At a guess: the "killer apps" are things like MS Office and Photoshop, and since they are usually available on both Windows and Mac, there's not such a pressing demand to support similar functionality for Mac apps if the Windows version is easy to obtain.
- MacOS Golden Gate (next version, fixes what was broken in Tahoe, comes out in a month)
I'm on MacOS Sequoia because I have things that can't be broken by updating to Tahoe.
I also cannot test how my websites/webapps will work in a month, because Safari's beta (called Safari Technology Preview) only works on Tahoe and Golden Gate.
I cannot wait a month to update to Golden Gate because Golden Gate drops support for my iMac.
And I can't test the new version of Safari on my Windows or Linux devices because Safari isn't available for them.
I can test the Webkit browser, but that doesn't include the Safari specific changes that apple makes which I need to be able to test.
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So, I can't test Safari until I wait a month and purchase a new apple machine.
(Oh by the way, apple keeps cancelling orders for new machines)
There are subtle differences. From the top of my head, differences with osx include the font rendering and the tab order (which is broken for everything except form elements).
I understand what you are saying, but that's not close to the original meaning of the term, or at least not what I have seen in early papers. Originally the idea was a single central repository of information which would be used to run a company: so similar to systems like SAP, but obviously a lot simpler and with the assumption of running on a mainframe. It didn't refer to a particular choice of data structure, but to the way that multiple business processes would share information.
That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. I am a sole trader, and manage a small company separately from that.
One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence". I'm not sure what that is or whether it applies to all businesses, so I'm not sure what it would correspond to in the UK. Neither of my businesses needed any licences or permissions to start trading.
There's no standard concept of a "business license" in the US either. Generally, the corporate registration / LLC filing is all you need to start doing business as a limited liability company, and you don't need to do anything special as a sole proprietor. Sometimes state and local governments have special requirements for particular types of activity, and require registration to begin operating in a regulated field. City and county governments sometimes have a business tax that you have to pay if you're operating a facility open to the public, and may require the tax receipt to be on display on your premises.
That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous.
It's becoming more onerous all the time to run a small business in the UK though.
We just got charged £100 just to essentially tick one box with Companies House saying "nothing changed since last year".
The main tax paperwork is the annual financial statements. These are getting more demanding over the next couple of years with the simplified versions that small companies have been allowed to file looking like they will no longer be acceptable after that time.
You now have to file tax returns like PAYE and VAT using approved software. Most of that software - even the big names - ranges from OK but with significant problems and limitations to simply awful.
I heard recently that personal self assessment tax returns for company directors are about to get more complicated as well.
If you have business premises then you have to deal with business rates. Often these are still based on valuations from a time when dinosaurs roamed the planet. Some small businesses have already closed down due to this becoming unaffordable.
I've lost count of how many different kinds of insurance we now have. All have a cost of course.
If you're working solo or the only person from your company working with a specific customer/client then you need to worry about Off Payroll Working as well. That's still a huge mess of ambiguity decades after IR35 was introduced and likely incurs further expenses for legal reviews and insurance policies that shouldn't even need to exist.
Control any personal data? Make sure you register with the ICO and pay their fee too.
Sell online or even run a website? Make sure you know the requirements for information you have to provide and it's in exactly the right format for compliance. (I've even seen businesses working in the compliance industry failing on this one and risking regulatory sanctions.)
The public sector is increasingly pushing for things like Cyber Essentials if you want to be part of its supply chain. That is an absolutely textbook example of regulations that were clearly written for large businesses using a certain operating system. The only options are 100% compliance or failing and 100% compliance is tricky for sole traders or microbusinesses to achieve without disproportionate expense and administration. If you need the certified version then that's another cost and the disruption of being audited to deal with.
We haven't even talked about everything you have to do if you want to take on employee #1 who isn't one of the founders/owners yet.
I don't think it's realistic to say that the UK is supportive of small businesses today. It never really was but at least the the potential financial benefits used to justify the overheads. Now the taxes are far higher - you end up paying double-digit higher overall rates if you set up a Ltd that can actually grow as a business compared to simply trading as a self-employed sole trader now - and the overheads and costs are also far higher in numerous ways. It's no surprise that people are deterred from going into business here and that's really bad for the country because we need the people willing to take the risks and put in the effort to build the next generation of businesses to support our economy and provide much-needed new jobs.
It's a term sometimes colloquially applied to one or more things that are not actually a "business license".
Some jurisdictions require "Certificates of Occupancy" if the ownership of a commercial property changes. This is more about the state of the structure and modifications made to it.
Some jurisdictions require registration with a state or county tax authority. In my state this is called a "business registration". Depending on jurisdiction, you may not be allowed to legally operate a for-profit business without this registration.
So there are frequently government-issued documents that are not called a "business license" but may be required to legally do business.
Yes, of course. In my case Waze to get there efficiently, OSMand App for topographic maps, and occasionally Apple Maps (works well with addresses in Calendar) and Sygic. I use them in the car, and on my bike: ruggedised CarPlay / Android Auto screens are rapidly displacing ruggedised satnavs on bikes. Playing audiobooks and podcasts is handy, as is getting text messages read out with dictation for reply, but it's navigation which is the killer app for ACP/AA.
Before that, there was the case of ÿ and Ÿ in the base IBM character set (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ÿ). The former exists in a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian (as in about five proper nouns), but only as a y with a diæresis, which would normally be handled with a Unicode modifier symbol. It is also used in a couple of endangered languages in South America, which would not have influenced the character getting in to a PC character set. It is thought that possibly it was supposed to represent the Dutch "ij" character, but apparently that is never written as "ÿ" in print. Ÿ seems to not be used by any language.
á (á) is also an 'a' with a diacritical acute accent. If you mean that ÿ should not have a precomposition in Unicode, well, why not, especially if it really is used in "a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian".
Remember, the reason we have combining marks is that that is in fact how many of these characters were composed in actual use, especially with typewriters. Heck, 1966 US-ASCII / ECMA-6 (1985), section 5, describes the use of backspace/overstrike in US-ASCII for composition of such characters! That comes from typewriter use. And that's where compose-key sequences generally come from, too.
So it's not at all surprising that given that ÿ has _some_ use, therefore a) it is a valid glyph to construct with combining diaeresis, and b) that it has a precomposed codepoint in Unicode.
iOS at least renders it as an n with dieresis; is that how it was intended (I’m unfamiliar with musical notation)? If so, what is so difficult about it?
In fact, (semantics aside, from a technical perspective) the preference should always be for modifiers rather than standalone characters because the chances of being supported by the viewer’s font are much greater: it doesn’t need a separate glyph explicitly drawn and add to the font file for the code point. Difficulties in entering it or typing it out should be mitigated with client-side affordances in the UI, shortcuts, etc.
> In fact, (semantics aside, from a technical perspective) the preference should always be for modifiers rather than standalone characters [...]
Yes. But the font has to be designed to allow this.
That means that a) lower-case letters must be small enough to allow "overstrike" with diacritical marks to render correctly, b) diacritical marks must be small enough too, c) if you want capitals to also render correctly then the font must have either a set of smaller capitals, or smaller/higher diacritics, and the renderer must scale the capitals and diacritics to fit, or change line spacing, etc.
Also, the 'semantics' for the _human_ reader are the same whether you use pre-composed or decomposed codepoint sequences -- the semantics for the human are about the glyph as rendered and not the details of how that glyph was obtained.
And to be super-pedantic (sorry!), what you call 'modifiers' are called combining marks in Unicode, and what you call 'standalone characters' are called precompositions in Unicode. And it's not necessarily true that the rendering will _in practice_ work better with the former than the latter, but in theory absolutely it is, and in practice it almost always is for _browsers_.
> Difficulties in entering it or typing it out should be mitigated with client-side affordances in the UI, shortcuts, etc.
I really wish Windows would adopt X11-style compose key sequences. Those are incredibly natural for all glyphs that can notionally be constructed via 'overstriking', and historically that is exactly how people did construct those with typewriters. (I don't know, but I suspect that for typesetting it was necessary to have a type for each modified character because having decomposed movable type would probably not have been robust enough.)
Thanks for the corrections, but I am specifically talking about semantics from the Unicode Technical Committee's perspective, of the underlying Unicode codepoint(s). There is a reason some end-user-viewable glyphs can be formed in multiple ways, sometimes with standalone codepoints (precompositions, sure) and sometimes via the use of combining marks. You have to go back to the Unicode project's actual founding vision, and its basis for accepting new codepoints or declining to do so. People are surprised to learn it has little to do with what the human-visible end result looks like.
My understanding is that decompositions for Latin scripts was just natural typewriter-style constructions, while precompositions for Latin scripts was also natural to simplify table-driven transcoding between Unicode and ISO-8859.
Similar considerations probably applied in the case of Hiragana (I'm guessing) and other scripts.
Besides, combining marks (decomposition) allow for creating new glyphs based on existing ones even where Unicode does not define them.
Once two or more ways existed to write any given glyph the canonical equivalence problem immediately arose, and the UC was aware of it immediately, thus we get two basic NFs (NFD, NFC).
When it comes to the semantics of glyphs, whatever the UC intended is one thing, but how natural language evolves to use those glyphs is another. So to some degree what the UC intended is a footnote, and what matters is how people use Unicode.
n̈ renders fine on my browser, but there is no compose-key sequence for it on my system.
I suspect the reason it renders fine is that 'n' in the font I'm using is small enough that the combining mark can be rendered by "overstriking" a diaeresis.
I've seen Dutch comics for kids which use ÿ instead of ij. E.g.: "mÿn". In typical comic font (which is closer to handwriting), it looks similar to ij, but it's clearly ÿ.
Surely those aforementioned non-initial cases would sometimes find themselves in a piece of all-uppercase text? You'd have found such things in print media even before the advent of computers.
Not everything is upper/lower convertible like ß for example (as far as I know)
At least until 2017, I imagine there are others though.
> In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.
I got rid of both, not too long ago, but even trying to be careful about approving office chatter got me that read-only license check bar all the time. And getting rid of it meant clearing rules and blanket Approve for a time, or a flood of individual ones.
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