Austin this morning from the train station. Unfortunately just a drop-off, not going anywhere myself.
Whenever I create a new file in Xcode and choose Objective-C as the language, I laugh a little. Am I creating more technical debt or am I saving countless hours of time not dealing with the sharp edges of half-baked new tech? Zig when they zag.
Just posted this week’s episode of Core Intuition: Homemade Granola. Not actually about food. We talk through my frustration with Apple-only development, Apple’s power over distribution, and where the Vision Pro sits on the spectrum of open to closed Apple platforms.
Back to cool air after our upstairs A/C went out for a day. Something usually breaks every summer, and the heat has been especially ridiculous in Texas this year. Very thankful for a quick repair, less than 24 hours. ☀️
Did some testing this morning with Goodreads and it’s slow and clunky. Timeouts. Really happy with how much we’ve streamlined Micro.blog’s bookshelves so they are fast. Paraphrasing a Jason Fried quote: we can’t predict the future of technology, except that no one is going to want apps to be slower.
Spent the afternoon polishing up the next Android release of Epilogue and submitting it to Google. Because I don’t use Android often, I don’t have a great sense of what UI feels right. Things like swipe-to-delete are very inconsistent across apps. New version is definitely better, though.
Congrats to Casey Liss on shipping Callsheet. I’ve been using the beta. Great app for quickly looking up someone from a movie or TV show while on the couch. This will replace IMDb for most people… It’s just a better experience.
Great article by Christina Warren on the history of the App Store and why we’re due for some kind of change, likely helped along by the EU’s Digital Markers Act. Apple taking a cut of all developer revenue is not sustainable forever.
https://www.inverse.com/tech/apple-app-store-15th-anniversary-past-present-future
Interesting news on GitHub for Mastodon search, noticed via @darnell@one.darnell.one. Full-text post search is coming, will be opt-in. Discoverability and search is a frequent topic on Micro.blog so I’ll be following this closely.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344 https://micro.blog/darnell@one.darnell.one
I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting to Threads. I like the foundation Meta has built with Threads and expect it to be successful, but I’m going to scale back my use until ActivityPub is ready. Most of what I write (including this!) needs to start on my blog.
Fixing bugs and submitting apps to App Review this morning. As a long-time Apple developer going back to the 1990s, I now spend most of my time on web and cross-platform technologies. I’ll always love the Mac, but what a trap the Apple-only development rabbit hole is. Apple is too big and dominant.
Pixelfed cross-posting in Micro.blog https://www.manton.org/2023/08/07/pixelfed-crossposting-in.html
New blog post editor for Micro.blog from @amit: Scribe. Clean, full-screen editor with styled text.
Snapped this photo while we were making a u-turn in Dallas the other day. Took me daughters here 14 years ago for lunch with their dolls. 🥲
I’ve driven by this tower a bunch of times on I-35 and was always curious about it. Turns out it’s an experiment in wireless energy transmission, built in 2017. A century after Nikola Tesla, fascinating that folks are working on this again.
We added a new about page with a little more about what Micro.blog is and what our values are.
I’m still waiting to see how DMs evolve in the fediverse before deciding what to do with Micro.blog, but one thing I’m sure of: we’re not going to have messaging that isn’t encrypted. Private replies to Mastodon users (which works now) will remain as a legacy feature, mostly hidden away.
Interesting what @dansup@mastodon.social is up to with a new messaging app called Sup. Early video demo is here. Sounds like it uses Mastodon to connect with users, but Signal protocol instead of ActivityPub for messaging. Meanwhile I still like Nostr’s approach to encrypted DMs.
https://micro.blog/dansup@mastodon.social https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110840095946715468
Mystery boxes of records at Josey Records in Dallas, $10 each.
Frustrated with Dropbox ever since Apple required these sync apps to move to a new official API. Dropbox was rock solid, always working. Now I see frequent Finder errors or refusal to move files around. I know, “security”, but from sandboxing to this, not convinced locking down macOS actually helps.