Hypercritical

The lowest hanging fruit is to clear caches from whatever package manager you're using. I highly recommend Daisy Disk[0], which shows a folder level breakdown of your disk space usage. Hyperspace[1] is pretty nice as well. It works well if you have a lot of duplicate files. It uses APFS clones to reclaim the disk space. 0: https://daisydiskapp.com 1: http://hypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hyperspace

Siracusa also developed an app to get Classic Mac window layering behavior on MacOS. - https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/ And one that gives him an application switcher that works the way he likes: - https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/

John Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of his semi-annual blog posts on this - https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.

I still read some of the classics (surprised nobody mentioned them so far) and also a few newer ones: https://kottke.org/ https://daringfireball.net https://seths.blog https://www.freedomain.com/blog/ https://www.cringely.com https://www.zeldman.com https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com http://quirksmode.org/blog/ http://hypercritical.co

> I use it to follow people This is something I have a real need for. Specifically, podcast hosts. I want to follow certain hosts and listen to every random show they're on. Some hosts do keep lists of their appearances across many shows: http://hypercritical.co/about/appearances/ But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app. I want something that aggregates appearances into a cross-podcast RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my app. Automatically subscribe to every one of their appearances.

Jony Ive had been the CDO for years and the results weren't great. It's not that Jony Ive isn't a great designer. It's just that it's difficult to judge your own work, no matter how good you are. What they need, more than a CDO, is someone who they have to run every design by, someone (EDIT: with an impeccable eye) who is not afraid to say no. In other words, someone who can fill the role Steve Jobs used to play. I, for one, nominate the great John Siracusa, for this job. See http://hypercritical.co/fatbits/2009/05/06/hypercritical

John Siracusa's assessment of the situation is still the best synopsis imo. http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/nintendo-in-crisis

There are articles like the following: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/nintendo-in-crisis discussing the Apple/Nintendo relationship

Siracusa's essay is the only one worth reading: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/nintendo-in-crisis The rest of those clowns don't have much to add to the conversation.

I'm always interested in new ways to handle billing/subscriptions/etc and this is a cool change. I recently heard of a payment strategy that I liked a lot though I understand it's hard to explain to customers. John Siracusa's Hyperspace [0] app has the following options: * Monthly, recurring * Monthly, one-time * Yearly, recurring * Monthly, one-time * Lifetime, one-time More details in the developer's own words here [1]. The interesting options are the Monthly and Yearly one-time options. For anyone in the Apple ecosystem you can technically get this behavior by purchasing a subscription and immediately cancelling it (since you will get the full time period you paid for still). But I really like this payment style especially for an app like this where I don't want to pay-per-use (that feel punitive) but I don't really have ongoing data-deduplication needs (at least the features the product currently offers). It's a "once every year or so" and I might need to run it multiple times on different directories/different settings. "Time-based unlocks" might be a better way to think about it. There are lots of products I would 1000000% pay for 1 month of, if it auto-cancelled, but I don't need it every month. Often I just skip using the product completely since I have no idea if I cancel if they will close my account right away and/or try to refund me. I just don't want to have to set a calendar item to remember to cancel a day before it renews. I'm not opposed to…

Could be a defensive move of Elasticsearch to win the mindshare of the community. OpenSearch has been gaining some momentum, albeit far from being comparable to Elasticsearch. See OSS Insight: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/elastic/elasticsearch?vs=opensearch-proj… I'm not sure Amazon is willing to go all in to win the war of search services, for that means they need to to handsomely reward the best coders that contribute the most to the OpenSearch project to produce insane amount of high-quality code for better and new features. See the great article Code Hard Or Go Home: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home. Nonetheless, there's a chance that Amazon may be determined to make OpenSearch catch up with ES, just like Apple has made Apple Maps comparable, even not better than, Google Maps. Therefore, open sourcing ES with AGPL is not a bad choice to retain the talent in the ES community. And AGPL is kinda restrictive to many large customers too, as the customers do not want to risk being forced to open source their business-critical code. In fact, many companies simply ban the use of licensed software. Therefore, AGPL reflects quite the spirit of OSS while in the meantime will not undermine Elastic's business model.

Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature. [1]: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works

This made me realize it's been 12 years since the last John Siracusa review of an OS X release on Ars Technica. I miss those so much! Here's John talking about ending them in 2015 https://hypercritical.co/2015/04/15/os-x-reviewed where he said "Someone else can pick up the baton for the next 15 years" - but sadly nobody even came close.

Another alternative is https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/ ($10 upfront) really well done.

Yeah. Related: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home

I believe the app “Front and Center” solves this: https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/

Maybe this app will do https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/

John Siracusa has an app which is extra and opinionated Dock, although not directly for windows: https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/ There's a detailed FAQ.

Are you looking for this? https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/ Found it further down the comments.

> Two kinds of purchases are possible: one-time purchases and subscriptions. https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase

Almost, but the difference is that if you change one of hardlinked files, you change "all of them". (It's really the same file but with different paths.) https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works APFS apparently allows for creating "link files" which when changed, start to diverge.

What kind of changes could you make to one clone that would still qualify it as a clone? If there are changes, it's no longer the same file. Even after reading the How It Works[0] link, I'm not groking how it works. Is it making some sort of delta/diff that is applied to the original file? That's not possible for every file format like large media files. I could see that being interesting for text based files, but that gets complicated for complex files. [0] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works

My understanding is that it is a copy-on-write clone, not a hard link. [1] > Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links? > A: No. Symbolic links ("symlinks") and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard links, a change to one of the files affects all the files. > The space-saving clones made by Hyperspace are different. Changes to one clone file do not affect other files. Cloned files should look and behave exactly the same as they did before they were converted into clones. [1] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/

Halo car paradigm. John Siracusa has touched on this for the Mac Pro: https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-succes… Sad that other than in price, Apple has really just given up on this.

Reminds me of SwitchGlass[0] preferences. The author talked on his podcast that he really wanted to display user's wallpaper as it currently appears, but he found out that to determine which "frame" of an Apple dynamic wallpaper is shown SwitchGlass would need to ask for location permissions. [0] - https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/

When the "Minimize into the Application icon" feature appeared back in Snow Leopard, I was very much into this kind of thing. Yet over the years since, I've moved to mostly using Cmd-H to hide. I tried the method you described and it seems to only bring back the frontmost window DragThing/Front and Center style.[1] Odd. [1]: https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/

> There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. Not sure about that. Even before the Blink fork, Google was the main contributor to WebKit. See the first two graphs at https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home

In the world of OSS, code speaks. A small team may not help the cause of Open Search. This article nails how code influences leadership in an OSS project: http://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home

I was very skeptical of this machine and the whole Mac Pro as concept car idea [1] but the Afterburner Accelerator Card has me wondering if I was wrong. Especially if Apple finds a way to support more works flows and applications with it. That could be a real advantage moving forward and it’s not hard to understand how it could trickledown to other products. [1] http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-success…