What Shortcuts does undeniably have is youth, looks, and an established following; and never underestimate the value of those. AppleScript may be built on a better technical foundation, but that don’t mean squat if it can’t bums on seats. And the bottom fell out the AppleScript market a decade ago.

However, being an outside product is absolutely no disadvantage. I’ll rate a passionate team of third-party devs with a vision over in-house chair-warmers going through vague motions with zero direction or objective. Being within Apple can be a huge advantage in that it offers prime positioning within the OS itself; but that’s of no use if you’ve got no clue how to deliver a desirable product and sell it to customers in the first place (Soghoian).

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of their product, the Shortcuts team cut their teeth and proved themselves out in the real world. I don’t doubt Apple bought WorkflowHQ as much to get those people as their product. As change of blood goes that was badly overdue.

UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know.

It’s the distinction between stability and stagnancy. Stability is good in that it’s predictable; its benefit vs cost ratio is known. Stagnancy is not so hot: that ratio cannot (or will not) improve. WIMP is both stable and stagnant; trapped by its own early success with no obvious path forward.

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Very relevant: after an early 8-bit dalliance I cut my adult teeth on Macs. Some of WIMP’s productivity gains were significant, but in other aspects it was just the same (or more!) drudge work in a cutsier skin. it wasn’t until I taught myself automation (via frustration and AppleScript) that I really put a decent dent in the latter.

And these were automations that built on my existing understanding of WIMP applications (unlike, say, the nix CLI which ignores all that knowledge and invents a whole new unrelated world entirely from scratch). All the Models were exactly the same; all my knowledge of how to manipulate my data in those apps was fully transferrable, not to mention all my existing documents. The only difference was the View-Controller I was using: RPC vs GUI. And whenever I got to a point in my workflow where it was easier/necessary to do something manually, I could freely switch back and forth between those two UIs.

Achieving 10x productivity gains over WIMP on frequent repetitive tasks is embarrassingly trivial* with even modest automations. The hard part is creating an automation UX that’s efficient and accessible to the large majority of less/non-technical users (AppleScript failed, but at least it tried).

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When will we see another attempt? Dog knows. Voice tech like Siri is obviously trying, but is starting from the hardest end of the problem and trying to work back from there.

I believe there’s much quicker, easier pickings to be had by revisiting the AppleScript strategy—“server” applications exposing multiple View-Controllers for different interaction modes, and a really simple, textual “client” command language along the lines of Papert’s Logo (which 8 year-olds could learn how to use and compose), combined with modern auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete to provide the transparency and discoverability that traditional CLIs fail so hard at.

The written word has 10,000 years of learning and practice behind it. And the most powerful word in the world is the word that expresses exactly what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. If that’s not an opportunity for some smart young coders with a desire to make a better world for all, I don’t know what is. You just gotta know history is all.

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“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite

No. I am not a mindreader. And “vaccines are injected into the bloodstream” is a standard antivax lie.

Yes there’s a risk in receiving a vaccine, just as there’s a risk in receiving any prophylactic/therapeutic treatment, but severe side-effects are closer to 1-in-100K to 1-in-a-million. Compared to a disease that is currently killing 2-in-100, with significant sequelae likely much higher.

I’m happy to accept that “bloodstream” was a slip of the tongue, but really try not to make those malignant lying bastards’ jobs any easier, when people die because of them.

[Sees what you did there]

Did we mention bad-faith arguments? Yes. Yes, we did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.

Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations, and secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.

Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.

Yes, the confiscation in itself is an attack on free speech rights.

But don’t think the high-stress weapons-drawn raid against a prominent whistleblower isn’t meant to send its own message clear and loud: keep your heads down or you could be next. Especially when combined with the twitchy trigger finger that US law enforcers are reputed to possess.

This is only a couple steps up from a banana republic death squad. And that too is no accident.

[citation]?

Yeah, no. Stopped there. Vanity is rationalizing the belief that you’re any better at being rational than the rest of us inchoate apes.

There are many technical, logistical, and political arguments as to why improvement (in any sphere) is hard, but if you’re not going to start with “It’s Us, The People” then where usefully are you going to start?

The reason it is tagged “Islamic” is presumably because the golden age of Persian/Arabic science happened in unison with the early rise of Islam, along with a blooming of industry and culture in general. This may not have been coincidental. The early Islamic world was a lot more inquisitive and open-minded than the western world of the time. It wasn’t till a couple centuries later that reactionary religious conservatism gained the upper hand; and several centuries more before Europe would best its own reactionary religious conservatism in shape of the Renaissance.

Physicist Jim al-Khalili has written on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Pathfinders-Golden-Age-Arabic-Science...

(Also some documentaries if you want to search on Youtube.)

On hi-def monitors and laser-printed page, it is lovely both to read and to look at.

I mean, 4K (3840×2160) 23" displays nowadays start at $300, so if you’re still on hundred-buck 1920x1080 then you’re only getting what you paid for.

Going to all hi-def displays is the single best investment I ever made as a professional programmer, reading and writing text on screens daily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.

I hate what 1970s terminal culture does to both.

Why can’t we have modern text-driven interfaces* that are both parsimonious and elegant? The mighty Knuth gave us TeX 40 years ago, and our hardware has long since passed the point where doing the job right demands a significant number of cycles (even with the clattery mess that is Unicode standard), so there really isn’t any excuse for such awful regressive primitivism now.

Because I don’t care that OP’s workflow works well for OP; I care about workflows that work better. For everyone.

/cynical idealist

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* Traditionally “text-driven interface” means keyboard-driven, but if you aren’t paying attention to the rise of spoken words then you’re missing the next great opportunity to open up computing to all 8Bn of your fellow humans.

And if you read the title very precisely, indeed it does say that. That said, it is baity AF with all sorts of rich, tasty read meat: “Corporate Internet”, “Github”, “stolen code”—all the things a good internet mob loves.

Furthermore, demanding (or even just assuming) that hosts can/should act as judges, juries, and executioners is itself an exceedingly slippery slope to hop on. I mean, just look at the Trump campaigns ongoing efforts to get Section 230 revoked because Twitter had the temerity to flag some of his posts as “may be disputed”. (Not even “liar, liar, pants on fire”, mind; merely “disputed”. Good Dog but that’s some thin skin.) Be careful what you wish for; laws of unintended consequences; roads to hell and the paving thereon; etc, etc, etc.

So this is not a “David vs Goliath” narrative, much as it might (accidentally or intentionally) resemble one from the OP’s take. It’s David vs another David, while Goliath very wisely—and legally—stays the hell out that particular boy-girl fight. See also:

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

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Now, whether OP actually needs a lawyer or just legally worded letter to activate the next stage in a DCMA takedown, I’m not sure because US Copyright Law’s not my bullpit either. But, yeah, when someone chooses to violate your copyright, then legal-nastygramming the swine once asking them nicely fails to do squat is entirely up to you.

Considering you can already get yourself template-generated contracts, wills, and other common legal documents online for little or no payment, personally I’d investigate that road first before going straight to the dramatic internet swoon. But that’s just me.