creichenbach

I know at least 5 Pharo users, and one of them wrote a book about it (for the other 4 :P). They were part of a research group at university and made us students use it. I get why it's nice and all, but honestly it feels a bit like Crossfit, or Vim. There are a small handful of excited users who try to convice everyone else how amazing it is. (Sorry, Oscar et al.)

> it added additional delays to the entire system

Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours are healthy.

As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.

I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.

Banks have stupid rules probably made by people who don't understand the matter. A relative recently got victim to phishing and gave away some of his banking details (fake e-banking login screen on a website). After locking the account, the bank said it would only unlock it after the phone got wiped, which obviously doesn't add anything in this situation.

Another pet peeve is that they prevent screenshots simply because they can, and it feels safer. I know, 3rd-party apps which can do screenshots etc., but this is fighting the threat the wrong way. And yes, it's partially the fault of the platform, which could just allow user-initiated screenshots. Or at least make it configurable.

That's still a bit risky as Arizona might just change its time zone definition on a whim. I'm an engineer on one of the big calendaring applications, and it's mind-boggling how often stuff like this happens world-wide, sometimes short-notice (a few weeks in advance). It regularly gives us headaches.

Well, among other things. Native APIs are another thing that comes to mind, but those can be bridged more easily I suppose.

Well, to have a perfect-ish solution, you'd have to build a framework with UI elements that map to native elements on each platform. Behavior and styling (e.g. positioning of elements) would need to be consistent, so you'd probably have to reduce functionality to the least common denominator for each possible dimension, or take the burden of implementing compatibility for A on platforms B and C. Web has a legacy of document-based components, while mobile is generally more interactive. There are overlaps nowadays, but staying within those boundaries would be a serious restriction.

On top of all that, you'd need a runtime that works on all platforms and is able to interact with native controls. I think React Native does something like that, but back then when I checked they did not have official web platform support (which is somewhat ironic, but I suspect technical difficulties too).

A few years back I looked around what options exist for building a cross-plattform app. It should support mobile platforms (at least Android and iOS) as well as the web, properly.

The problem with cross-platform frameworks is that they either focus on a good mobile experience, and web becomes an afterthought, or vice versa, meaning mobile basically embeds a browser. Flutter is one of former; back then the web variant was in alpha and basically just a canvas that couldn't even adjust aspect ratio. Since web had priority for our project (accessability, reactive scaling, etc.), this was a no-go.

We ended up going with Ionic (which is basically Cordova with some components on top). The web experience is tweakable to a low level, and the mobile experience is acceptably good, even if not perfect. And we get to cover 3 platforms with the effort of building for ~1.2 apps (there is some platform-specific work involved still).

I'm not even sure if cross-platform is at all solvable in a perfect way, since the UI patterns between mobile and web are just too different.