I recently stumbled upon this (and it sounded great!), but was already too far in the development cycle of a medium sized Swift UI iOS app. Instead I used ChatGPT & Claude to convert the SwiftUI Code to Kotlin & Jetpack Compose & Material3. This worked crazy well. The generated code worked almost instantly and basically just needed small modifications for the styling /theming. I think the similarities in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose make this a great match for LLMs
the code I got is pretty maintainable and it’s all standard kotlin & jetpack compose. Even the ui tests converted nicely. The big effort was the initial conversion of the app to Android, for maintenance I won’t necessarily use LLMs
at least BetterSnapTool was never available for free and I believe I can see the spikes in sales when the fake reviewers did purchase (just before they reviewed). Not sure whether one can check the pricing history of an app, maybe there are some sites which collect that data?
BetterTouchTool is overkill for most users who only need window snapping :-)
I‘m the developer of BetterSnapTool & BTT and have also discovered & reported these fake reviews to Apple about three weeks ago on July 2. They are investigating and keep deleting (some of) the fake reviews, but I have no idea who is responsible for them or what they want to achieve
I‘m the developer of BetterSnapTool and have also discovered & reported this to Apple about 3 weeks ago on July 2. They are investigating and keep deleting (some of) the fake reviews, but I have no idea who is responsible for them or what they want to achieve.
I think the fourth reason that has been discussed here and in Jeff's post also sounds plausible:
- somebody wants to push his app with fake reviews, however that would be easy to detect / trace back. Thus that person buys additional positive fake reviews for other apps (that are not in competition with his apps). This makes it really hard to tell which of the apps "purchased" the fake reviews.
I was thinking exactly that: BetterSnapTool has great reviews and many great reviews at that. I can't see why you'd pay money to have... more of those?
You can add feature requests there, it should be pretty simple to extend BTT to support the remaining required features.
I have also recently been approached by shady companies trying to buy my app (I'd never do that) - maybe they are currently targeting apps that require special permissions?
I found an old Leap Motion device in a storage box with USB devices last week. The support you provided for it was great and had me waving at my desk all day.
Even though the Leap Motion is now unsupported, I still enjoy using BTT daily.
Haha, yes Leap Motion was a lot of fun and I think the BTT integration landed me my first job (@Siemens) after university. That must have been almost 10 years ago -- yep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJKFtLDx4k
Wait, the software I’ve been using for what feels like decades and which always gave me a charming, cosy old school vibe due to its almost infinite options and deep understanding of OS X/macOS was written by someone younger than me!?
Mind blown.
It’s an incredible tool and among the first things I install on a new Mac.
oh that's cool. I have the original (first version) of the Leap Motion in a box somewhere. Now I want to pull it out and install BTT and see what I can do with it.
That hides icons to the left of BTT, but BTT is already my leftmost icon. Do I need to change the startup order or something? Currently using HiddenBar which works great, but if I can use fewer apps, so much the better.
And thanks for BTT! It's in my "must-have" apps for any Mac along with Karabiner Elements.
Man, I love BTT. I've been using it for many years, it's fantastic!
Something that I'd love to have is an easy way to show menu items that aren't visible because there's not enough space in the menu bar. I often have to switch to a different app with fewer text items in the menu bar like Finder, which only has File, Edit, etc., just so I can reach menu bar items that would be otherwise hidden.
On the website Ente mentions the AI features are not yet ready and can not be used on phones yet. Is there an approximate timeframe on when they will be usable (on Desktop & Phone and if possible even shared in a family)? I use the search & face recognition on Google Photos a lot. Once that works on Ente, I‘ll try to switch :-)
I‘m absolutely fine with having the ML run on my Desktop as long as it syncs to the phone as well.
I would love this paired with sharing photos of certain faces in (eg our children with my wife). Perhaps a dynamic album (with a list of faces) that I could then share.
One example: a while ago I worked on a bluetooth le based companion app for industrial sensors. The client would absolutely have built this as a web app if iOS had offered web bluetooth. With alternative engines this would be possible and Apple does not want these kind of applications outside the App Store.
With the right engine basically any kind of app could be created as a webapp / pwa
So in the US it doesn’t matter because users are still stuck with Safari there
> One example: a while ago I worked on a bluetooth le based companion app for industrial sensors. The client would absolutely have built this as a web app if iOS had offered web bluetooth. With alternative engines
Do you know that the only "alternative egnine" that implements hardware APIs is Chrome? Because it's a Chrome-only non-standard that Firefox opposes, too?
Well on desktop Chrome/Edge has a high enough market share that the client would not have cared.
I don’t think Apple can tell alternative browser engines what features it will allow and which not. Or is there something in the EU regulation that says browser engines must follow a standard?
> Well on desktop Chrome/Edge has a high enough market share that the client would not have cared.
Indeed. People cry "Safari is the new IE" and then literally turn around and say "well, who cares, Chrome has dominant market share, so if it only works in Chrome, it's fine".
You need a competitive browser if you want to convince people to use it. Apple's only distribution scheme for Safari is forcibly pre-installing it on all of their devices. It's not akin to Chrome or Firefox where people deliberately install their app and weigh it against alternatives. You don't get a choice.
As a reminder, United States v. Microsoft Corp. was never about IE's market share. It was about the illegal monopoly manipulation of Windows to prevent third-party browsers from competing. With that in mind, Safari absolutely could be the next IE.
> You need a competitive browser if you want to convince people to use it.
The argument may have worked 10-15 years ago. Since then Chrome has captured majority market share (among other things deploying, clear anticompetitive practices [1]). They now dominate all the standards bodies and shit all over the standards process by shipping whatever they damn please to the sycophantic cheering from the sidelines.
So it's not "you need a competitive browser", because both Safari and Firefox are plenty competitive. It's "you need to ship whatever features Chrome ships at neck-breaking speed, all consequences be damned".
The story of how Google drove the final nail in IE6's coffin is funny until you let the implications set in https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in... And yes, "only works in Chrome" is a frequent enough appearance to warrant a worry.
> It's "you need to ship whatever features Chrome ships at neck-breaking speed, all consequences be damned".
Given that Chrome isn't shipping ActiveX or Flash, what's the issue? Apple and Mozilla decide how (or if) they want to implement each standard. If there's no demand for the feature, it shouldn't be a problem ignoring it. If icky features like WebUSB and Bluetooth are terrible, users won't notice anyways.
I've daily-drove Firefox for close to 5 years now, but Chromium is simply better-developed in a lot of ways. It integrates better on Linux and doesn't ship with annoying adware that nags you with pop-up modals. I don't want Google's browser engine to be the best, but I don't think I'd be using Firefox today even ignoring compatibility concerns. Safari isn't even an option to me, not that I'd willingly pick WebKit anyways.
> And yes, "only works in Chrome" is a frequent enough appearance to warrant a worry.
Crocodile tears coming from an ecosystem where "only works on iOS" and "only works on Mac" is the default. Apple is not the savior of the free web, and if the openness of the internet relies on their goodwill then it is already lost.
Google's strategy is pressuring Apple to make more capable software. When a user has more freedom in a browser than they do in their hardware's native runtime, something is gravely wrong (and you can't blame the browser).
> Given that Chrome isn't shipping ActiveX or Flash, what's the issue?
What does this have to do with what I wrote? Literally nothing
> Apple and Mozilla decide how (or if) they want to implement each standard.
For something to become a standard there needs to be consensus, and at least two independent implementations.
Just because Chrome ships something doesn't make it a standard.
> If there's no demand for the feature, it shouldn't be a problem ignoring it. If icky features like WebUSB and Bluetooth are terrible, users won't notice anyways.
Neither WebUSB nor Bluetooth are standards. There status is literally, and I quote, "It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track. "
> Google's strategy is pressuring Apple to make more capable software.
That's not Google's strategy, and never has been. It's also quite telling you decided to ignore Google's clear anti competitive practices. I guess by sabotaging Firefox they were also "pressuring Firefox into making more capable software or something".
It amazes me to no end that Apple/Safari haters will contort themselves to no end to justify Google because Chrome can do no wrong.
> When a user has more freedom in a browser than they do in their hardware's native runtime
Google couldn't care less about the end user. All Google cares about is its dominance. To that end it doesn't care if it breaks the web [1], or twists it to their liking [2]
Everything, really. ActiveX and Flash were proprietary runtimes, which is a real example of a domination play. To my knowledge, Chromium doesn't feature anything that couldn't be reverse-engineered or conditionally re-implimented by third-parties. Maybe some things are nonstandard, but if there's user demand for it then why complain? The native iOS runtime clearly isn't making everyone happy.
> I guess by sabotaging Firefox they were also "pressuring Firefox into making more capable software or something".
Nobody but you has been talking about Chrome's anticompetitive practices in this thread. I might actually agree with you, but I'm not going to discuss it because it's tangential to Apple's own anticompetitive practice.
> Google couldn't care less about the end user. All Google cares about is its dominance.
I'd have an easier time believing you if I couldn't use the web with my Open Source browser.
> but you will ignore these, too.
Both of those posts are actually valid complaints, and they're just as valid when the breakage is on Safari's side. Much as you'd rather minimize it, "who owns the web" is also a valid question when leveled against Apple too.
> To my knowledge, Chromium doesn't feature anything that couldn't be reverse-engineered or conditionally re-implimented by third-parties.
To your knowledge. It's just Chrome-only Chrome-specific code inside a 50-million-line codebase that may or may not depend on very Chrome-specific things.
> Maybe some things are nonstandard, but if there's user demand for it then why complain?
Because you've just literally supplanted standards processes with "whatever Chrome ships is standard now". Are you even aware that Chrome ships 400 new web APIs a year?
> Nobody but you has been talking about Chrome's anticompetitive practices in this thread.
Indeed. Very few people talk about Chrome's practices, period. You could look up the thread why I started talking about Chrome's practices.
> I'd have an easier time believing you if I couldn't use the web with my Open Source browser.
Ah yes. The only thing that's needed for a company doing whatever the hell it wants is to provide the source. Who cares if no one has any say on what gets implemented in that browser. Who cares if even that company admits that no one contributes to that browser: https://twitter.com/RickByers/status/1715568535731155100
I mean, you could use the web with internet Explorer, too, so why complain?
And yes, there's an increasing number of sites (including sites from Google) that carry the "only works in Chrome" or equivalent banner. So no, increasingly I cannot use the web using an open-source browser of my choice.
> Much as you'd rather minimize it, "who owns the web" is also a valid question when leveled against Apple too.
I don't minimize it. I point out the one-sidedness of the judgments leveled against Apple.
This thread isn't about the one-sidedness of Apple's criticism. It's about criticizing Apple, and you're deciding to derail it with an unrelated strawman arguement.
If you want to circle back around to the point, I'm glad to keep discussing it.
This is the comment I was replying to in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408640 Where the person quite literally said "I don't care if it only works in Chrome, since its market share is high enough".
And then the second sentence following that is: "I don’t think Apple can tell alternative browser engines what features it will allow and which not."
The core problem is not Chrome's adoption of random features. It's Apple's neglect of the native platform, which in turn creates demand for absurd workarounds. As I said way further up in the thread, they're not pushing proprietary browser extensions; so how is it anticompetitive?
I replied to a post asking „And if PWA were such a threat to Apple's business then why are they allowed in US.“
Whether Web Bluetooth, Web HID etc should be implemented in a browser engine is really irrelevant in this context - but the thing is they CAN be implemented in a browser engine. So can pretty much any native functionality currently guarded by the App Store.
is it not chromium, because Chromium browser, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex, Samsung etc... (and Google Chrome) all use the open source chromium engine
which might be great because you have the choice...
and you can use open source chromium or brave (like the jvm to run cross platform java) to run web apps seemlessly that need web bluetooth or such but use safari or firefox for personal use if you find them more secure
I mean using chromium engine as the running environment where chromium only ever runs special trusted web domains and never goes to other "malicious" web domains that may fuck up iOS as Apple claims would be still a secure choice
like you will not download spyware from Apple Store because you are an adult not because Apple can protect you there
> because Chromium browser, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex, Samsung etc... (and Google Chrome) all use the open source chromium engine
Ah yes. Browsers with near-zero market share (aside from Edge which hovers around 4% market share) that have literally no say in how the engine they are using is developed, and what features go into it.
You know how I know that? Because Google themselves admit it's a problem: https://twitter.com/RickByers/status/1715568535731155100 The largest contributor to Chrome that is not Google is none of those browsers and is barely above 1% of all Google contributions.
