Alderete @Alderete@mastodon.cloud

I got commentary from 55 Apple watchers about the state of the company in 2022, across various categories.

You can look at the pretty charts or dive into the (very long) details:

https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/02/apple-in-2022-the-six-colors-report-card/

Website dying https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-just-180-000-u-s-subscribers-two-months-after-launch

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".

Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.

In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

Brand new instance, brand new #Introduction! I’m the author of the Galactic Cold War series of #scifi spy novels, the most recent of which is THE NOVA INCIDENT. (https://dmoren.com/writing/galactic-cold-war/)

I’m also a #technology journalist: I write regularly at Six Colors (https://sixcolors.com) and have a weekly column at Macworld.

And I also do a ton of #podcasts on technology and pop culture, including @rebound, @clockwise, and several shows at @incomparable.

macOS Isn't as Small As You Think https://birchtree.me/blog/the-straw-men-propping-up-anti-touch-mac-takes/

Free and open source RSS reader for Mac and iOS — now with its own proper Mastodon account! On indieweb.social. #introduction

@deepgreen This is one of the worst and most hamful things that Apple is doing right now 😕

Apps that are perfectly fine, just not updated often enough (sometimes there's really no reason! especially with games) - are removed from the store because they're not built with the recent SDK/engine.

For most of them it's simply not worthy or straight impossible to do in feasible time 🤷‍♂️

Really hoping the latest Mac Studio never to be updated rumors are false. Best desktop machine Apple has made in years, I'd say in the same league as the 2009-2012 Mac Pros.

I'd be fine with it skipping a generation, Studio M<odd>, Mac Pro M<even>, makes a lot of sense to me (and would prevent me from wanting to upgrade every year).

Hey folks, TootSDK is now public! 🚀

TootSDK is a Swift package for creating apps that interact with Mastodon, Pleroma and other Fediverse APIs.

It handles the data model and network calls, with lovely async/await based calls.

The SDK is still young. There are plenty of API calls still to add. The foundations are strong, and TootSDK is very useful already.

Contributions and PRs are more than welcome!

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/tootsdk/tootsdk

I'm surprised that among all the zillions of dollars spent on defense, the United States doesn't have some kind of drone that can simply attach itself to a balloon and escort it to the ground. Blowing shit up seems ... kind of crude ...

Eventually you have to accept that no matter how many different notebooks you buy, they won’t make you a better writer. For that, you need to spend a lot of money on the right pen.

Finally got around to implementing the cursed celsiheit temperature scale.

If you've ever wondered why so many podcast apps have HUGE settings screens full of little nitpicky toggles, take a look at my mentions.

Everyone wants a slightly different set of often-conflicting behaviors, and there are tons of edge cases to consider with every decision.

" A good rule of thumb is to start from the assumption that any story you hear about using AI in real-world settings is, beneath everything else, a story about labor automation." https://maxread.substack.com/p/two-paths-for-ai-journalism

The last time Google went into a full freakout about a competitor, it killed Reader, tried to jam everything into Plus, and churned through like three IM clients, so I'm really excited to see what fresh hell comes when it tries to compete with ChatGPT for some godforsaken reason.

Social media! It super sucks for writers right now, and I had some thoughts about that, should you care to read them.

https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2023/02/03/the-state-of-social-media-as-it-pertains-to-writers-in-particular/

Some of the attention to detail in indie apps for exceeds Apple’s standards. Reeder by @rizzi is a fine example of this. Take a look at a + icon in Reeder compared to Pages. Apple’s is a blurry mess (because of SF Symbols), but Reeder’s is crisp.

You could claim it doesn’t matter at this resolution, and true, not many people would notice. But some app creators take the time to make their UIs as polished as possible, and I for one appreciate the effort.

#indiedev #appdesign

To all the other Mastodon app devs out there, one thing keeping me on @Ivory is that fact that it remembers UI state across accounts.

For example, when I switch to the @atpfm account (from an always-visible menu, without having to go to settings!) it knows that I was last viewing Mentions on that account, so that’s where it brings me.

I don’t think I’ll ever switch to a client that doesn’t preserve state in this way (…unless it has a unified timeline…but why not both?)

Every mastodon app search UI needs to show an autocomplete/typeahead-style dropdown of popular and previously accessed mastodon instance names.

Gets tiring always having to type out long instance names when searching for a user. Especially when most of the time it’s like 1 or 3 instances for me. cc @ivory

From the a16z economic model for cryptocurrencies (leaked by @miniapeur@twitter):