It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
This would be so exciting. The implementation language would be less of a concern, but it worth wondering about... Would you use Rust, Racket, Lisp, Clojure, etc? I had a lot of fun teaching adults to program using DrRacket and didn't focus on the language as much as the concepts you mentioned above. They ended up being easily able to move to Javascript, Swift, and others at the end of the course.
K.W.Jeter was writing Blade Runner 2 in the office next to our small video game company. We were working on the entirely forgettable Dark Fiber title which was only published in Japan for the NEC PC-98.
"It takes five years to become an overnight success" I heard a variation of this from a VC who invested in my startup in the 8Os. I had to use it on him when we went back to the well a few times for more funding.
I don’t understand what you mean by “we don’t know”? Are you saying tech entrepreneurs don’t know education? I agree with that. Or are you saying we don’t know what problem to solve?
My interpretation of “we don’t know” is that the space of possible instruction methods is huge, and we don’t know what works best. It is easy to think of it as a kind of optimization problem, but that line of thinking quickly runs into a bunch of practical obstacles: different people learn differently, studies with good experimental design take time and resources so it is slow to iterate, and good teaching seems to require deep insights into student motivations and incentives, aspects of teaching that are hard to quantify. We also don’t have great ways to measure outcomes; grades are weakly predictive of future success.
The best teachers seem to combine deep thinking about how to teach with intuition and charisma. The ingredients are hard to replicate.
I do think that this is a nut that we will eventually crack, but it is proving to be a very tough nut.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.
My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.
That's not unique to tech startups. Almost nothing in terms of explicit methodology has any effect on education outcomes. The literature on education research is of abysmal quality too.
That is rough. I assume this is a web application?
I went through a previous thought experiment about what would happen when we moved a paid up front feature behind a subscription. This was the outcome I came to. Unless the user bought and installed a physical app, on the desktop, outside of an app store, they were going to get the rug pulled out from under them.
Ugh, that happened to me too. But instead of researching other apps and waiting for them to decide to go premium too, I built my own workout app. Been using it for a couple months now and it's working great, but the hassle of publishing it to the app store means that it will only ever be a solution for me and I can't share it with anyone.
I actually started with it as a PWA, but ended up rewriting it in react-native. I wanted a couple features (heart rate monitor, lock screen integration) that afaik don't work with PWAs.
That is terrible and I am glad someone broke ranks to inform you of the risk.
My wife had a very agressive triple-hit lymphoma and CAR-T was eventually suggested. Fortunately, the medical team was very honest about how hard it impacts your body, with very likely chance of death. My wife decided to do it, and it almost killed her. The team actually had to "shut down" the process, so she didn't benefit completely from the treatment. The suffering was pretty immense as well. She died a few months later regardless.
We are (were) both engineers and we did wonder how many might get streamrolled by the whole medical process, where you do get this odd combination of extreme indifference and optimistic exuberance.
Sorry for your loss, I feel your pain. Your wife was very brave to give it a shot and take the fight to the limit, and you should remember her courage and honor her memory and keep fighting till the end regardless of what hardships you encounter in life.
The treatment actually killed my dad. I may be wrong but it appears with the treatment there was a 30% chance of some recovery, 40% chance that it would at least stop the cancer growth, 30% chance that it had no impact. I guess you have to take that chance when you have no other option. I don't blame the hospital (which was terrible) or the treatment, it was the last card left. And our loved ones end up in the 30% statistic and maybe as another anecdote for the risks section, but we know what we they went through and we won't forget.
It was tough because my dad was suffering, but he still was active and had at least a few months left without the treatment and I know that at that point in his battle he did this treatment to keep fighting for us rather than for him, even though it was he who had to suffer through it. So I am going to honor his memory and keep fighting until the end as well.
In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee. Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large scale of things.
Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.
Thank you for the Be-related posts. Maybe, one day, you could write a more detailed report of it in a format made for longer articles. I would read it.
As a former Be employee who ended up at Apple by way of Eazel, there are two ways to answering your question about the UI direction; 1. If Apple did not acquire Be, Apple most likely would not be in business or would be a much different company. 2. Assuming Apple did survive, Steve Jobs used the industrial design language of Jony Ive for the look of Aqua. Bas Ording was the primary designer of this and was directed by Steve with daily updates. The further evolutions of brushed metal, skeumorphism, etc. were all directly driven by how Steve wanted things to look with minimal input from others. The current bland minimalist UX disaster (IMHO) would probably not have happened, because for all of his faults, Steve had very good attention to detail and was in general a good proxy for the user.
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