3 Minute Reviews were good, but reviews are relatively easy to shovel out. Their essays were so bad, I started to actively avoid them.
The Anatomy of Sekiro comes to mind in particular. Competently structured but devoid of any meaningful observations.
It feels like these guys where working to meet a quota.
This referenced Video is probably a better source. Changes start at 2:40
Also they’re just visually bad. The bubbles have way too much spacing. The low-contrast blurry bubbles make everything feel cluttered. When expanding a group, you’ll see the same app icon repeated 20 times, while the headlines are clipped. The typography doesn’t feel right: headlines are too large, text styles on individual notifications are too similar and the line heights are too small. The scheduled summary was a nice idea, but again it’s blurred background on blurred backgrounds. And if all of that wasn’t cluttered enough, let’s make everything overlap at bottom.
Apple is usually really good at this, I don’t know what this particular design team was smoking.
Building abstractions and tools to reduce busy-work has been the goal of computer science since the moment we created assembly. The difficulty lies in finding methods that provide enough value for enough use-cases to outweigh the cost of learning, documenting, and maintaining them. Finding a solution that works for your narrow use-case is easy - every overly eager junior has done it. However, building solutions that truly advance CS takes time, effort, and many, many failures. I don’t mean to discourage you, but always be aware of the cost of your abstraction. Sometimes, the busy work is actually better.
So Apple is obviously an evil, profit seeking company that exploits users and developers, maintains a monopoly and actively hurts efforts towards openness.
But bro, what else am I gonna use? Do you think Google is any better.
And, as you already noticed, most open source alternatives suuuck. (Man, I’m gonna regret saying this on an FOSS community) With some research you’ll get a usable desktop OS for some use-cases, but phones such as Fairphone and Purism are another story entirely. Don’t even think about watches or tablets. I love the Purism Firefox demo, where they enthusiastically say: “With Settings unusable in Portrait, it’s time to switch to landscape mode”.
The “you think … yet you buy …” argument is pointless, because it ignores the realities of monopolies and globalism. I’m sure his T-Shirt that day wasn’t made from ethically sourced cotton or whatever.
I think I would have enjoyed this more, if I had played it earlier. But when I finally got around to playing it in 2021, the Multiplayer was dead and I had already seen too many pretty games for Journey to stand out.
I can see how someone would fall in love with at the right time though.