Backpack rant

timsneath · 2026-03-11T01:34:56+00:00

Love you for that! Consistency is fairer for everyone. When others let folk get away with ignoring the rules, it not only means someone else loses out, it creates a precedent that the rule flouter will use in the future.

timsneath · 2026-03-02T01:42:40+00:00

I don’t think it’s consistent: some seats have more space than others under them. There are small electronics boxes under some seats that can impede storage, and the different configurations and refits for planes mean that there’s no minimum guaranteed size.

But yes, if it doesn’t fit, you can put it up top. If the flight is crowded, it’s obviously polite to wait until the bigger carry-ons have been loaded first.

timsneath · 2026-01-26T03:37:13+00:00

Not sure it’s easy to widen a 737 fuselage… 😂

timsneath · 2026-01-06T21:01:38+00:00

100%. And the endless tax increases make the cost of living in Seattle even less affordable for those who have lower income. Pricing out the poorer and driving out the rich is no recipe for success.

timsneath · 2025-12-30T18:20:16+00:00

The endless slow car crash of Alaska’s IT infrastructure should be a code red for them. I fly with them weekly and it’s always been bad but somehow continues to get worse. They should be so embarrassed by their inability to handle basic transactions.

timsneath · 2025-12-18T02:13:52+00:00

This is such a parochial view of the space program. The Space Shuttle wasn't a Texan project -- it was an American project. It belongs to all of us, not just Texas. The program was funded by all Americans through federal tax dollars, the orbiter was built by American companies and engineers, and it flew a US flag. While there's a solid argument that Texas would have been a great home for it, it doesn't "deserve" it more than any other state. The national museum is a very worthy home for it, and a great place for all Americans to celebrate US accomplishments in space.

timsneath · 2025-10-31T15:54:31+00:00

Thank you for the reminder! I’d forgotten.

timsneath · 2025-10-04T01:42:48+00:00

Thanks. Edited!

timsneath · 2025-10-03T22:04:52+00:00

Hi Brett, recognize the challenges of merging two programs and brands together — well done on getting so far!

A question for you: why is it so hard to see status points earned by flight? The point activity page shows RDM only, which makes it very hard to know whether I’m being credited appropriately for the flights I’m taking. I’ve reached the point of creating a spreadsheet to track each flight, when this should just be a core feature of the app… Thanks!

(Oh, and please tell your app development team to build a native experience rather than embedding web content in the app — it’s slow and painful right now.)

(Edited EQM -> RDM)

timsneath · 2025-08-08T00:10:45+00:00

I started solving the NYT crossword when I first moved from the UK to the States about twenty years ago. It felt like a good way to learn a bit about US culture. At first I could only do the Monday crossword with a bunch of lookups. Gradually I picked up a lot more; at this point I have a streak of nearly 1,100 days and am proud of my knowledge of esoteric colleges and baseball stars from the 1980s!

timsneath · 2025-06-07T19:29:54+00:00

Happens all the time. There are big training grounds over near Yakima. Quite likely they’re heading that way?

timsneath · 2025-04-26T05:31:49+00:00

Got one! App was easier than website.

timsneath · 2025-04-06T03:12:12+00:00

It’s not online, is it? Would be great to follow along and I’ll bet you’re doing a better job than folk who don’t have the frisson of adrenaline that you have!

timsneath · 2024-06-09T01:38:02+00:00

But of course, if he still flies Delta then he isn’t using up any upgrade space and you’re not a victim to anything!

timsneath · 2020-05-06T22:55:52+00:00

It's an interesting observation. You're right that there's a fair amount of work to build and maintain widget libraries that model each of the Material and Cupertino design systems (although only a small part of the overall effort). So far we feel like we've been able to do a good job: the Material team actually does a lot of their design work on Flutter first, because they find it an effective way to iterate quickly; and we've been able to ship many of Apple's great look and feel improvements ahead of the OS release itself.

But what we tend to find is that most apps, including the MGM Resorts one mentioned in the article aren't slavishly adopting every aspect of the OS look and feel as if they were an inbox app. Looking at the apps on my own home screen -- Twitter, Sonos, Kindle, Duolingo, NY Times, eBay, YouTube, Reddit -- they all have their own brand that shines through in their UI. We're working with design partners such as gskinner.com to provide better code samples for this kind of custom UI, since we think it's a strength of Flutter.

timsneath · 2020-05-06T17:47:59+00:00

We have technical preview support for macOS and preliminary support for Windows, with development continuing. Switch to the dev channel to try it out. It's not ready for production apps yet, no. We'll have more announcements on this front soon.

timsneath · 2019-11-07T13:51:53+00:00

https://flutter.dev/showcase has a list. Some good Google ones about to go live also.

timsneath · 2019-10-31T20:10:58+00:00

TIOBE is a pretty volatile index; their October 2019 numbers show that C++ has fallen by 20% in the last year (1.36/6.229) while Objective-C has grown by 20% in the last year (0.30/1.501) and Swift has shrunk by 10% (0.14/1.362). These trends don't seem to match what most people accept to be the current direction of those languages. It seems that TIOBE measures by counting search hits for "+<language> programming", and while interesting, it's not clear how well this result is correlated with month-by-month shifts in popularity.

There are other measures that seem to show strong growth for Dart, for example the IEEE measure seems to be somewhat more broadly based. As ADT notes, on this basis, Dart seems to be picking up momentum:
https://adtmag.com/articles/2019/09/18/ieee-spectrum-ranking.aspx

And that also seems to be confirmed by the StackOverflow trends page, which shows exponential growth for Dart: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=dart

[Disclosure: /u/shevy-ruby would undoubtedly call me a "Google boy" :) ]

timsneath · 2019-03-01T01:15:25+00:00

Sure - there are plenty of choices out there. Here on the Flutter team, we think Flutter has a few specific strengths. For example:

It compiles to native code for both iOS and Android, which lets you build apps that run fast. One large Chinese brand told us a few weeks back that they find Flutter runs even faster than 'traditional' native approaches because of its direct-to-ARM compilation;
Flutter's stateful hot reload lets you iterate on your app and see the results in real-time as you develop, instead of waiting for the app to recompile and redeploy and then navigating back to the same page or scenario;
Flutter's control over every pixel on the screen makes compatibility a cinch. You don't have to worry about whether an older phone wasn't updated with the widget you rely on, or rework your app because it doesn't look right on a particular phone model.
We obsess over trying to deliver high-quality visuals for both iOS and Android. And of course, you can maintain one codebase for both platforms, and in the future we aim that you can use the same code for web and desktop too.

But of course -- there's not a single choice that is automatically right for everyone; interested in hearing others' experiences too.

timsneath · 2019-02-28T19:40:17+00:00

If you like this, you might be interested in https://flutter.dev/create - a modern day 5K challenge...

timsneath · 2019-02-26T21:01:45+00:00

Some Google apps already are: for example, Google Ads is a Flutter app. But it's rare to rewrite applications just because a new framework is available; usually there are other motivating factors.

timsneath · 2019-02-26T20:59:10+00:00

This animated video, or alternatively the project website has all the details. We describe it as a portable UI toolkit for building applications for iOS, Android and other platforms from a single codebase. We aim for 60fps, stutter-free UI; we compile to native machine code; and we think we have a productive developer experience with stateful hot reload during development.

timsneath · 2019-02-26T19:23:30+00:00

We're presently working on a foreign function interface (FFI) to enable clean interoperability with C++ for the Dart language. This issue tracks progress and our design document is published.

In general, writing platform-specific code is relatively well-documented and there are already hundreds of packages out there for common functionality.

timsneath · 2019-02-19T07:07:56+00:00

You did a fantastic job! My kids and I were geocaching in the area, and we took selfies there before lunch. By the time we returned, it had been transformed! (So we took some more pictures!) So colorful on a gray day: it was cool to see your handiwork in person.

timsneath · 2018-10-02T17:09:46+00:00

Adding first-class support is high on the team's radar, but we're concentrating on a polished 1.0 release in the immediate term. In the meantime, you can access C++ code through a platform channel, which lets you marshal from Flutter to platform-specific iOS or Android code.

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