Flynn is one happy kitty.
He finds my lap every night. Now I can’t move. 😃
Time to make the magic elixir! This batch comes from Exeter Coffee Company.
That’s how Flynn rolls. Sleep wherever, whenever.
Guard Dog on Duty
Our big tough – lick you to death – guard dog is on duty and on high alert for criminals of all shapes and forms. Especially squirrels. 🐿️
Who says you can’t have a retro look in your apps? 😃
NetNewsWire includes templates for the article viewer. One called Illinois looks super fun!
The biggest story of 2022
The biggest story of 2022 was, without doubt, the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The Ultra Conservative packed Supreme Court decided it would overturn 50-years of law and plunge women’s rights back into the stone age.
I don’t know a single woman who supports this decision. These are not women who’ve had abortions, rather women who want control over their own bodies. It mostly comes down to having men taking decisions about their own healthcare out of their hands. It makes sense.
Shame on the Supreme Court and the three TFG appointed judges who flat out lied during their confirmation hearings. Of course nothing can, or will, be done about the corruption, gaslighting, and grifting that is the way of the GOP.
Time for Ms. Priss to get high.
I just watched her dig her catnip toy out of the pile of dog and cat toys. It’s fun to watch her go crazy, rubbing it all over her face and roll around.
TCU stuns Michigan
GLENDALE, Ariz. – In the biggest upset since the advent of the College Football Playoff, third-seeded TCU rode its underdog status to a 51-45 win over undefeated and No. 2 Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl on Saturday. The win continued TCU’s storybook season and made the Frogs the first Big 12 team to reach the title game in the CFP era.
I figured, for sure, Michigan was going to take this game, easily.
Many folks, myself included, thought TCU should have been out of the picture after they lost the Big 12 Championship to Kansas State!
Wouldn’t it be something if Ohio State beats Georgia then beats TCU in the National Championship game? 🤯
The Musk Files: Part II
As the world turns so does the mess Elon Musk is making at Twitter.
Who knows how much of this once titan of social will exist once he’s finished dismantling it. Who will be the lucky company to buy twitter.com when the place fails?
Of course that’s probably a bit premature but it sure seems like it’s headed that direction.
How about his effect on Tesla? Yeah, it’s been bad.
Tesla’s stock plunged by 9% on Tuesday, poised to end 2022 on a grim note after having shed over 70% of value this year.
How about his own wealth? Yeah, it’s been bad.
The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer has now achieved a first of his own: becoming the only person in history to erase $200 billion from their net worth.
How are things going inside Twitter? By some accounts it really smells. Talk about a shit show.
That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.
I’m sure the site is running just fine since Mr. Musk is a genius computer programmer and has probably optimized the site to the point of being able to run on a single 8 MHz 8088 PC, right?
Oh, there have been service disruptions? I see. 🤔
If Twitter isn’t loading fine for you, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users are complaining that they unable to access the Elon Musk-owned social network, seeing scores of strange error-messages instead.
I’m trying not to embed Tweets into my blog these days but this chart shared by Dare Obasanjo is too good to skip. Tap or click on the embed below to see the chart.
This took longer than I expected.
— carnage4life@mas.to (@Carnage4Life) December 29, 2022
Each week we learn a new lesson about what all those people at Twitter used to do. pic.twitter.com/3bEL31D6eH
Who knows, maybe once Musk as destroyed Twitter he’d like to run a Mastodon instance on musk.social? It’s still there for you, Elon.
So, yes, Twitter is going great! 🥳
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.
Barbara Walters RIP
Barbara Walters, the trailblazing television news broadcaster and longtime ABC News anchor and correspondent who shattered the glass ceiling and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated by men, died Friday. She was 93.
RIP
What’s that?
Flynn heard something outside.
Saturday Morning Coffee
It’s grey outside this morning, low fog, and we expect rain later in the morning that should go until midnight tonight. My what a difference a week makes. Last week at this time is was 8 Fahrenheit outside, this week 49 Fahrenheit at 8AM. Weird.
My first cup is steaming on the table next to me. It’s delicious. ☕️
WASHINGTON — A federal judge indicated Wednesday that then-President Donald Trump’s remarks on Jan. 6 telling a crowd to “fight like hell” before the Capitol attack could have signaled to his supporters that he wanted them “to do something more” than just protest.
It seems obvious to all of us TFG riled up his supporters and sent them marching to the Capitol to overthrow the will of the people. Of course he’s likely to get away with it, run for President, win again, and never leave office. Thus destroying our democracy.
I hate being so negative but I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe justice will eventually come home to roost for TFG.
Thanks to my instance admins, though, seeing the red no alt badge is a simple way for me to know not to boost that post. Conversely, an alt badge gives me the green light to boost, knowing the author has taken the time to describe the image.
My friend, Ashur, on why it’s important to add alt text to images in your Mastodon posts. It’s all about accessibility.
Historically, Apple released at least one new Mac model every year in the fourth quarter that runs between October and December, starting in 2001 with the launch of the iBook G3. This means that there has been a new Mac toward the end of the year for the entire lifespan of product lines including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
While I still love me some Apple devices I don’t really pay much attention to what’s happening with Apple releases. Most of the end of the year Apple enthusiast angst is around their promise to convert the entire Mac line to use Apple Silicon. They didn’t make it.
Meanwhile I’m plugging along on my 2019 MacBook Pro and it’s a perfectly great computer. Yes, even for writing code.
We spend so much time drilling algorithmic complexity. Big-O and all that. But performance is so often about contention and memory, especially when working in parallel.
I see Rob Napier’s name all over Stack Overflow when I have a question about iOS or Mac Programming. This little piece walks through his process to optimize some code. I love these types of posts.
I tried the “Full Self-Driving (Beta)” on a Model Y in Toronto. It was terrifying.
I don’t want a full self driving car and I have zero confidence in Tesla ever creating a good one, much less a perfect one. Musk is delusional and rapidly slipping into insanity after his purchase of Twitter. More on that later.
Don’t waste your money on a Tesla, there are lots of really great EV’s on the market now.
After a heavy winter storm hit southern Ontario and parts of Quebec around December 25th, one lucky home could keep the lights on via the power from a Ford Lightning.
Speaking a a great EV! How cool is it to have the ability to power your home when the power goes out? I’d like to have that ability. I mean prices start at less than $40,000.00! 😳 Who can afford these things? I can’t. 😕
Controversial US congressional candidate George Santos has finally filed his Personal Financial Disclosure Report on September 6th - 20 months late - and he is claiming an inexplicable rise in his alleged net worth to $11 million..
This Santos guy is a real piece of work, just like TFG. He’s nothing more than a grifter and he’s going to be a Representative for New York’s 3rd congressional district. Hogwash, I say. He should be expelled for lying and we need a better systems in place to vet any candidate before they’re allowed to run for office.
A lot of people have been asking for an explainer on what is going on with Southwest Airlines and the massive meltdown that has occurred.
This whole Southwest thing is a real mess. It sounds like they need to invest heavily in their digital infrastructure. I know a company full of great folks who could help fix it.
Eating too much cake is the sin of gluttony. However, eating too much pie is okay because the sin of pi is always zero.
Lovely, geeky, dad joke. I had to share it.
Building the tiny house, setting up the garden and food forest during the first summer. Then, of course, learning about living in the tiny house during winter and what that means for keeping warm and keeping things working.
This is a really great series of posts! Our youngest daughter is taken with the idea of living in a tiny home. Guess I should pass this series of articles on to her? 🤔
But, like anyone I suppose, I have darker moods from time to time; and I often find that I’m reluctant to post those thoughts at the marmot. They’re not strictly political, though politics has a role in why they exist.
I love reading Dave’s work. He’s a very thoughtful man and shares wonderful stories about life, tech, and photography. This post is out of the norm for him but I understand exactly where he’s coming from. I have these thoughts myself and I often wonder how many folks share them with me.
You’re not alone, my friend. ❤️
One of the reasons I chose Twitter for identity for my apps, a decision made in 2014, is that I hoped that a developer community would grow up around Twitter. I hoped that Twitter would take a chance on co-promoting products. It could still happen, but it seems unlikely now.
With Twitter imploding there’s a decent chance Dave will have to swap out his identity system. As nice as it would be to not have to do it, it seems somewhat inevitable unless Musk can turn things around at Twitter.
Time for my third and final cup of coffee. See y’all next week. ☕️
Brother(Flynn) and Sister(Priss) chillin.
Delusions of Grandeur
In my dreams last night I was back in Exeter. My brain likes to run home on occasion and I’ve been thinking about it all morning.
We love our little town. I loved the home we’d purchased there and we’d made some really nice improvements to it in the four years we were there. We had a nice detached garage we converted into a living space our oldest daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter lived in for a while. When they moved on, Taylor, our youngest daughter took it over. The idea was to turn it into Kim’s She Shed when Taylor moved out. As it turns out that never happened because we moved east to Virginia.
I grew up in Exeter from sixth grade on. I graduated high school in Exeter. Kim and I were married in Exeter in 1987. Aside from a brief stint in Seattle we raised two children there and got to see our first grandchild begin life there.
In all honesty I’d like to move back. There, I said the quiet part out loud. ☺️
If we moved back I could remain at WillowTree because I’m in our Work from Anywhere group. Knowing I could do that makes me smile because I really do enjoy my work and the people at WillowTree. My sincerest hope is to retire from WillowTree when I hit 70. Hopefully they’ll allow me to stay that long.
I miss a lot of things about the San Joaquin Valley and Exeter in general. Silly things like Exeter Coffee Company where socializing is encouraged and I took advantage of that. I miss Kirkman’s VIP Pizza. We got pizza there every Saturday night, Kim indulged me that. I miss Frosty King, a local Mom and Pop burger joint that did everything just right.
Mostly I miss family and the people of our little town. Our neighborhood was wonderful and we had great neighbors we could share with or just shoot the breeze with while out mowing lawns.
I’d always dreamed of running a little hyper local news site – blog – that filled gaps left open by our local paper, the Sun Gazette (who are doing amazing local journalism.)
My dreams of being an Indie Developer have been a constant and I’d always imagined owning a certain building in Exeter and making our home and my Indie Software there. The building I’d still love to have is the old Exeter Bank of America building, complete with a nifty old vault! The building is a beautiful two story affair that had received a lot of love in recent times but the second floor was never converted. I always imagined the second floor as our home an my little Indie office.
I think it’s safe to say I’m more than a little delusional. But those hopes and dreams keep me going when I get down. For some strange reason I still believe a lot of this will magically happen some day.
If it never does, that’s fine. I’ve had an extremely wonderful life, filled with great joy, friends, and family I love to be around. As I’ve aged those friend and family connections have become more important to me than any house or town, but I still dream of Exeter.
Work Note: Reworking Arrgly - Day 2
I didn’t do much on day two. I did a very basic layout that displays the long URL copied to the Pasteboard and got the link off of the Pasteboard and placed it in a text field. The layout it nowhere near final.
Then I decided to get Chipotle for lunch and got really lazy afterward and didn’t do any additional work.
Work Note: Reworking Arrgly - Day 1
Even though I was pulled into work yesterday I managed to start the rebuild of Arrgly to use SwiftUI. I do NOT recommend doing this on a real software project because rewriting an app is a sure way to lose money and possibly destroy your business. I use Arrgly as a learning application because it’s tiny and fairly easy to rework.
Yesterday I spent the day reorganizing the Xcode project. It was organized into different folders to make it easier to find things. I had it organized in groups like; Network, ViewModels, Utility, Parsing, etc. All of those lived under the main Arrgly build target and I’d like to reuse all of that code for the SwiftUI build.
Step 1
I added a new build target for the SwiftUI project, called SquishU for Squish Universal. Oh, yes, I’m renaming the app to Squish because I really hate Arrgly and that’s the best I could come up with.
Step 2
Once I had the new target I created a group called Shared and moved all of the code that could be shared between the two targets under the Shared groug and made sure the application could still build and run.
So far, so good.
Next
Now I need to sit down and start reworking the UI using nothing but SwiftUI. This is where the rubber meets the road and who knows how long it’ll take me to actully complete the work.
With any luck this will be in the App Store soon. The last version of Arrgly was pulled from the store by Apple because I didn’t rebuild it with a newer version of the iOS Frameworks. It still works fine on my phone, you just can’t download it any longer.
Bye Ms. Khloe
We lost Ms. Khloe a couple days back. She’d been battling a thyroid problem for a few years now and her body reached a point where she couldn’t go any longer.
Her persist “grumpy old lady” vibe will be missed as well as her persistent meowing to be fed anytime you went into the kitchen. She lived a good long 19 years.
A Hero in Buffalo
TRUE ANGEL IN BUFFALO 💯 A THREAD: A local woman received a call on Christmas Eve, “Hi, you don't know me but I have your brother.” The woman’s brother’s name is Joey. He is 64 years old and mentally disabled. pic.twitter.com/iAVQTsf2xH
— Kimberly LaRussa (@KimberlyLaRussa) December 26, 2022
Sha’Kyra Aughtry, you and your family are heroes. Everyone who helped this poor man are heroes. This is an example of true love and compassion for your fellow man.
That is what Jesus called for.
Nothing like the stunt pulled by Texas Governor, Greg Abbott.
We need more kindness, compassion, empathy, sympathy, and love.
I’m happy to see it still exists in the world.
Developing in SwiftUI
I’ve decided I’m going to work on revamping Arrgly starting tomorrow. It’s going to get a new name, Squish (I think), and the UI is going to be 100% SwiftUI (worst name ever) because I need to learn SwiftUI and Arrgly has always been my playground app.
Once I’ve completed it I’m going to start working on Stream for Mac in SwiftUI and see if I can complete it before the end of 2023. 🤞🏼
Wish me luck. 🍀
The GOP is all about cruelity
Multiple busloads of migrants were dropped off at Vice President Harris’s residence in Washington, D.C. on Saturday — Christmas Eve — leaving migrants on the streets in below-freezing temperatures, according to multiple reports.
Of course Greg Abbott was responsible for this cruel, cruel, act.
Jesus was pretty well known for stranding poor children outside in freezing weather as a hilarious joke to make fun of his enemies. https://t.co/IJOcbYouy6
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 26, 2022
Anyone who claims to be Christian and behaves this way is clearly not a Christian.
A simple piece of scripture for those who love to quote it to people.
“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” - Matthew 25:40
Don’t look to the GOP for servants. They only serve themselves; power hungry, money grubbing, hate mongers.
“Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!” - Peter Venkman
That’s Kolby in the foreground and that black spot in the background is our old girl Khloe partially covered by a blanket.
These two know how to live.
My family gets me. 🎄
Merry Christmas! 🎄
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.