Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been a very quiet week but I’m excited for tomorrow because Kim and Taylor will be back home! 🥳
Guess I’d better cleanup the house. 🤣
My first cup of coffee is in hand. I hope you enjoy the links.
All schools in every Oklahoma district must now include the Bible in their teachings, as mandated today by State Superintendent Ryan Walters.
This seems to be a violation of separation of church and state established by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The text is simple and is referred to as the Establishment Clause.
It reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…
That’s it. That says it all and goes on to say you’re free to practice any religion you’d like.
Also, when these Christian Nationalists say “The Bible” which Bible are they referring to? Catholic? King James? New International Version? Which? Folks will argue over that, believe me, I know first hand. My Grandparents and Mom swore if you didn’t read the King James you were doing it wrong. Who can read all those begats and hithers and all that English we no longer use today?
Anyway. This is the setup for a visit all the way to the Supreme Court where the Heritage Foundation was allowed to seat three judges during the Orange Man’s time in office and Alito is obviously ready to support a Christian Nationalist agenda.
This is a clear violation of the First Amendment, just like being able to post the Ten Commandments in the class room.
Keep Church out of public schools. You have your place of worship and Bible studies for that.
A few months after opening a non-compliance case on Apple and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Commission has shared its preliminary findings with Apple. And the bottom line is that the current App Store rules are in breach of the DMA. Confirmed violations of the DMA can lead to fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover.
Hoo-boy. Apple has stepped in it. Their implementation of the Digital Rights Act has a few things that have left many scratching their heads. Apple believes and has established that they’re entitled to a commission on every sale of digital goods. Until Tim Cook took the stand and proclaimed that, I’d never thought of it as a commission. I just knew they got 30% of my sales, which was reduced to 15% later on. Tim Cook when on to say it was going to be tough for developers to keep track of, and pay, what they owe Apple every month.
As part of Apple’s DMA implementation they expect a 27% commission due them for each App sale on competing app stores.
The next oddity is the Core Technology Fee for companies opening their own app stores. Go read the CTF if you’re interested. I’m just gonna mess it up trying to explain it here.
Basically Apple has made the idea of having a competing App Store so unattractive very few companies have the resources to pull it off.
Having a commission of 27% vs. 15% in the Apple App Store and the CTF seem to be the biggest issues.
Can the EU tell Apple they can’t collect a commission? I’m pretty sure that’s what most developers want and it would open the door to competition from Indie App Stores. We’re all in this to make a living from it. If I could sell my app in Store A and pay 5% for processing it’s a much better deal than the 15% I give to Apple. Math for the win!
I don’t foresee putting my apps that lose money in any other App Stores, but I’d imagine others are super happy to try.
Today I’m releasing Juno 2.0, which incorporates a ton of that community feedback, and truly brings the app to the next level through extensive improvements and new features. Using it over the last little while I have had so many moments where I catch myself smiling. Browsing and watching YouTube on visionOS through Juno is honestly just so fun, immersive, and downright futuristic, and I genuinely think the best way to watch your favorite videos.
Christian is the developer behind the wildly popular Reddit client Apollo, which Reddit shut down. He seems to have gone down the Vision Pro rabbit hole with a new video playing app called Juno. I suspect the app is beautiful and extremely easy to use.
If you own a Vision Pro and love watching YouTube videos, give it a try. It’s a one time purchase of $4.99US in the Vision Pro App Store.
Fascist piglet and Donald Trump butt boy Kevin Roberts, President of the uber-right leaning Heritage Foundation – the organization that owns the Supreme Court and six of its justices – was skillfully unmasked earlier this morning by MSNBC correspondents Simone Sanders, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez, who apparently had a diabolical plan in place to expose this Nazi for just who he is… just ask the idiot Trump sycophant pertinent questions and then sit back and let him run his mouth.
Go watch the YouTube video of this interview. The MAGA nuts are now saying the quiet part out loud. Project 2025 is a playbook to make a fascist America.
It’s good they’re being open about it. The question is, how many people will see this and pay attention to Project 2025, much less vote against the fascist MAGA agenda?
Germany let it happen with Hitler. We can’t let this happen with Trump.
Figma is announcing a bunch of new features at its Config conference today, including a major UI redesign, new generative AI tools to help people more easily make projects, and built-in slideshow functionality.
I’m stunned how popular Figma is. At WillowTree it’s used for everything. Just about every meeting I go to there’s some kind of FigJam board being used for something. Can we please stop? 🤣
I guess at some point everything devolves into presentation software. Folks used Visio for this purpose back in the early 2000’s and probably still do today.
Personally I’m more into native apps, like Sketch, for Design. But folks need to use what suits them and makes them productive.
Casey suggested “The Search for Blue March”, and I mostly stuck with it, only opting to change the month to “December” because I felt gave a better nod to the original. “Kay Celis” became the director, a pseudonym that makes way more sense if you say it out loud. For the date, I opted to use Callsheet’s launch date. It felt appropriate.
Reading about the process of doing something creative makes me smile. This post did just that. 😀
The NFL has been hit with a $4.7 billion verdict in a class action antitrust lawsuit filed on behalf of residential and commercial customers who paid for its Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV from 2011 through 2022.
That’s a heckuva lot of cash! Wowzer!
Once it’s divvied up everyone will get a check in the mail for $0.25. 🤣
40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess
Old software never goes away. In this case it seems X is considered complete.
The new hotness is Weyland. I haven’t used Linux since 2009 so I have no experience with it. Heck, most of my windowing experience on Linux was with KDE.
It’s interesting to see how far things have come since then. I may need to make a VM just to horse around with things.
The wet-bulb temperature limit for human survival indicates the maximum combinations of temperature and humidity that humans can tolerate without suffering inevitable heat stroke over a fixed duration of exposure.
This is kind of terrifying if you believe in Climate Change and a hotter earth.
Our combined stupidity and the drive of capitalism at all costs will lead to our extinction.
It makes me wonder if folks should continue to have children? I fear for my grandchildren.
Eleana Tworek, Don Gonyea, Samantha Balaban, and Shannon Rhoades • NPR
Detroit’s population is growing, a first since the 1950s. The uptick is small but significant for a city that’s struggled for decades.
I’m here for this! I’d love to be able to convince my wife we need to move to Detroit and fix up a home in a neighborhood that needs reviving.
My wife’s not having it. 😆
