows or OS X for iOS you're giving up a lot of capability and a lot of freedom. Tech-savvy and professional users either don't want to give that up or as is the case with developers can't give it up.

But the problem is that non-tech-savvy users are most of the market, especially as computing becomes more and more mainstream, and most of the market is the market for a large company like Apple. Edges of markets don't matter. As such, I see the majority opinion of the market pulling things away from open platforms and rich capability and toward a managed, simplified, jailed, iOS-like future.

I think there's a real risk that the professional will be left with a choice between the awful UX offered by pure OSS and being forced to adapt to iOS or similar platforms.

Hey, maybe it'll prod the OSS folks into really taking UX seriously.

Yeah.

I'm not encouraged by what I see there nor by the combative/ultra-defensive attitude you get in those circles if you bring up this topic. One camp will insist that the latest Linux desktop or Ubuntu phone or whatever is great and is totally comparable to iOS and OSX and call you an idiot (and worse) for daring to think otherwise, and the other camp will just call you an idiot for "needing" UX or even a GUI at all because "real men" blah blah blah and why don't you read e-mail in emacs? I used to wade into those debates from time to time, but I stopped after I wrote a blog post (years ago) about Linux usability with some ideas about how to improve UI/UX development on Linux and the responses were full of insults I hadn't heard since Jr. High... not to mention one DDOS attack against the server.

I think the fact that it's mandatory has something to do with why people don't leave the iOS App Store.

I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it?

The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS is somehow worse. From Apple's perspective, the sandbox limits are arguably justified by a desire to provide greater security and privacy controls. The review process is basically a consequence of that same goal - though of course, review time could be greatly reduced.

It sounds like the core issue for people is sandboxing. But what specifically about sandboxing is the issue? Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time), or are there just a lot of developers who prefer not to rework their apps to deal with the sandbox restrictions? Or is the very idea of sandboxing the problem (or perhaps the default security setting for allowed app installation)?

As long as apps can be distributed outside the MAS, I guess I don't really understand the problem. The MAS adds a lot of convenience, but as usual, the convenience comes at a cost, and thankfully users and developers can take it or leave it.

As for the MAS harming devs it's the "official store of OSX" so users are arguably being trained to look there and only there for apps. So sure you can look elsewhere but Apple is fighting against you.

30% cut is very high as well. I think existing payment systems for shareware apps were 5% or less. What do you get for your 30%? Support? No. Discovery? Not really. File Hosting? Ok, maybe but is that worth 30%? Easy upgrade and install. That's about it but usually that would be mostly handled by a free library.

Again, my contention is not that the MAS is perfect, but to say that we're worse off for having it is hard to fathom. If the inconveniences really outweigh the conveniences, then distribute your app outside the MAS. Problem solved.

I can understand similar complaints about the iOS App Store since there are no alternatives (outside of jailbreaking) for native app distribution, but in this case it's just an option. Is the existence of the MAS really worse than not having it as an option (inferior as it may be, depending on your viewpoint)?

Whereas the design and simplicity of iOS has ensured, from the start, that these types of apps cannot exists on that OS.

> Are the sandbox limits really too restrictive for most apps (I guess new APIs/permissions could improve that with time)

The last 5 years have proven that Apple is not interested in granting exemptions to the Sandbox or new entitlements for, say, Accessibility apps.

But again, Apple doesn't require distribution through the MAS (even if the majority of apps can work effectively within the restrictions), so how does the MAS's existence make the OS X ecosystem worse off overall?

If Apple is ignorant enough to leave money on the table by failing to provide a good marketplace/environment for a large number of apps (as may very well be the case), then non-MAS distribution will still flourish. Maybe they'll wise up and improve the situation in response. Maybe not, and we're back to the way things were before the MAS.

And hosting, key generation, payments, etc. are a fairly significant roadblock to shipping an app that the MAS formerly allowed you to completely ignore.

The ability for any normal person to identify, understand and resolve issues caused by the wild west of "desktop computing" should be well understood at this point -- they cannot.

I'm really hoping this opens the door for more flexible licensing for Sketch. The Mac App store is a bit of a pain for multi-seat licensing and upgrade pricing.

I don't distribute Mac apps through the app store, and signing a regular app (no need to worry about sandboxing) with your developer certificate so that it can run without disabling Gatekeeper literally involves clicking a single radio button in Xcode.

According to the article, the people who did not get a job were the ones who "indicated on their resumes they were cancer survivors AND WORE A HAT that read 'cancer survivor' when applying for a job."

NEWS FLASH: Wearing a novelty baseball cap to a job interview may not be the best idea -- cancer or not.

The control either should have involved people wearing hats for another cause and/or they should have had a resume-mention only group in the test.

Point of fact, I would not be suprised if discrimination exists. But no need to rig the test.

> In the control condition, the resume provided no extra information and participants wore a plain white hat. Finally, it is important to note that all confederates served as their own control—they entered some stores wearing the “Cancer Survivor” hat and other stores with the plain white hat.

Yup, total linkbait writing here. I was able to find more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10533808