Software 30 years ago was more amenable to theming. The more system widgets you use, the more effective theming works by swapping them.
Now, we have grudging dark-mode toggles that aren't consistent or universal, not even rising to the level of configurabilty you got with Windows 3.1 themes, let alone things like libXaw3d or libneXtaw where the fundamental widget-drawing code could be swapped out silently.
I get the impression that since about 2005, theming has been on the downturn. Windows XP and OSX both were very close to having first class, user-facing theming systems, but both sort of chickened out at the last minute, and ever since, we've seen less and less control every release.
I think what you're describing as "theming" is more "custom UI". It used to be reserved for games, where stock Windows widgets broke immersion in a medieval fantasy strategy simulator and you were legally obliged to make the cursor a gauntlet or sword. But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!" when your application is a smart-bulb controller or a text editor that could perfectly well fit with native widgets.
We are talking about software development not user configuration. So “theming” here clearly refers specifically to the applications shipping non-standard UIs.
This also isn’t a trend that Electron started. Software has been shipping with bespoke UIs for nearly as long as UI toolkits have been a thing.
What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."
Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.
It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
> What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
Subsidies.
> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure
Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.
Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.
My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.
That's one of the things that freak me out about Wayland.
The DIY/BYOB experience is perfectly viable in the X11 world. I don't think I've ever had a piece of software balk at me because I used FVWM instead of kwin. I don't want to be railroaded into a desktop environment with strong opinions and mediocre tools when there's a sprawling flea maret worth of software to explore.
wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates.
That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.
You can still get a handful of non-RGB cases. They're usually sold as the "Silent" version (i. e. Fractal Pop series, Gamemax Titan Silent series) since the non-glass side panels often have sound-deadening material glued in.
15 bucks of rattlecans will make any case beige. :)
I'm sort of waiting for a motherboard manufacturer to weigh in though. Even the "pro" ranges tend to be black PCBs with a lot of complex silkscreening. The boards that don't have any of that tend to be OEM-tier boards with skimpy features. Surely someone can make an X870E-VINTAGE board with a green or yellow-brown substrate, no nonsense silkscreening, and finned brass heatsinkage that looks like the sort of thing you saw permanently glued to your 486DX2/66 CPU?
I want the aesthetic, but that can still be implemented in the context of no-compromises modern hardware.
It sounds from their blog posts, they tried to crib some config details from the MSI Intel boards they had done work with, but it seems like a relatively small part of the story.
I bought one a few months ago because I had wrecked the PCI-E clip on my old ASRock X670E Pro RS, and it was my first time in a Micro Center. :P
What drew me to it was the large number of conventional PCI-E slots (one day I might want to dust off my old Hauppauge HVR-1250 or Sound Blaster Audigy-RX)
The one novel feature compared to other similarly priced B850/X870 boards is that it has 5GbE when most have 2.5Gb.
The tech people have done a terrible job of using their leverage.
They're inventing the cool hardware and infrastructure, but for some reason, they let the content people dictate terms. I want to see the LGs and Samsungs of the world announching "we're making this amazing 16k OLED panel, and the only interface it has is unencrypted DisplayPort. If you don't want to your precious movies on it, there are still stock traders who will buy it to fill with graphs or programmers who will fill it with StackOverflow tabs and vim windows."
Sure, Sony could try to make some sort of sealed box viewing system that never let the raw bitstream out-- by the darkness, they've spent the last 30 years trying-- but most of the content firms don't have the technical chops or the market power to make it happen. I can fully imagine them trying to sell multiple different set-top boxes, each of which is only capable of decoding one studio's DRM.
On the other hand, what ended up liberating the music market wasn't some grand audiophile product, it was the market full of $29 no-brand/minor-brand "MP3 players". It was such a fragmented market, running random bare-metal firmware on the cheapest MCUs available, that nobody except Apple could possibly make a play out of selling anything but DRM-free content.
Three or four blank lines is probably the least hostile and most foolproof way to handle addresses.
But the cart software has distinct address-line-1, address-line-2, city, state, zip-code fields.
And the CRM they export into has similar fields.
Probably to be compatible with some further pipeline of tooling going back decades.
I suspect if you go back far enough it ends at pre-/semi-computerized data processing systems which would print addressed envelopes and documents from stacks of Hollerith cards, using extremely rigid fixed formats that were probably fine for their original buyers, likely US-centric and old enough that they were just getting it to the right city and letting the local postman figure out the nonsense on the envelope.
I went year-make-model many years ago when I did an autoglass website.
The filtering value is big as you said, and the model year as a first filter is easy to type in, and probably gets you reasonably close if you're off-by-one. Accidentally picking an '05 Sonata instead of an '04 probably has similar parts, but if you pick Honda instead of Hyundai, you're way off in Wonderland.
It looks suspiciously like a Kensington Slimblade.
That makes me wonder if the functionality could be done on random off-the-shelf trackballs in firmware or drivers, in which case you're not a product, you're a feature.
Creator here - yes, it's a mod of a Kensington SlimBlade Pro, mentioned on the site. Rotatrix is the hardware mod (added controller), firmware, and software stack that extracts 3DOF rotation and integrates into CAD and other apps. It's possible with firmware, but you need a trackball with dual optical sensors to do this (which very few have), and the system is patent pending. More on the architecture in the earlier Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990422
Software 30 years ago was more amenable to theming. The more system widgets you use, the more effective theming works by swapping them.
Now, we have grudging dark-mode toggles that aren't consistent or universal, not even rising to the level of configurabilty you got with Windows 3.1 themes, let alone things like libXaw3d or libneXtaw where the fundamental widget-drawing code could be swapped out silently.
I get the impression that since about 2005, theming has been on the downturn. Windows XP and OSX both were very close to having first class, user-facing theming systems, but both sort of chickened out at the last minute, and ever since, we've seen less and less control every release.
I think what you're describing as "theming" is more "custom UI". It used to be reserved for games, where stock Windows widgets broke immersion in a medieval fantasy strategy simulator and you were legally obliged to make the cursor a gauntlet or sword. But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!" when your application is a smart-bulb controller or a text editor that could perfectly well fit with native widgets.
reply