Unless you jailbroke your iPhone 2G and 3G that's an impossibility: the iPhone has never officially supported USB Mass Storage mode: it has always only ever officially supported MTP/PTP (and DFU) over USB.

It's a pretty young company / product but I see great awesome first party integrations instead of unreliable hacky 3rd party scripts which was the default on alfred/packal median of plugins tbh. (As much as I loved 'em and toying with them)

Raycast integrations with for example another awesome tool (Linear.app for PM) Github Issues or Jira if you or your company feel the necessity to put yourself thorugh such painfully useless endeavour lol)

PS: When looking for alfred scripts the other day for a co-worker which did a clean install after recommending it to swap spotlight, packal returned pretty ugly errors when running any search keyword on the site, doesn't seem that well maintained either... so

Timing is a factor, too. For such a thing to be successful, you also need a OS/hardware combo that can draw the notification without slowing down using the main window (rules out early Mac OS) and users who think the added distraction of notifications is worth it. I would that added distraction goes down with screen size. I doubt it would have been a success on 640×480 displays, for example.

Also, Apple had something similar in 1997 or 1999, with Mac OS 8 or 9.

Obviously then it was then extended for things like a long process completing, etc.

But back in 1990 or 1995, there's wasn't a need for something like Growl. Your e-mail inbox and the occasional beep and modal dialog did the job just fine.

To counter your "most things are obvious in retrospect" philosophy, you might be interested in the "multiple discovery" viewpoint [1] which says precisely the opposite -- that, extended to design, essentially says that the need for a solution becomes obvious to people at about the same time, and that people will solve it in similar ways because they're facing the same constraints.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Growl had so much configurability, so many options, it's not like Apple implemented really any of that!

Also oftentime there is zero extra space in the menu bar.

Alerts and notifications have followed a pop-up pattern since basically forever in computing.

If you're shitty enough person (good businessman) you can profit off of anything.

In my opinion the biggest fear of those business development teams is to be treated as or thought of just as providing internet on a device. As being just the pipe is not considered a lucrative market, and open to lots of competition where the race is to the bottom on price. This is also where you get lots of the anti-competitive behaviors, like not investing the effort to make a competitors service optimal within a network, as the carriers would rather launch their own service instead of making someone elses service they don't generate revenue off of work great.

To be fair, in the older gen access technologies, all internet access isn't equal. The access network was optimized for the usage patterns of a mobile browser, in the way it scheduled and idled the radio (I'm glossing over a large number of details). So connecting a computer via tethering that behaves differently and is far more chatty on the network, is actually a much costlier device to support. The current gen techs like LTE do operate much differently, to support chatty devices and apps. With a better optimized network and devices loaded with chatty apps, this difference is probably disappearing.

So if you put yourself in the shoes of a business dev person at a wireless carrier. They'll look at this and say, well we can have a $40 plan for just internet access. Or we can have a $35 plan for just mobile browsing, since that's more efficient and allows us to be more competitive when using the phones browser, and a $15 add on for tethering for those who want it and cost the company more. There are entire teams dedicated to just figuring this stuff out.

And this leads to some of the stuff I would get thrown from time to time, like the $60k bills (no longer allowed in canada, a rule was created to prevent surprise bills, but used to be a thing) when someone bought unlimited mobile browser for $7, and thought that meant unlimited usage for their tethered computer and started torrenting all day which was pay per use.

An unlimited $7 plan only works in the context of the way a user can use a mobile browser, and that's why the carriers think they can dictate how you use the internet connection. They have departments to tailor make plans that only work if they're able to dictate how the internet is used.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this model, I'm just trying to explain where I believe this perspective comes from based on my experience. I've been out of the industry several years now, and my opinions are my own.

Source: read the fine print on an offer from my provider, Bouygues Telecom.

My regular plan has 40 GB, which I can use on the phone or tethered. This summer I was spending a lot of time at my parent's and their land internet connection was spotty. At the same time, Bouygues ran a campaign where I could get an extra 20 GB for next to nothing, so I was considering that. Read the fine print which basically said "the allowance doesn't apply to tethered use". I didn't care enough to challenge them on this so I passed.

Edit: Just checked the available options, this is still the case. Can't give a direct link for some reason, so here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/rQgoz0m

Basically this is an option for "unlimited internet on the weekends". The originally hidden disclaimer says, among other things, "except for modem mode".

Not so, unfortunately. I tried putting a phone SIM into an iPad, and soon got a message from the mobile company saying the SIM card wasn’t intended for this use and would be disabled until it went back into a phone.

(This was in the UK a few years ago with a Three PAYG SIM).

not really. a few years ago, before the eu roaming was made cheap, i bought a sim from wind operator in italy, and it was blocking my tethered traffic. i had to "fix" my ttl for it to work

The answer is money. Tethering was usually not allowed but you could buy in. You get phones for free, but only if you pay 40€+ a month for the next 2 years for something you actually don't need. E.g. some unlimited services (streaming) while your general data is capped.

I haven't been in the market for such contracts for quite a few years, this has changed a lot in recent times due to "contract-less" cheap providers gobbling up the marketshare. And these packages always disappeared over time and became standard. I don't think tethering is not allowed anywhere anymore.

- The fees weren't disproportionate with respect to any infrastructure investments. Why should my internet bill triple over the span of a few years while speeds decrease unless I call, wait on hold for a day, and ask to cancel service?

- There weren't an aspect of double dipping -- why are we being charged for peak bandwidth (with absolutely no guarantee of reaching those speeds) and _also_ being charged for exceeding bandwidth caps equivalent to a few dozen minutes of full use? Why is that "extra" bandwidth more expensive than buying several extra full internet plans?

- It didn't open the door to metering different content sources differently based on the ISP's monopolistic whims.

There are physical bandwidth limits, and those need to be allocated somehow, but the status quo isn't great.

So technically, how do they differentiate the traffic?

I thought that's an Android internal thing to decide which of several APNs to use.

Also the first 2 references that Google returns say dun is obsolete and not in use with today's devices. I believe that belongs to the ATD *99# era

(Havent't worked in the field for 10+ years, could be wrong.)