Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I had the first two days of the week off and didn’t realize until we got back from our camping trip that we had Friday off for Juneteenth, so I had a two day work week mainly filled with getting caught up. Also, I desperately need a vacation to recover from my vacation. As recorded here we spent June 1st through 7th with our grandkids at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, camping at the State Beach. It is a lot of fun to hang out with them and see the ocean but it’s also exhausting. 🤣
We’re all happy to be home. Getting a proper shower and getting to sleep in my own bed was amazing. I’m still tired. 😃
I was able to spend some time on Stream yesterday and sorted out some UI stuff that was bugging me and sorely missing. When the app opens and refreshes feeds or the user presses Cmd+R or presses the Refresh button it now displays a progress indicator. The same method is used for importing OPML files. I hope it looks and feels OK to folks? I still need to post my Work Note.
Thirty years ago this month, three friends working at a small multimedia company in Greensboro, NC, decided to post a few fun sets of Mac desktop icons on an AOL webpage. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into back then, but here we are, incredibly, thirty years later.
I’m so happy for my friends at The Iconfactory. Ged and the gang are such amazing people, designers, and developers.
For a little while now I’ve gotten the feeling they’re struggling a bit, which is unfathomable to me. They’re so good at what they do! Their design work, iOS, and Mac app development are world class, who wouldn’t want Craig Hockenberry or Sean Heber on their team, not to mention Ged Maheux and Anthony Piraino’s design and illustration mastery and that’s not every employee at the company. I’m sure the other folks involved are just as incredible.
I’m surprised they haven’t been acquihired. Seriously great people and a great, small, company.
Apple or another BigCo should buy them for lots of money, they’ve earned a big pay day with everything they’ve done for the Apple Community. Yes, I’m a fanboi. ❤️
My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.
A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.
Brent has been working very dilligentally on NetNewsWire and the list of changes he outlines shows in the product. An alltime great application from a Mac Development hero.
Thanks for everything you’ve done over the years, Brent. It’s nice to see you’re keeping busy and staying out of trouble. 😃
I’ve been updating the Pagecord home page today with a new headline, refreshed hero text, and a new section called The Pagecord Principles.
The idea is to encapsulate why Pagecord exists and what it stands for. I’m hoping this resonates with bloggers visiting for the first time, encouraging them to sign up to Pagecord rather than (or as well as) one of the many, many alternatives.
I’ve been following Pagecord’s progress for a little while now and just started following Olly on Mastodon and subscribed to his blog.
Pagecord is a very simplified blogging platform, as they should be. The 800lb. gorilla in the space — WordPress — has grown into a full featured Enterprise CMS capable of running the worlds largest web sites and your tiny blog, but something like Pagecord is a great choice instead of using WordPress for your personal blog because it’s tiny, has a great UI and editor, and comes at a really great price of only $39/year!
I signed up to support their efforts and I’m thinking about moving my Hayseed Blog over to Pagecord.
Thanks for the great software, Olly!
Robert B Shpiner • The Guardian
I’m a critical care doctor. I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately
Ah, yes, the incompetence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. continues to destroy our country’s health and human services infrastructure and put us at great risk.
I don’t know if it was the brain worms or something else that twisted this mans brain but he doesn’t belong in a leadership position in our country.
I hope beyond hope we have future elections and can get competent people back in office to start turning the mess our country is in around. 🤞🏼
Apple this week confirmed that Notion is migrating its user interface to SwiftUI, citing the app’s desire for greater performance and UI consistency than its existing web-based stack can deliver.
This is both interesting and welcome. It’s also going to be very expensive but it’s nice to see such a highly regarded company and software move toward a native solution when so many are moving to Electron and React Native to deliver their products across platforms.
That brings up some questions: Is the Mac their primary desktop platform? Do they have a big Windows user base? Will the core Swift code be shared between Mac and Windows or will they be using shared C, C++, or Rust as the core? Are they using an LLM to do the initial port to Swift and SwiftUI using their TypeScript/JavaScript code as a map?
I’ll be watching their progress. This kind of stuff really interests me.
If treated as a country, data centers could rank sixth globally for electricity consumption by 2030. They would also require an amount of water equivalent to the annual needs of 1.3 billion people.
Data centers are going to be a huge controversy for years to come. I wish I had the intelligence to help solve these problems because I really have no clue how we fix this. Someone has to have the knowledge to do it? Right? 😳
A “full-feature-parity version of Notepad” has been written in x86 assembly and it weighs in at just 2,749 bytes. Windows legend Dave W. Plummer is (inevitably) the coder behind this efficiency tour de force, and he’s made RetroPad available (code and exe) on his GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.
Ahhh, old greybeards know what they’re doing when it comes to understanding how the machine really works. At a time when we see developers moving higher and higher up the stack to solutions that abstract away so much of the computer it’s nice to see someone get down in the muck and mire of the chip and build something.
As a Swift developer I’m ready to see Swift as a language slow its pace of new feature adoption. I’d like to see it stable for a long time. It’s been a very useful language since the start but it’s become such a dumping ground over the last few years I can’t keep up with it. I’d imagine that’s just a me problem, but it’s still something I’d like to see.
Mr. Plummer was able to take something that’s been stable for 30+ years and build a highly useful, fast, small app with “old” tooling. I’m looking forward to his video on the matter and I hope he dives into his entire working environment as well as code details.
Forever the optimist, I think that the next several years will be an era in which opinionated, competent developers are able to run circles around projects that are overly-invested in AI. Dip into AI, maybe even let it be your first mate, but never let it be the captain.
I’ve always liked Daniel Jalkut. I’ve never had the honor of meeting the man personally but I listened to him and Manton Reece on CoreInt for years (long live CoreInt!) He is a true punkass and optimist and seems like a genuinely kind and thoughtful person. He’s also a hell of a software engineer, especially when it comes to debugging Mac software.
Hey, fellas, if either of you happens to read this, please, do an episode of CoreInt so we can get caught up! 🙏🏼
Dear Apple: please move on from your focus on ‘style’ and return to substance. Your operating systems are verging on unusable and totally ignore the accessibility needs of millions.
Also: please ensure your new CEO doesn’t publicly reward a fascist dictator with gaudy awards.
I think Mr. MacPsych should be pretty happy with this years WWDC. It really sounds like they’ve worked on hardening the operating system and shoring up Apple Intelligence instead of adding a bunch of new features to the OS’es. That’s great news for users and developers alike!
As for the CEO and his kissing the ass of a fascist dictator. That job seems like it’ll become the job of the Chairman of the Board instead of the CEO’s job moving forward. Yes, still Tim Cook doing the ass kissing, but I hope it frees up incoming CEO John Ternus to get Apple back to what it does best; amazing hardware and software that delights.
A software update to some Amazon delivery vehicles is automatically turning off the air conditioning after a few seconds if the driver is not in their seat, according to multiple Amazon delivery drivers who are complaining about the update online.
Talk about not taking your target audiences day-to-day use of something into account! Amazon workers are notoriously overworked and monitored for efficiency. It’s a bit extreme and this unfortunate bug certainly doesn’t help driver morale.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.
I’ll keep saying it: Space Karen is a horrible human being and deserves a trip to Mars, him personally, alone. 🤬
Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of time to iron out the code. It’s a heuristic, but a reasonable one.
Polishing code is fun, especially when, as the developer, you see a performance or stability improvement. When you’re able to polish up the UI of your application and someone notices it, it’s an even bigger joy than noticing the internal improvements you’ve made, unless, of course, someone using your app notices performance or stability improvements. 😄
Ah, heck, polishing is rewarding no matter what type you’re able to do but polishing the UI is no doubt the most visible type.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
I’ve been thinking about LLMs a lot lately. Mostly about where they belong in society. The more I watch this race to deliver AGI the more I’m starting to believe this technology shouldn’t be used to make a small group of people billionaires or trillionaries. I think the original goal of Open AI was right. It should be open to everyone. For the good of mankind.
Yep, I said it, “for the good of mankind.” Loaded words, I know, but I don’t know how else to say it. All of these AI researchers and developers should work for universities who are government funded all working to deliver their unified work for all to use. It should be socially responsible software with strict regulation behind it. Do no harm.
LLMs should be a social benefit for all Americans. Run by its own agency within the United States Government in partnership with the best universities. Pay the researchers and developers well and give them the best tools and working conditions necessary to advance LLMs while making sure we don’t drive humanity to extinction.
Social issues related to LLMs also need dealing with. If humans are going to be put out of good paying jobs we, as a society, need to make sure people can survive without jobs. Of course folks will scream socialism! If LLMs put us out of work eventually how do we survive if not by a basic income provided by our government? Yes, it’s something I’m curious about. Something we may need in the future — hell, something we need now?
Anyway, that’s a deep discussion for someone like me with a shallow mind. I’d love to hear how folks would solve problems like this.
Guillermo del Toro’s wild, cinematic imagination has led to him being attached to many unrealized projects over the years. It’s a miracle on par with creating life that he finally got to make his dream “Frankenstein” movie. Of all the Del Toro projects that never happened, though — aside from maybe his canceled H.P. Lovecraft adaptation – the one unfulfilled del Toro movie that’s left the biggest hole in fans' hearts is “Hellboy III.”
I love the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy movies and I wish Ron Perlman had a chance to make that final installment but I guess it’s not to be. 😔
Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right.
I love that we have free speech in America (well, the kind we had before Marmalade Messiah took office.) Yes, I’m well aware that free speech, part of our First Amendment rights, only apply to the suppression of speech by the Government. Which is where this stuff gets sticky, and yes, I know it’s the UK government in this case. 😁
Anywho, since BigCo’s won’t govern their own platforms to protect children someone has to. We have enough studies now to know it’s not good for kids mental health and definitely doesn’t help them learn. So, I guess, it’s time for governments to step in and propose regulations to stop social networks from harming children. Now, how do we do that without compromising privacy? There’s the rub.
Fox has announced that it’s acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion.
Roku is built into our TCL TVs. We use them and the only issue I have with them is not really knowing what they’re collecting from us. 🤔 You can bet Fox is going to collect every little tidbit they can and more.
I’m hoping I can convince my wife it’s time to upgrade to Apple TV and disconnect the TCL from the network. 😁 It’s a longshot, but I’m gonna try. Wish me luck! ☘️
But credit where credit is due. The upcoming version 27 of Safari is looking very good.
That’s not because it’s at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That’s what I want to acknowledge and applaud.
It seems the hardening that’s happening with all Apple 27 OS’es also applies to apps. I use Safari everyday as my main daily driver — I’ve also been using Orion — and every little fix they make to Safari is perfectly fine with me. Do I want them to support all web standards? Yes, I do, but I also want them to continue to make a solid, easy to use, and privacy preserving browser.
Yes, I want it all! 😆
Chris Koseluk • Hollywood Reporter
Gene Shalit, the fun-loving film critic on the Today show known for his oversized mustache, out-of-control mop of black hair and lively use of puns in his movie reviews, died Friday. He was 100.
Godspeed Mr. Shalit. I always loved watching your reviews delivered with a big smile and gigantor mustache. RIP. 🪦
This weekend NASCAR is racing at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego on the Coronado Street Course. The track is 3.4 miles long and goes over various different track materials like concrete, old concrete, black top, and old black top not to mention lots and lots of bumps! It also includes a transition into a downhill just before a left turn. All that said just to say it’s kind of cool seeing these cars getting a little air when they hit that downhill transition. 😄 Should make for some very interesting racing. Based on the truck race yesterday I suspect there will be lots and lots of damaged and crashed race cars before the day is over.
