I thought I’d sticker up my work MacBook Pro and after adding the centerpiece WillowTree sticker I stopped. It just looks so nice.
Viticci’s Monster
MacPad: How I Created the Hybrid Mac-iPad Laptop and Tablet That Apple Won’t Make
I may call it a monster in the title but this is a fantastic idea for a device in my opinion. I love that it has both iPad and macOS operating systems and both chipsets. It is after all just an iPad bolted onto a MacBook Pro bottom.
I can see a little cottage industry springing from this. I envision a top cover that fits the laptop perfectly and includes an intelligent dock, or tray, for the iPad to slide into. That intelligent dock would also provide a way to plug directly into the back of the MacBook complete with a hinge so you could close it and it would look just like a laptop from another manufacturer.
The dock would also need a way to provide power and a USB-C connection so Sidecar wouldn’t require a network connection to operate. When docked the docking system would autodetect it and fire up a session into the Mac and display it. I’m not sure how that would work, but it would be amazing.
When detached you could close the lid and use it in clamshell mode, hooking up a full size display, keyboard, and mouse.
This is the perfect device. ❤️
Stream for Mac: Work Note
I managed to work on Stream for Mac for a little while yesterday. I got a bit confused about how menus operate on the Mac — from a developer standpoint. I’m an old Windows developer of 20 years turned iOS developer in 2009 and now exploring the Mac and AppKit (yeah, I know, it’s old and busted now.) I got hung up on who “owns” the menu in a Mac App. I’d never had to think about it before, now I have a better understanding of how the Mac and first responder work.
I was kind of beating my head against the concept until our internet connection decided to stop working and I was kind of forced to walk away for a bit. That was intimately the key to figuring it out. I asked some questions on the Core Intuition Slack, using my phone, got some great answers to my noob questions, and read about menus and first responder in a book I have available in Kindle. The book I used was Programming Swift! Mac Apps 1 Swift 3 Edition by Nick Smith. I jumped to Chapter 8 Menus, Toolbars, and First Responder and that did the trick. I’m hoping I’ll be able to carve out some time today to put my newfound knowledge to use. 🤞🏼
I have other chores to take care of first. Hopefully they don’t take too long. Heh, they always take too long. 😂
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning y’all. It’s raining this morning, a repeat performance of last weekend. I did manage to get the steps completed in the garden now we let the rain test my work.
This week I had to get a tooth and removed and a bone graft due to a 20 plus year old root canal failing. I don’t recommend it. 🦷
Time to go lay down in a field and have Kim throw some dirt on me. 😂
On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the roster of cities made notorious by a mass shooting epidemic much of the country seems prepared to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms.
No words. 😔
Today marks the debut of the new Microsoft Teams app, released in public preview for Windows customers.
This redesign of Teams looks extremely thoughtful, well planned, and well executed. I’d like to get my hands on it and run it through dumpbin and other tools to see just how it’s put together.
It’s my understanding it’s a native app — no more Electron — with an HTML/CSS/JavaScript filling using the new, Chromium based, WebView2 control
It also means no Mac or Linux client until they can get those items ported to Mac and Linux. You can write C#/.Net code on Linux and Mac today, but as far as I know WebView2 hasn’t been ported. Heck, who knows, the shell around the app could be written in C++? I’m not really clear on that bit, it’s why I want to get my hands on it. 😁
The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future.
Red States are becoming more and more radical. The entire anti-LGBQT, anti-woman, anti-education, movement is in full swing.
Next thing you know women will have to walk 10 paces behind their husbands in their modest to the ground dress with their eyes on the ground. Disgusting.🤬
In September 2004, the activity we called audioblogging was starting to gain traction.
Neat little story about how podcasting got its name. 👍🏼
A dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.
The authoritarian was outwitted in this story. If you haven’t heard about this yet go read it. 🤭
This year is supposed to be the year of the Rust GUI. So why is it still so unsafe?
This discussion focused around handles in Windows is quite interesting.
Having written a lot of Windows code that uses handles everywhere — HWND, HINSTANCE, HANDLE, anyone(?) — because that’s the way the Windows API works I don’t see it as an issue.
A HANDLE is a persisted thing that allows Windows to shuffle the underlying object around if needed. It’s a remnant of 16-bit Windows days, because 640k of memory was a precious commodity. It’s a safe thing to the developer as I see it but I do not fault anyone wanting to make things even safer for developers. 👍🏼
Trump is and has always been the sort of person who believes that laws are for the little people, and has acted accordingly.
I love John Scalzi’s books and prior to Twitter becoming a worthless piece of poo I really enjoyed reading his tweets. In case you don’t know he’s had a blog for many years and it doesn’t disappoint.
We believe that designer-developer handoff is broken and to solve this problem well requires software that is familiar to designers and developers alike—software that makes building an app’s user interface a collaborative process instead of handing off files back and forth.
I’d really like to take a look at Judo to see how it could improve my own coding efforts. Stream for Mac could use some help. It’s been a slog for me and I keep switching between AppKit and SwiftUI. I really need to focus on SwiftUI going forward.
Only two centuries ago, a shallow inland sea dominated California’s Central Valley.
Tulare Lake is fascinating. California Highway 41 runs right through the lake between Lemoore and Kettleman City. I’ve heard tale in the olden days one had to catch a barge or take a boat from Lemoore to Kettle City.
We drove that route all the time when we lived there. It’s one way to get from the San Joaquin Valley to the Central Coast and all the lovely towns and beaches we fell in love with. Places like San Luis Obispo, Avila Beach, Cambria, Morro Bay, and Pismo Beach.
As it is today you’d have to go out to I-5 and loop back to get to Kettleman City.
A Blogging App?
What would be a good name for a blog editing tool? Just for writing, editing, and publishing. Native iOS and Mac. A companion to Stream, as it were.
Would a combined blogging and feed reader app be appealing?
Before doing Stream I was originally doing a blogging tool. I did Stream because a feed reader was easier than doing a blog editor. 🤣
It’s unfortunate I waste so much time thinking about these things but I want them for myself. I figure others might want them too.
Saturday Morning Coffee
As I’m getting started it’s a nice crisp 27F outside just before 8AM EST. The sun is out and will be all day. We’ve had a very mild winter this year, with the exception of that polar blast around Christmas, and I don’t expect us to get any snow.🌞
My coffee is in hand, time to get started. Hope you enjoy the links. ☕️
A gunman opened fire on Monday night on the main campus of Michigan State University, killing three people and injuring five, before an hours-long manhunt for the suspect ended with his death, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot, police said.
It’s the guns. I don’t know what else to say. Over and over and over again we see this and do nothing. A truly American thing and not one to be proud of. 😞
Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl for the 2nd time in 4 years, beating the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on a FG with 8 seconds left
I’m happy for the Chiefs and their fans. It was a great Super Bowl, a nail biter, not a blowout. Oh, and the Mahomes to Kelce connection is without a doubt the best in football and one of the best ever. If Patrick Mahomes can stay healthy and have a 20-year run he’ll break all kinds of records and win some more rings.
Just short of the 10th anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.
Given Apple’s new chip architecture with memory and processor built into the chip I have a difficult time defining what a pro machine should or would be. Maybe you have to accept a new definition? Maybe it doesn’t mean a flexible and expandable architecture?
What I’d like to see is Apple give the Professional computing world a way to use their current investment in Mac Pro a way to replace the x86 based Xeon chips with Apple Silicon. Of course Apple would never do such a thing because money. 💸
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 15, 2022 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution to power and protect digital experiences, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers.
I follow a number of indie software developers and they tend to use Linode for their service backends. Two that come to mind are Micro.blog, the system I use for publishing my blog, and Overcast, the indie podcast app for iOS. I’m sure there are many more out there I don’t know about. I’ve never done any large scale backend work for my indie endeavors but if I did I’d most likely choose Linode because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and have great customer service.
Hopefully they don’t start hiking prices, laying off people, and becoming a terrible place to host. 🤞🏼
Spotify’s podcast push began in earnest in 2016, when Ek invited audio executives including higher ups at Gimlet to the company’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to explain the emerging American podcast market.
Spotify calls their recorded audio podcasting. It’s not. Podcasting is the audio plus a delivery mechanism in the form of RSS. Yes, you can have a podcast as I’ve defined it behind a paywall. They just want to lock you into their app with their advertising and try to upsell you on other things. That’s fine. It’s their business but don’t call them podcasts. Ok, off the soap box. 📦
I was listening to the Pivot Podcast last night and Scott Galloway point out that very few podcasts make a profit. That’s true of what he defines as a podcast. Remember, this started as an open technology built by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. It was used and loved long before businessmen decided they could monetize it. Just like blogging. It’s was and still is a way for us mere mortals to communicate to the outside world, even if we’re not paid a dime to do it.
Oh, and I have a feeling some of the small podcasting shops are doing just fine, but they do things differently and have well loved shows. They’re just not exclusive to Spotify or Apple or whatever Big Co place you get your podcasts. They’re fully open and downloadable using your podcast player of choice because they’re built on top of RSS as the delivery mechanism.
The key phrase to listen for when you hear a podcast advertised is ”Download wherever you get your podcasts.” Then you know it’s a real podcast.
The hearing got incredibly creepy when Arkansas state Sen. Matt McKee asked a trans pharmacist if she had a penis. “Do you have a penis?” he asked the woman, who seemed stunned at the question.
Unbelievable. I wish we could get past this and so many other things. So many people want to control how others behave and how they live their life. Often times based on some form of religion they’ve twisted to support their hate, disdain, or jealously of others.
Let people live their lives. Show them respect and grace as fellow human beings. It’s not our job to tell folks how they should live. That goes for women, brown skinned people, and the LBGTQ+ community. ❤️
After half a decade of sedate, steady growth, Mastodon suddenly surged, from 600,000 daily users to 2.6 million in the space of months.
Some folks are already writing off Mastodon. Silly people. If you’re looking to get a huge following and interacting with movie stars, influencers, government officials, and the rich and famous, don’t expect that from Mastodon. It’s not built for that. It’s built like your everyday neighborhood for us commoners to engage in. It’s real people carrying on real discussions. Sure, there’s gonna be some hate but there are mechanisms in place to take care of that crap. I love it and I’m excited to see it grow. There’s no algorithm to encourage you to follow people or corporate master to satisfy and no need to grow to billions of users because of it.
It’s like blogging. It’s all open and up to us, everyday people, to keep it. ✌🏼
Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.
Talk about hateful, mean, and unsympathetic to fellow human beings. DeSantis is an authoritarian who wants to mold Florida into his own disgusting image. He doesn’t want you to think for yourself or question authority, no sir. He wants a bunch of dumb drones serving the rich and powerful.
Get out if you can. It’s a terrible state. If you can’t, or don’t want to, I wish you luck and hope you find a way to help change the state. 🍀
In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times.
I don’t know Joseph personally but I’ve interacted with him on the NetNewsWire Slack and Mastodon and he’s a really kind, thoughtful, selfless man. He’s given me feedback on Stream and Mac programming questions. All that to say he’s one of the good ones.
Anywho, this is a great piece on how he built an XCFramework with a Rust core. Rust has become the new, safe, language for creating highly performant software and being able to use it natively on iOS or Mac and integrate it right into Xcode is wonderful. 🧰
Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!
Web tools continue to improve to the point that native apps may become a thing of the past for many companies. Of course folks like me will continue to do native iOS, and hopefully Mac, apps for as long as we can, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Native apps are becoming less and less important with each passing day. Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.
A really great piece by Jamelle Bouie. Please, go read it if you can.
Yours truly who accidentally started a conversation about SwiftUI List performance. Smooth, fast, stable, code is important to me and most developers. we do strive to make our apps the best they can be. I’m still learning, still trying, to make all my apps better each time I work on one. This conversation may change how I do Stream for Mac.
MarsEdit 5
I’ve recently purchased MarsEdit 5 and it’s really nice. It’s what Mac Experts would call a “Mac assed Mac app.”
It’s been a real labor of love for its longtime developer and caretaker, Daniel Jalkut, who continues to expertly tweak and polish each feature like the craftsman he is.
I didn’t purchase MarsEdit 4, but had been a happy MarsEdit 3 user for years. When version 4.0 shipped I thought I’d just use the web version of WordPress, and did, up until switching over to Micro.blog full time. When it came to Micro.blog I used the native clients and web versions and they served me just fine.
I’m also a listener of Core Intuition, Daniel and Manton’s wonderful Indie Developer podcast. They’ve been talking about MarsEdit 5 for a while now and when it made it to the App Store I decided I’d purchase it for its new Markdown support, which has been my preferred way to compose blog posts for a while now.
Not long after downloading it I hooked it up to this very blog and created my first post with it. It detected I was using Micro.blog and prompted me to get an app token from Micro.blog. I did that and once I added the token to MarsEdit I was up and running. All of my blog posts pulled down and ready to edit.
The editor is smooth and fast. All of my categories were pulled down and listed on the right side of the post. It is very stable and it publishes posts really fast.
Daniel really cares about his craft and provides excellent customer support. Overall it’s a keeper and a piece of software I can easily recommend if you’re a blogger who uses a Mac.
Of course there is one thing I’d like to see added. An iOS App as a compliment to the desktop app would be amazing. I do compose many blog posts on my iPhone because it’s the computer I have with me all the time. I’m actually composing this post on my iPhone with Tot. Why? Because I’m chillin’ on the couch having a beer and I’m too lazy to go get my laptop. 😁
MarsEdit 5.0 by Red Sweater Software lists for $59.95 and can be purchased directly from the Red Sweater website or the Mac App Store.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning! It’s Christmas Eve – for those who celebrate!
Look, I’m a native California boy. It’s mostly sunshine and warm weather year round. Sure we’d get down in the high 20s overnight on rare occasion, but nothing like we’ve experienced in Virginia this week. It’s been pretty darned frigid. The temperature at the moment is a balmy 8 degrees outside, with a feels like of -7. That’s just wild!
Anywho, first cup of coffee is in the mug. Time to compose the post. ☕️
Many people using PCalc on their shiny devices today don’t realise that the app has been around for a lot longer than they think. In some cases, a lot longer than they’ve been thinking.
Happy Birthday PCalc! 🎂
It’s impressive to have an active 30 year run with a piece of software. Congratulations on 30 years and counting James Thomson!
By now, you probably know where this is going: yes, I wrote my own utility and call it SimBuddy. It’s a FREE download from the Iconfactory.
Craig Hockenberry is a long time Mac and iOS Developer. He’s best known as the creator of the first Twitter client, Twitterrific, but he’s also developed many fun and useful apps for the Iconfactory.
If Apple gave out lifetime achievement awards, Craig would be deserving of one.
Thanks for another great development tool, Craig!
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
This is an oldie-but-goodie. The Joel on Software piece above is from 2000 and touches on something that can destroy a company quicker than anything: rewriting software.
The article was brought up somewhere this week because Musk is reportedly looking to rewrite Twitter.
I mean, dang, dude! Maybe try to understand how all the things work together before jumping to that conclusion. A lot of cool stuff was happening before you blew the place up.
Randomly thinking back to my time at Apple.
— @taquitos@macaw.social the new Taquitos (@taquitos) December 5, 2022
In 2013 when the iOS side of iTunes U, Podcasts, App Store, and Remote were owned by a team of 7 engineers. Each app source in a different source control.
I was lead for iTunes U. I was told a few things by my new manager
1) Don't ...
I’ve been trying to stay away from linking to Twitter but I couldn’t resist this tweet because it captures something a lot of modern devs should hear.
Basically the tweet thread goes on to explain how broken Apple’s development process was broken on a particular team.
I’m not saying alternate forms of development are necessarily bad but grinding devs into the ground is not good, at all. People need time to live, and sleep.
It’s not just Tesla investors who are at their wit’s end with CEO Elon Musk, who has been making a huge mess of his Twitter takeover.
Ah, yes, The Musk Effect. He’s dragging Tesla down with Twitter and I’m shocked the Tesla Board hasn’t fired him.
But, really, after all this, I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly get all that excited about joining yet another centralized social media site. Perhaps I’m biased (note: I am biased) because it was my frustration with the problems of these big, centralized social media services that made me write my Protocols, Not Platforms paper a few years ago. But, after all of that, the big question that kept coming up about it was “sure, but how would you get anyone to actually use it.”
Here’s to the Open Web making a comeback! We now have Mastodon and Micro.blog to fill our Twitter mojo and both run on open standards like ActivityPub and RSS.
A friend asked what I think will happen to Twitter. Here’s my assessment
Nice little Mastodon thread from Dare sharing his thoughts on the Twitter mess.
You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction.
This piece from Denice is required reading for any Software Developer. It explores the position know as Staff Engineer or Principle Engineer in many companies today.
At WillowTree was have a dual track for Software Developers after the Senior level; Staff Engineer or Associate Engineering Director.
I personally reached a point where I decided it was time to change direction and focus on building teams instead of coding, so I became an Associate Engineering Director.
It is interesting to note the Staff and Director positions overlap in significant ways but also have very unique traits. The Director position is a people management and team building position, the Staff position does deep dives into technology and can master just about anything.
Anywho, go read Denise’s piece, it’s very good.
Like in the past years, I will try to answer a couple of questions: How many binaries are in iOS 16? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? What is the percentage of apps using SwiftUI versus UIKit?
I had to share this because I too find it interesting to know how much Apple is eating their own dog food when it comes to their developer technologies.
Swift seems to be making real inroads and SwiftUI (worst name ever) is starting to show itself.
I’ve been thinking about doing Stream for Mac with SwiftUI. It is the future of development on the Mac and iOS. All devs need to learn it at some point.
Newsrooms should not spin up instances for their reporters partially because this is too new to dedicate strapped staff to
I’ve been pushing the idea of news companies spinning up their own Mastodon servers. Dan does make a good point about not doing that. If Mastodon could be enhanced to export all posts to another instance I have a feeling Dan wouldn’t be as opposed to the idea. As it stands you can move instances but it only keeps your followers, you lose your posts. That’s no bueno.
We want the field of journalism to take ownership of the ways stories are distributed and audiences are engaged.
With the most recent flight of users from Twitter Mr. Davidson spun up an instance of Mastodon for journalists. That was a brilliant idea and provides a bit of distance from the journalist to their organization. It’s a great alternative to news orgs spinning up their own.
There has never been any mystery about what happened on January 6, 2021. As Senator Mitch McConnell said at Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
In many ways I’ve lost confidence in our Justice system because it treats the rich, politicians, and white people differently than everyone else. Combine more than one of those traits and you’re likely to walk away unscathed where someone who works at the coffee shop, is poor, and dark skinned is totally screwed.
It’s not right. TFG must be brought to Justice. Our system requires it if our democracy is to survive.
How to have a good internet experience in 8 easy steps
I usually avoid posts that include “steps” or “X reasons” because they’re usually really bad click bait type articles. This one isn’t. Go check it out.
Bringing back the joy
When I heard the news that the sale of Twitter went through, I was literally shaking. My family and I have had a rough year health-wise. My wife was diagnosed with Lupus and my 5 year old started having panic attacks out of nowhere that resulted in seizure-like symptoms. We had to up our health insurance premium to $2500 a month (Yay America!) for access to specialists previously not in our network. Then I had a bad crash on my bike where I had a concussion and lost consciousness.
Read the entire thread it’s a really great read by a Tapbots co-founder. They’ve gone all in on creating a brand spanking new app for Mastodon called Ivory and it’s stunning. I’d expect nothing less from this little company of two.
Beyond the iOS version I hear they’re bringing their Mac version to Mastodon as well. Sweet!
Now, if we could convince The Iconfactory to bring good ole Ollie to Mastodon I’d be happier than a pig in slop.
Stream Wish
I have plenty of work to do on Stream, plenty. I have a list of features a mile long. Some submitted by the fine folks using Stream — thank you! — some right out of my goofy brain. Yes, I wish I could move faster, yes I’d like to do this full time. Yes, yes, yes!
The best I can do is muster is an hour here an hour there. Anywho, I’m putting this idea out here. It’s one I’ve added to the Stream list. It’s absolutely something I want.
Read Later
I use Pocket as my read later app. It plays a crucial role in collecting posts and news for Saturday Morning Coffee. What I’d really love to have is a read later feature in Stream. One of these decades it’ll happen.
Twitter Support
It would be much better if these features were part of Twitter.
First, I’d love to be able to follow Twitter Lists as if it were an RSS feed. This is a very selfish feature because I have a Twitter List called Politics. It has all my favorite news sources and other sources of politics. I made it because Politics can really stress me out, especially around election time. I’d like this so I could follow any list from any Tweeter, including my own. Of course it would be best to be able to do it without going through Twitter’s authentication system, but I supposed I need that so I can use the API.
Second, it love to have an extension to Stream that could unroll a Twitter thread into a nice single post. That’s it. That’s the feature.
Here’s what it would look like. This example used Thread Reader and Pocket. Stream could be great at this if its darned developer would get off his butt and write some code. 🙃
I don’t know why I’d like to do this, but I’d love to do a Mac and Windows word processor that implements a WordStar clone. All the way down to keyboard shortcuts and file format.
Some writers still use WordStar as their word processor of choice.
Of course there are projects I will spend my time on instead of this odd thought.
Stream comes to mind. 😃
Free and Opinionated
NetNewsWire Blog: “Our mission is to make the best RSS reader that we like making. We value stability, high performance, clarity, and lots of figurative air and space rather than a mélange of features.”
I love how Brent and the NNW team hold true to what they believe – and what they want – a feed reader to be.
If you haven’t checked out NNW you really should, it’s a great product.
Here’s the Visio for Mac splash screen, thanks to Chris Roth, a long time Visio Developer.
Committing Digital Suicide
Brent Simmons: ”But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.”
Wow. This could be a big move by one of those early Mac developers and bloggers I looked to for inspiration.
Of course I can’t say these thoughts haven’t crossed my mind and I definitely blog less these days. Our hope is to someday live a more nomadic lifestyle, travel the country. I expect that would lead to more blogging.
I can totally see where Brent is coming from.
I know of one person who did this; Mark Pilgrim.
UPDATE: Brent replied to my tweet that linked to this article and thought the title was a bit strong. He’s correct, it is. My mind went to Mark Pilgrim’s “digital disappearance” and I applied that to Brent’s post.
It is a bit over the top. I am sorry for that, Brent.
My WWDC 2020 Wishlist
Time to get in on the action.
Here goes: Custom Watch Faces, iOS stability and performance improvements, and macOS stability and performance improvements
That’s it.
I’d really love to have a Dumbledore watch face.