Top all-time · #9174
Roben Kleene
Personal blog · blog.robenkleene.comprogrammingbusinessdesign
Roben Kleene's personal blog at blog.robenkleene.com covers programming, business and design. Since 2019, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “The Era of Visual Studio Code”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts about the rise of Visual Studio Code and editor usage share. The comments only link or cite the post and do not judge its writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Roben Kleene’s blog
Most-linked posts?
- The Era of Visual Studio Code4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-22
- Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-05-17
- The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-06-19
- The Enduring Influence of TextMate2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-17
- macOS Big Sur: Has the Dust Finally Settled on Limiting Third-Party Apps?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-25
What Hacker News says?
> That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software than Pro Tools. I definitely didn't say this. Pro Tools likely has higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being unpopular, which is just objectively not true. > I'm sorry to say it, but…
Comment linking /archive/
on “Apple M5 chip”Submitted The Era of Visual Studio Code as a story · 647 points
HN discussionYes, I use Ableton Live every day. > It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live. This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound design and electronic…
Comment linking /2019/06/10/2015-digital-audio-workstation-market-share/
on “Apple M5 chip”Submitted Rep and Ren: A new approach to CLI find, replace, and renaming as a story · 111 points
HN discussionI’m guessing that Apple will start hindering web apps because the new mouse support in iPadOS is going to be such a boon to web apps. Because of sandboxing, web apps are the only cross-platform apps that can run in their full versions on iPadOS. I wrote a quick summary of the situation[0]. Therefore, since native apps are more of a platform differentiator than web apps, moving forward we can expect Apple to start sy…
Comment linking /2020/03/20/ipadoss-new-mouse-support-will-benefit-web-apps/
on “Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible”Submitted Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st...
Comment linking /2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-studio-code/
on “Helix: a post-modern modal text editor”Submitted The Era of Visual Studio Code (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAgreed. But the dilemma is Apple is not encouraging content creation on macOS. E.g., no important content creation apps are Sandboxed[0], so they can't be in the Mac App Store. And their latest development push, Catalyst and SwiftUI, is about cross-platform parity of low-powered apps, it does nothing for high-powered content-creation apps. With few exceptions, content creation has not been successful on iPadOS. And…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support”Submitted The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section ( https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... ): > In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, suc…
Comment linking /2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/
on “Figma files for proposed IPO”Submitted The Enduring Influence of TextMate as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace: > Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year. I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is…
Comment linking /2019/08/31/office-suite-market-share/
on “Microsoft's “Love” of Linux”Submitted macOS Big Sur: Has the Dust Finally Settled on Limiting Third-Party Apps? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs someone in the Apple ecosystem, the first thing I think when I see a service like this is that this would let me keep doing the type of computing I want to be doing (e.g., software development, and using the big creative apps[0]), while still using devices that Apple is invested in improving (i.e., iOS devices, because they're not investing in macOS, or at least not the parts of macOS that support the type of sof…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything”Submitted macOS Big Sur: Has the Dust Finally Settled on Limiting Third-Party Apps? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI just wrote about this exact progression from TextMate to Visual Studio Code (and why I think VSCode is the end of the road) here https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/04/13/is-visual-studio-cod...
Comment linking /2020/04/13/is-visual-studio-code-irreplaceable/
on “Emacs: The most successful malleable system”Submitted TextMate’s Enduring Influence as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMost of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in…
Comment linking /2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/
on “Figma will IPO on July 31”Submitted Pro Audio Work on iOS in Context as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat it will force developers to safer development patterns has demonstrably not been the case. When comparing the success of apps that work within Apple's sandboxing restrictions in the App Store versus apps that are outside of the App Store, that are not sandboxed, the ones outside the App Store and the sandbox are so much more popular that the sandboxed ones might as well not even exist[0]. Consumer's do not use…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)”Submitted The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI agree 100% in principle, the problem is Mac App Store apps compete with non-Mac App Store apps that have unfettered access, and macOS itself competes with other OSes where unfettered access is expected. So while I agree in principle, in practice the real result is Mac App Store apps are just getting utterly destroyed in the marketplace, it's truly a slaughter as I've cataloged here ( https://blog.robenkleene.com/2…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?”Submitted Codespaces: GitHub's Play for a Remote Development Future (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's actually amazing how consistent the pattern is for professional creative apps, I did a study of market leaders across various industries[1] (based on the best data I could fine), and every single one supports some form of extension. Just doing a quick eye-ball glance, and I'd guess every single one of the apps I looked at also supports some form of scripting. (This is only tangentially relevant to this thread,…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “Ableton Live 11”Submitted Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote an analysis of the most popular creative apps across various industries[0], none of them are sandboxed, and all of them support plugins of some kind, which is the main type of functionality that sandboxing makes difficult. Also, Photoshop was once also the undisputed king of user-interface design, but they were dethroned by Sketch, an app that was first released one year before sandboxing came into effect. I…
Comment linking /2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/
on “Mac sandbox escape”Submitted Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOn the IDE marketshare question, the Stackoverflow Developer Survey asks questions like this and I always jump to that section. Here's my comment on HN summarizing the most recent survey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725015 I also wrote about VS Code's early rising with a focus on marketshare here https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st... I also think your observation about VS Code's r…
Comment linking /2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-studio-code/
on “RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use”Submitted Codespaces: GitHub’s Play for a Remote Development Future as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
