Disclaimer – This article is me pondering on a „phenomenon” I lately see.
I have no answer here; for now, I am trying to collect my thoughts on the subject.

The Friction of my tools

I have heard Ulysses is an excellent app for writing.
So I have installed it on my mac bought a subscription for some time to play with it.
And It’s great, but I won’t probably use it.
Why?
The answer is simple: it doesn’t work well with my current setup.
I am dyslexic, and English is my second language.
So I am relaying have on Grammarly and Hemmingway app to check my posts. Here is the first problem – if I copy the text out of Ulysses and then copy it back – I will lose all the Ulysses magical formatting (like links etc.).

Someone suggest to use iPhone/iPad Grammarly keyboard for proofreading – but this also doesn’t work well the keyboard has a problem with grammar checks on longer texts.

Next issue is peer review – as far as I am aware only way for me to share articles for review is to move them out of Ulysess and as I wrote above, putting them back is hard.

Another aspect of Ulysses is publishing articles straight to word press. For now, Let’s assume I’ve resolved all my above issues. Somehow I can’t post my articles straight to my blog – Both Ulysses support and my hosting support claims problem are not on their side – and probably both are right.

Ulysses by itself is an excellent app that if uses enjoyment of writing drastically properly.
But here is the thing it doesn’t integrate with my ecosystem, yes probably I’ve found ways to work around for most issues I showed here.
But all of them adds friction to my system, annoyances for me and colleagues which I ask for reviews.

Friction less EcoSystem?

I think that was the most brilliant move that apple did,
put all its stuff in one closed ecosystem,
you get one item you see how much synergy it has with others, so you buy next one and next one.
At this point, I have a phone, tablet, watch and computer from Apple.
So going out will be the hard cause in most cases when you have apple stuff „it just works” – and if you try to switch to the third party is not always as good. Again Friction…

Our Own Rube Goldberg machines

I think the same is with our it works.
Look how much stuff currently go into running simple UI tests!
You have to have an environment, to which code is deployed, which is probably in some docker setup by CI, and you also need webdriver and corresponding browser. etc. etc

I kind of feel like programing and automation in our current word is mostly about making proper connections and configurations between hundreds of different modules, which in theory are designed to work in tandem but in reality, require a lot of setups.
It’s also fragile – we claim it is not, but we have to trust so many different parties that their product will work, that when you actually think about it is madness

This all makes me think about one question:
How many greate technologies and tools were forgotten by time because its authors couldn’t or didn’t want to make them work well it other already existing tools?
Change is hard, but if you have to change one tool probably, you have to change a lot more.
„Mass Effect Andromeda” animations problem is probably the poster child of this issue.

That’s All for now.

What do you think? Do you see same this in the same way as I do or I am ranting senseless?

If you enjoyed this post, I have my other thought collected here.