I have gripes about Substack even aside from content moderation, but I do think it’s worth giving them credit for letting you bring your subscribers — email addresses and payment info — with you when you leave. Imagine if Apple was cool with developers having their own customers in the App Store?
John Gruber in a post on the passing of Niklaus Wirth:
"Most of the apps that established the Macintosh as the platform for people with good taste in the 1980s and early 1990s were written in Pascal. THINK Pascal was an IDE years — maybe over a decade — ahead of its time."
THINK Pascal really was amazing. I’ve got fond memories of that era, reading Inside Macintosh books at the cafe or school and going home to tinker in THINK Pascal at night.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/01/11/niklaus-wirth-rip http://www.think-pascal.org/
Last month I mentioned we have a brand new feature rolling out later this month. It is coming along really well, but probably will slip until early February. Any launch is a lot of work and I don’t want to get too pulled away from the other maintenance and fixes we’re always doing.
Because my thinking-out-loud about news headlines in Micro.blog went over so well, for my next trick I’m planning to go into hardware: Micro.phone will have a really small screen.
Rabbit has sold through their initial 10k units already. @danielpunkass and I talked about this for the upcoming podcast… I’m fascinated by the cloud backend (would be neat to train it to post to a microblog) and the personality they’ve managed to get into the branding and design.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033498/rabbit-r1-sold-out-ces-ai https://micro.blog/danielpunkass
Missed this Patreon blog post from last month on accounting for Apple’s 30% cut:
"Apple is requiring us to start using their in-app payment system in order for Patreon to remain available in the App Store, which means purchases made from our iOS app will be subject to Apple’s 30% App Store fee."
The default setting will be that users on iOS will have to pay more than on the web to cover this fee. And last week we had the Hey Calendar rejection. Strange that Apple is tightening the screws with the EU’s Digital Markers Act waiting in the wings.
https://news.patreon.com/articles/an-update-on-commerce-purchases-in-the-ios-app
Got some really interesting replies on my post about a potential news section in Micro.blog. To be clear, this is not being worked on anytime soon, maybe never. We have our hands full with other things! But the discussion gave me a lot to think about.
Just did some research for a reply to “someone who is wrong on the internet”, drafted the reply in detail, then discarded it. It doesn’t matter! Have to keep reminding myself that not everything is an invitation to debate.
2024 is going to be something else. One feature I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while is a news section in Micro.blog curated by a journalist. We just aren’t big enough to hire anyone for this. Maybe volunteers? No algorithms, no misinformation.
Outrage is like a poison. It’s good to be passionate, thoughtful, outspoken even. But if there’s a trend in the last handful of years of social media it’s that everyone is mad about everything. It’s sometimes warranted and always exhausting.
Doing more work with CloudKit. Honestly haven’t really done much with it before. Everything I do has a custom backend service, so CloudKit is just rarely needed.
Weird morning, apparently I forgot my Apple ID password? The password in 1Password didn’t work. Either someone in the family reset it, or I’ve been hacked, or I’ve lost my mind. 🙂 Reset it.
Excited to see the Rabbit R1. Only $199! Not sure who is going to crack this AI device category, but it’s going to happen. Nice line from the keynote: “Our smartphone has become the best device to kill time, instead of saving it.”
If you use Micro.blog on the web, you may notice the layout has changed slightly. These kind of design updates are my favorite. Just a little better, not throwing everything out in a way that would be jarring.
ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has bumped to version 2.0, lots of good changes. No-brainer prediction that blogging with ActivityPub will continue to improve throughout 2024, in Micro.blog, WordPress, and elsewhere.
https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/2.0.0
2024 has started busy. Juggling a lot of different things, hopefully it all settles out. Still aiming to release a major new feature toward the end of the month. There is a new companion mobile app too that @vincent has taken the lead on.
Usually CNN.com is not great. Shallow soundbites and clickbait along with your breaking news. But sometimes there’s a true surprise, like this long article about Chinese immigrants to America. Flight to Ecuador, then the trek north. A stunning journey that it’s hard to fully comprehend.
It seems really easy to trip up Safari into trashing localStorage, even before its 7-day window. For example, if I load the same site in private browsing mode, then go back to the regular session, the cookies remain but not localStorage. Seems like a bug, or privacy protection gone awry.
Created a page to track my goal of visiting all the Texas state parks. It’s a pretty daunting list, but it’ll be fun to update it throughout the year. This is the kind of thing you lose if everything is just a post on someone else’s social platform.
I’ve been critical of the $3500 price specifically and the entire premise of the Vision Pro more generally, but now that I know it comes with a polishing cloth, I’m in. 💰