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Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.

Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!


Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.


MacOS does support tiling. You can tile exactly one window across the entire screen by pressing the green button. If you want to tile more than one window, you can buy additional monitors.

(This is sarcasm.)


Wrong!

You can tile two windows. :-)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

But yeah, I use Recrangle for my macOS tiling. I use it all day, every day.

Would love something that worked more like Pop!_os’ tiling, or perhaps i3’s.


Strange. Is this new because AFAIK Windows was copied from MacOS and it had tiling at least from 3.0 ? Also in X window managers tiling was an old concept.


Windows 1.0 was tiling only. Overlapping windows were added in 2.0.


macOS window management philosophy is to not tightly manage windows, letting them live where they end up, not unlike papers on a desk. For occasions where windows need to be side by side and both fully visible (which at least for my workflow, isn’t all that often), they’re only loosely manually arranged that way.

It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.


macOS WM philosophy sounds like Outlook email philosophy: it should behave like paper mail.

Worst philosophy ever. Instead of figuring out how new technology enables better solutions to current problems, their philosophy is to emulate current solutions instead.

This is why I prefer gmail over outlook, and Linux over macos.


The mental model of windows having a consistent spatial location is deeply ingrained into MacOS because it's been done that way for decades. There are still old Mac users who complain that the Finder switched from a spatial model to a browser model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/macos-x-beta/14/#b6

That's an old article, but Siracusa is still complaining about the "new" non-spatial finder to this day.


I’m not sure it’s so cut and dry. Workflows are highly personal things, so while something highly automated might work a charm for some while not working at all for others.


IIRC they recently added support for some half-assed tiling, only for two full screen windows side by side. It's called Split View.


Not recently, 6 years ago.


Spectacle was my jam. Simple and free.


I thought rectangle was the next evolution of spectacle


It is, since Spectacle is no longer maintained. Rectangle is linked from the Spectacle README on GitHub: "Spectacle users have recommended Rectangle as an open source alternative."

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#important-note


The Parallels Developer edition comes with a pretty great window snapping feature. Parallels was the only solution to run Windows on my M1 Mac. In addition to doing a great job at VMs, it comes with a bunch of handy utilities.


I got Parallels in a bundle deal and was really aggravated by the fact that it kept popping up notifications to install additional utilities. Way uncool.


Yes, so agressive, stopped using it because of it.


Is it the same developers. My main gripe is the complete change of key commands and the option to swap to Spectacle key commands is very limited.


Spectacle was created by a different developer. Rectangle contains nearly everything in Spectacle, and it includes an option when you first start the app or when you go to reset the default shortcuts to select the Spectacle shortcuts.


it is. Spectacle is no longer supported.


I still use Spectacle! Maybe I'll abandon it if I ever upgrade to Big Sur -- but it continues to work for me.


Is the "Jordan Peterson" who is a Silver Tier supporter of Rectangle that Jordan Peterson?


Assuming you mean the one in the news, no. You can see on GitHub it's just a developer with the same name.


Usually people just make up names when they are donating. I’ve seen few Steve Jobs and Bezos around patreon.


No, but in the realm of interesting Jordan Peterson facts, I recently learned that him and Jim Keller are brothers in law.


I stumbled upon the fact that Michael Pollen (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and many other interesting books) is the brother-in-law of Michael J. Fox.


Yes. Keller was the lead engineer on the AMD K8 processor team, and the Apple A4 and A5 processors.


The history of the relationship between Mesos and Docker is definitely an interesting one. If memory serves right, Mesos was not keen of supporting Docker as a containerizer. The devs wanted to stick to improving the Mesos containerizer.

In the end, the community was so vocal about Docker being supported in Mesos that it happened, but the end result was not stellar by all accounts (and a bit of a nightmare to deal with on the framework side to boot).

I'm not privy to what was going at the time since I was just part of the larger Mesos community, but looking back, can't help but wonder what would have happened if they collaborated instead.


> A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?).

This gets into a tangential issue but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the consequences.

Where I went to undergrad the university had invested a lot of money in bringing their basketball team to NCAA Division I.

The program ended up doing a lot of shady stuff to recruit good basketball players, many of them which were discarded from other universities due to their inability to meet academic standards at their institutions.

Guess what happened?

Softball courses created for the athletes (someone has to teach them).

This was followed by rumoured intimidation of instructors by coaches who had the immediate backing of the university's president (who has the power to make your job/life miserable).

In practice, most of those who took the grunt were lecturers but this wasn't a household even name for sports, just some ego driven project for the president of a public university.

Having been a student during that team and paying attention to the reports that came out, I wouldn't discard the possibility of a professor being caught up in major politics as a result of the athletic admissions, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as a downside.

For the record, and not that it even matters, I was an academic.


I have an open source project that moved from using Jira to track issues and changes to Github. Before, when the project made a release, it would fetch info from Jira to create a changelog.

With this tool, I was able to do something similar using Github as the source of information instead[1].

I fetch the info using the gh tool, output the result into json, and use a python script to format the output which results in a decent looking automatically generated changelog[2].

It's not the most exciting thing, and I could have probably achieved it in a different way using the GraphQL API directly, but for the needs of the project this fit the bill and let me get on with the release.

[1] https://github.com/aurora-scheduler/aurora/blob/master/build...

[2] https://github.com/aurora-scheduler/aurora/blob/master/CHANG...


I had similar feelings when I was hired to write in Go about 3 years ago. Coming from Java where everything (including the kitchen sink) was available for import, it took some time to re-adjust my mindset of having to seek out libraries and thoroughly vet them.

After a while, I kinda started to dig having to do it. You end up having a more personal connection with the dependencies you pick which makes it easier to contribute back upstream.

The one downside of being around in this stage of a language's ecosystem development is you can potentially get some pretty undesirable fragmentation.

A good example that comes to mind is one of the original Go library to interact with Zookeeper. There's like 6 maintained forks of that library due to the original author bowing out of maintaining it.


If you download a package that supports go mod and try to build it, it'll automatically try to fetch dependencies through proxy.golang.org

You can override the proxy, and there are open source implementations of the module datastore[1], but it's not made clear front and centre to the end user that building software will call a Google owned service.

It was a source of contention for some when the default toolchain moved in this direction.[2]

[1] https://github.com/gomods/athens

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20870264


also, you can choose not to use the module system entirely, and just `go get` packages the old-skool way.


From the outside looking in, it seems like Mixer had other factors that contributed to the decision to close up shop[1].

It seems like Phil Spencer had a meeting with the affected ex-employee but nothing came out of it[2].

Adding on to that, a leaked town hall video really painted a grim image of the company and the management internally.[3]

[1]https://twitter.com/MilanKLee/status/1274830702538821632

[2] https://twitter.com/MilanKLee/status/1286008870935179266

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RZxaSLyjUM


TikTok Live is already a feature.

Having live streaming built into the xbox platform + tiktok as a brand and audience would be a much more power combo than just mixer alone.


Is this the manager seen on the video[3] who was accused of racist behavior? I wonder if they still work at Microsoft, I also wonder who put these people in charge.

I don't believe Mixer was shut down because of bad management though, if the people in charge weren't getting results, then Microsoft would have just replace them.


It was not the same person. The person in the video was Shilpa Yadla according to ArsTechnica[1].

I would tend to agree that management not getting results could be replaced. It could be that bad management was a symptom and not the cause.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/microsoft-is-killing-...


Disclaimer: I'm was part of the Apache Aurora PMC before the project went into the attic.

Not sure what you mean by declarative infrastructure but eventual reconciliation has been implemented in at least one other project (now retired) called Apache Aurora[1] which runs on Apache Mesos[2].

Twitter ran (and probably still runs) a combo of these to huge scale and great success so I don't think it's fair to say that there's nothing else around that does that :).

K8s is great, but we should be careful not to rewrite history.

[1] http://aurora.apache.org/

[2] http://mesos.apache.org/


I'm familiar with these having used DCOS a fair bit.

>K8s is great, but we should be careful not to rewrite history.

Why's that? That's kind what tech is all about, no?


Just want to point out that Go can also be used without dealing with DNS servers and repos in a similar way to Java.

The big difference is you have to place the code in the $GOPATH with the right directory structure and disable mod (GO111MODULE=off)


I'm a former Apache Aurora maintainer. Aurora has been (and continues to be) awesome for us and I'm so happy to hear other folks are still using it and it's working out for them.

Funny that you mention the configuration part. At the most recent KubeCon in San Diego, CA, the folks at Reddit gave a talk in which they said they got sick and tired of dealing with yaml. They accidentally went on to recreate Pystachio as the remedy so I think you're right on the money with your statement.

When the Project Management Committee (PMC) voted to put Aurora in the attic we were all super bummed but we just ran out of interested developers :(.

The PMC agreed to kick off an "official" fork but so far it's just me maintaining it: https://github.com/aurora-scheduler/aurora


Oh it’s super cool to see you in the wild! To clarify, I had a lot of qualifying thoughts running through my head when I said “kinda sucks” (hence the “kinda”!). :)

I actually think managing aurora configs is way easier than managing yml files, and I agree that I think aurora configs were ahead of the game: having access to python in your config feels like a super power. I feel like we’ll converge on something that compiles aurora configs into yml files, prior to runtime.

That being said, we’ve never been able to get good editor support for things like “go to definition”, with the whole “include” syntax. We have maybe 2-3k aurora config files, of which maybe 100 are shared boilerplate. Do you have any advice on this? I tell vim to treat them like python files, but pylint hates them :)

We were bummed by the PMC decision too. I think some people at my company have considered becoming maintainers over the years, but, for the most part, everything “just works”, so we haven’t felt a selfish need to, so to speak. I actually think it’s a kind of unintuitive credit to your project, that it doesn’t require a horde of maintainers. That being said, I’ll set aside some time this weekend to take a look at some issues. :)


Oh no worries, no offence taken at all with the comment, configurations files tend to suck in general :).

Pystachio was indeed very forward looking and the folks who worked on this at Twitter at the time deserve all the credit there.

I think what you mention is a general problem I've encountered with IDEs when it comes to dealing with Python (esp. the "go to" issue you mention). Even when I've had to touch the Aurora client code, which is full on Python code, I've come out pulling my hair thanks to PyCharm acting wonky.

> We have maybe 2-3k aurora config files

Those are some big files! The boiler plate stuff is definitely something I've heard before from users but, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a better answer.

When it comes to managing job configs, I'm pretty low on the pecking order in terms of knowledge since we ended up creating our own thrift client using Go to use with Aurora. (As a consequence, all our job definitions exist as Go code.)

Stephan Erb (https://twitter.com/erbstephan/) may have better advice in this case. Some of the Twitter folks may have good info too, but they've been radio silent for months.

> I actually think it’s a kind of unintuitive credit to your project, that it doesn’t require a horde of maintainers.

That's definitely a great point and a great compliment to the project. There's a lot of love that went into this project and I'd be ecstatic to get some new contributions, even if it something simple like fixing documentation or bumping up dependencies :D.


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