If there’s no media session available, “play” isn’t an action that makes any sense, so it shouldn’t do anything IMO.

embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, right? Seems obvious to me. If I press "Backspace" and there is nothing to go back to, or to remove, I expect the key to do nothing. Same for Escape, or Volume Up, or whatever. If it can't do what's expected, it does nothing.

Feels like at one point all the people who spent decades building OSes and desktop environment left Apple and Microsoft, and the people left are brand new developers who only been using computers for the last 10 years or something. Or something something executives/management, whatever fits your worldview better.

▲

kps 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Probably gaming metrics. “87% of users used my team's program this month!” Who cares if 87% of those did it unintentionally? That's some other team's problem.

	▲	jimjimjim an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly this. The telemetry stats will bubble up to some level of management and it will show, "after making the play key launch the music app more people are using it". That's it. Explanations won't fit on the slide deck. In fact it probably isn't even that much, it would just be a graph with "line goes up" after the making play launch the music app.

▲

ryandrake 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No other key on my keyboard opens an application. I don't see why there should be one special key that operates that way.

	▲	coldtea 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The search key opens the Spotlight panel, and the speech key opens Dictation...
	▲	okamiueru 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The insufferable part is not letting you disable it.

▲

jonhohle 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dating Fireball just posted about how broken SwiftUI is for basic things AppKit was doing correctly in the late 90s (undo/redo)[0].

I think peak productivity for desktops was probably hit about 10 years ago. Most things since then are worse, and the best things from macOS (drag and drop everything nearly anywhere, consistent keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, scriptability of everything, etc.) were never copied by other systems.

Now systems are being designed to follow Node JS-style development which doesn’t work like a normal thing anywhere and native apps are just as bad as electron apps from a usability perspective…

At least they can be vibe coded since Interface Builder is no longer needed?

0 - https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/swiftui_only_makes_it_eas...

▲

kevincox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think playing something when I hit the play button makes a lot of sense. (The headphones auto-play is a bit less obvious than the keyboard key, I would probably want that to do nothing in this case.)

The issue IMHO is that this is not configurable. Apple Music may even be a reasonable default (being the built-in music player). But it should provide options for Apple Music, whatever other apps I have installed, or nothing.