Long Form Posts
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I realise that I’m probably so far removed from how much the general zeitgeist knows or cares about the relationship between Apple and their developers, so even expecting that these outlets know that they have been had is a huge assumption. ↩︎
- I’m completely recovered from the side effects of the vaccine now. I did have a sore arm for about a week, and actually saw to the doctor about it, but he said that it took him about a week to get over it as well, so nothing to worry about here. Incidentally, this was a day after seeing the same doctor about renewing a prescription, making it the first time in my life I went to the doctors two days in a row, which I guess is something. Now just need to wait 11 more weeks for my next dose.
- I’ve got a research task at work today, meaning no podcast listening at work today.
- Related, I find it relatively easy to listen to music and podcasts at the same time I’m writing code, but as soon as I need to write prose (documentation, copy, or writing a blog post), I have to turn the music off. I guess my mind needs complete focus when writing English sentences, probably because it’s an area that has been underdeveloped somewhat.
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Or “follows”, which is I guess the new term for it. ↩︎
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This article is paywalled, but if you are in any way interested in technology, I highly recommend subscribing. ↩︎
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The built in app, called “Samsung Global Goals”, is designed to promote charitable causes through the use of promotions. I appreciate the motivation of funding these causes, but not the approach they use to do so. ↩︎
- Offer the author the choice to publish the thread on a single web page, complete with a permalink URL that can be shared, once they have finished writing it. This could be on demand as they’re composing the thread, or it can be done automatically once the thread reaches a certain size.
- Provide the link to this web page on the first tweet of the thread. The reader can follow the link to consume the thread on a single page, or can use the link to reference the thread as a whole.
- The app will disclosed in their Info.plist the privileged APIs that they need access to (they might do this already, Iām really not sure).
- A new āPermissionsā menu item will be added by the OS to the application menu. This menu item is beyond the control of the app: it could not be automatically triggered or otherwise controlled.
- Clicking this menu item will bring up a window listing all the permissions that the app has disclosed. Beside each one is a toggle, allowing the user to turn them on and off at will. Like the menu item, this window is managed by the OS itself, not the application, and could require users to enter their admin passwords before enabling the permissions if necessary.
On Apple's Media Release Gymnastics
I started listening to the latest Talk Show, where John Gruber and MG Siegler discuss Apple’s media release of the class action settlement. Releasing it to the major media outlets in such a way as to spin the guideline clarification as a concession to developers, even though nothing has actually change, is genius if true. I imagine that’s why Apple’s PR department get the big bucks.
But I wonder if Apple has considered the potential blowback of this approach. I might be naive here, but I can’t help wonder whether these media outlets publishing that Apple hasn’t actually conceded anything will eventually realised that they have been had. Would that affect the relationship between the two in any way? Say Apple wants to publish some good news and expect these outlets to maintain the favourable air of their release. Would they do it?
Then again, it’s most likely that nothing will really change. There’s little trust lost between the two anyway, and if this gymnastics actually happened, Apple knows it. Also, it sounds like Apple’s media release has had the desired effect of reaching those in the US government applying anti-trust pressure on the company. They probably think it’s worth the credibility they have burned with these outlets, if any1.
One thing that seems clear though: this is doing no favours in addressing the trust lost between Apple and their developers, no matter how much clarifying this release does.
Post Of Little Consequence
I’m wouldn’t call myself a regular poster on this blog. I don’t have a goal of writing a post a day or something. But I do want to keep it up with some frequency, and post at least one item a week. I realised today that it’s been a week since my last post.
However, due to the current lockdown, very little of note has happened over the last week. Apart from work, TV, reading, and doing a few personal projects on the side, there really isn’t much going on. So it was hard to come up with something that was interesting to write about.
So I’m playing my post-about-how-difficult-it-is-to-post post, which is what you are reading now. In short: there’s nothing spectacular that’s going on at the moment.
That said, I did start three drafts that I thought about publishing. It felt a little strange posting them individually, so here they are as bullet points:
Anyway, that’s what’s happing at the moment. Hope I didn’t waste too much of your time š
Six Weeks Off Twitter
Itās been roughly six weeks since Iāve stopped using Twitter on a daily basis. I initially took a break to stay away from some anxiety inducing news, and I was initially going to return to daily use once that passed. But after hearing others on Micro.blog post about their experience closing their Twitter account, I decided to see how long I can go staying off Twitter myself.
I wouldnāt say that I am a big Twitter user. I donāt have a Twitter audience (I think my follower count is in the single digits), I hardly ever tweet or reply, and although I have a few friends and family on there, I have other means of communicating with them that I tend to use more often. The only thing I would miss are the occasional interesting or amusing tweets from those that I follow, something that is not guaranteed in any particular reading session.
In those six weeks, I notice my reading patterns have change. Iām reading a lot more books and blog posts now. I found that having something to read during the time youāre usually browsing Twitter helps a great deal, so thereās always some long form written piece that I can turn to when Iāve caught up with everything else. And although I wouldnāt say my anxiety has gone, I do think that itās lower than it was. Itās calming to know that there are no shocking/depressing items that can jump out of me during a particular reading session. I think that mechanic has a lot to do with the addictiveness of Twitter and itās ilk.
Iām not quite at the point where I will completely close my Twitter account, and there are some users that I may move over to Feedbin (I havenāt done that yet, so Iām not sure how interested in them I really am). But, all in all, I think this break from daily use of Twitter has been good for me, and I found myself having no real urge to going back.
Seeking Out Bad News
Sometimes I wonder if Iām just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe itās because I think that if I donāt, then a problem will go unaddressed as no-one else is aware of it.
Thereās probably some evolutionary trait to this. Being the one that hears a predator, and reacts to it before anyone else, is an advantage. But in this day and age, many of the problems that I have anxiety about is pretty much known by everyone, and addressing it in any meaningful way is beyond my direct control.
So in the interest for my own mental health, I should cut down on seeking out these stories, do what I can to help with the problem, and just hope that someone who does have the ability to do something substantial knows about it, and can address it in some way.
While total ignorance is probably not ideal, being up to speed with the woes of the world is probably not healthy either.
A Year On Micro.blog
It’s been a year since I’ve signed up to Micro.blog and written my first post, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner.
The reason for joining was to write more; to focus less on the blogging engine and more on the blog itself. At the time I have only posted seven times over a period of 9 months. In the last year, that post count has risen to 222. I guess I can call that objective achieved.
But the biggest reason for staying, and one I wish I knew sooner, is the fantastic community here. Having such a great bunch of people online is quite rare now, and this has quickly been my favourite place on the internet. We truly have something special here.
Thank you all for being such awesome people.
Working On The Weekend
Iāve saw a Tweets last night saying that the best thing a young person can do to help their career is to work on the weekend. The implication there is that being the one that āputs in the extra hoursā can seem, in the eyes of your employer, like youāre the hardest worker there, that youāre committed to the project and the job. This could lead to bonuses, promotions, perks, a reputation, you name it.
Iām always sceptical when I see advice like that. Coming in on the weekend on a voluntary bases might be good for your career, but is it actually good for you? Are you doing yourself any favours spending two additional days a week creating value for someone else?
What about the things that will create value for you? That can help you be a more rounded person? Things like learning a new skill, starting a new side project, socialising, taking up a hobby. When will you have time for that? Not to mention just fricken resting, which is really not as valued as it should be.
My feeling is that you already work for someone else 5 out of 7 days a week. By all means work on the weekend if you want to, but make sure youāre doing it for yourself.
Stumbling Into the Concept of Narrating Your Work
About a week ago, we had a retro. One of the things that was brought up was the sense that management felt that the team was not delivering as much as we could be. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the higher ups work in Perth, a good 3,452 KM away from Melbourne. Another was that a lot of the work the team deals with is experimental in nature: more R&D vs. product development (a large portion of it involves dealing with a lot of barely supported, and completely undocumented APIs for MacOS).
Nevertheless, it was a bit of a downer that management felt this way. A solution proposed by a team member was to maintain a work log. Doing so would give the product owner, who works in Perth, the ammunition needed to push back on the notion that the team was just sitting on their hands. Prior to the pandemic, I started keeping a bullet journal, which helped me keep on top of things that I needed to do. But this would been different: it would essentially be keeping a log of what I did, and how I did it.
Last week I started to do this. I took a silly little web-app that I built for maintaining a “now” page (which I never used), and started to use it a bit more like a journal. I added it as a web panel in Vivaldi so that I could open it whenever I was in the browser. Every so often while I’m working on a task, I would quickly jot down a paragraph of what I just did. If I got stuck, I would write down what the problem is and my thoughts on how I can get out of it. I originally thought about setting up a reminder to do this like once every 30 minutes, but I found that simply journalling the thoughts as they come work quote well. At the end of the day I usually had at-least 3 bullet points on what I was working on (the record was 12) and at the beginning of the next day, I cut-and-pasted these bullet points into the Jira work log.
It’s too early to say whether this would help dispel the notion that the team is not delivering; we may get an update from the product owner when the next retro comes around. But I’ve found the process actually quite useful for myself. I’ve forgotten how beneficial it is to write my thoughts down as they come, and I’ve never used a process like this before: everything up to date has been simply todo items or scrawls of the next task to look at.
I learnt this morning that this is not a new concept. Dave Winer wrote a blog post about this in 2009, called Narrate Your Work which talks about how he adopted this practice at UserLand. I guess the same thing could be helpful here. After all, you could probably say the place I work at is distributed in nature, given that there exist a whole continent between the two offices.
It’s only been a week so the habit has not fully settled in but I hope to continue to do this.
On the Souring Relationship Between Apple and its Developers
Listening to episode #430 of ATP yesterday, it was kind of shocking to hear the loss of good will experienced by the hosts towards Apple and their developer relations. I canāt say that I blame them though. Although Johnās point about lawyers making the case for Apple is a good one, I do get the same feeling that Marco does about Apples opinion about developers, which is not a positive one.
It feels a lot like Apple believes that developers building on their platform owe them everything to them, and that without Apple none of these businesses would exist at all. It does feel a lot like they are entitled to a cut of everything that is happening on their platform. It does feel a lot like they think a developer releasing their app for free on the App Store is an ungrateful free-loader, that is taking advantage of all their hard work building the platforms and developer toolkits. This is not just from whatās coming up during the Epic-Apple lawsuit discovery. Remember what happened to Basecamp last year, when tried to release a new version of their Hey iOS app.
None of these is accurate in the remotest sense. Although it is true that some of these business may not be around if iOS was ever invented, itās not to say that these developers wouldnāt be doing something else. Also, these developers DO pay for the privilege to build on their platform. Letās not forget the $99.00 USD ($149.00 AUD) that these developers pay yearly, not to mention all the hardware they buy to run XCode and these other tools. And itās not like any of these tools wouldnāt exist at all if these devs were free to use another IAP provider. Apple, I assume, would like something like XCode to exist so that they can build their own apps.
I hope people in Apple are listening to this. Anti-trust regulation aside, they are doing themselves a massive disservice by treating their developers like this. These people are their biggest evangelists. Iām not sure it will come to the point where they will abandon the iOS platform, at least not at this stage. But I could foresee these developers being hesitant to adopt any new app platforms that Apple release, say a future AR platform that will feature hardware devices.
Podcast Roll 2021
Yesterday, @Munish had the courage to share his podcast subscriptions1. Sensing an opportunity to talk about with what I’m currently listening to, even though it may reveal more about myself that I’m usually comfortable with, I’m taking up his dare and sharing mine.
So, here is my podcast roll as of early May 2021:
The shows above can roughly be divided up into the following categories:
Technology: This is a topic that I’m very interested in so there are fair few of these. A lot of them are Apple centric, but this is more of an accident than by design. The second podcast that I started regularly listening to was The Talk Show since I was a casual reader of Daring Fireball at the time (and I still am). That opened me up to ATP, which led to a bunch of Relay.fm shows.
Business: These could probably be lumped into technology, but are focused more on the business side of things rather than product development. Ben Thompson shows up a lot here, with Exponent, Dithering, and the Stratechery daily update my regular gotos. The release of that last one helped set some new routines while I was working from home last year. There’s a decent collection of shows from indy developers here as well.
Science, History, and Philosophy: These are where the real heavy podcast listening comes in, the shows that are 2 to 4 hours long and go deep into a particular topic or event. I have to be in the right kind of mood for these one. Key drivers here are Making Sense, Mindscape and Hardcore History.
Politics and Society: I am somewhat interested in US politics, which could explain the shows that appear in this category. Deep State Radio is one that I still listen to occasionally. Also of note is the NPR Planet Money podcast, which was the first podcast that I’ve ever subscribed to. A recent addition is the ABC Coronacast which provides a decent briefing of the coronavirus pandemic in Australia.
Popular Culture: This is probably where all the Incomparable shows come in, when I’m in the mood for something lighthearted and funny. My usual goto’s there are the Incomparable Game Show, Robot or Not and Pants in the Boot. One or two Relay.fm shows fall in here as well, including Reconcilable Differences, which is a favourite of mine.
Micro.blog: The final category is more-or-less podcasts that I’ve subscribed to while spending time on Micro.blog. This includes shows like the Micro Monday podcast, but also shows from those on Micro.blog like Core Intuition and Hemispheric Views.
So that’s it. There are a fair few subscriptions listed above, not all of them I regularly listen to. I guess I should probably unsubscribe from those that I haven’t listen to for a while. I probably keep them around for the same reason why I keep RSS feeds around: just in case something worth listening to pops up in there.
On Basecamp
I’ve been thinking about the incident at Basecamp for most of the week. I wanted to write something about it earlier, after hearing about the policy changes on Tuesday, but I’d figure that it would probably be best to wait a bit and learn more about the issue first. The last thing I wanted to do is add one more knee-jerk reaction to the mix during the heat of the moment.
But it is something that I want to comment on. I’ve only recently started following the writing of DHH and Jason Fried but I am aware of their reputation in both their approach to business and their dealings in the open-source community. To hear of a scandal form a business founded by these two took me aback. That’s probably why I’m writing this post at all. Hearing news like this from companies as large as Facebook or Google, with tens of thousands of employees, doesn’t surprise me as much as something arising from a company of about sixty people.
The thing about being on the outside looking in is that you have an imperfect picture of the whole incident. And even after reading the open letter, the report from Casey Newton, and the response from DHH, it’s still not the full picture, as you cannot be inside the head of those involved. You can only work with what you read, and how it shapes your view of the principal actors that lives inside your head. This, along with the current environment that this event occurred in, makes it difficult for me to comment on the matter.
But I do see a few things that are regrettable. It’s regrettable that such a thing like the Best Customer Names list exists. Far be it from me to be above making light of those that I deal with on a day-to-day basis, that such a list exited seemed like a step too far, particularly when it deals with those that you are being paid to serve. I can understand if this was a small startup with a handful of employees working hard to get it off the ground, and there was a need to vent. But for a company of sixty, especially one that thinks highly about how they operate they write blog posts about, it strikes me as unprofessional, and it does them no credit.
It’s also regrettable that this matter could not be have been dealt with internally.
One thing that struck me was how long the build up to this policy change was. It did not happen overnight; clearly something was brewing in Basecamp for a little while. And although I recognise that there were attempts to settle the matter internally, with the list removed and an apology from the founders, I also recognise that we are dealing with people with very strong personalities that are not afraid to air their opinions. So I wonder whether or not it could have remained an internal matter at all. Nevertheless, it’s in the public now, with the associated backlash and loss of credibility.
Which brings me to the third regrettable thing, which is the ban on political discussion. In the abstract, this is not something that I personally support; a company does not operate in a vacuum after all. Maybe for a company like Basecamp it could act as bit of a circuit breaker if deployed for a little while; I get the sense that the founders thought similar. But it is a shame that it got to that level, and I do hope that they reverse it once things settle down. I think it’s good of Basecamp to offer severance packages to those employees that disagree with this measure, and wish to find work elsewhere. That indicates that they are willing to back their employees decision to leave, rather than leave their employees with a bit of a Sophies’s choice situation.
So, what will I be doing going forward? I’ll probably continue to read posts from Jayson and DHH, and continue to use their open-source frameworks.
I’m not a paying customer of Basecamp, although I do use their free offering, and I’m planning to continue doing so. Of course, I can understand if others choose a different course of action. Although I’m not a fan of making decisions in the heat of the moment, I can understand and respect the decisions made now, given that more on the incident has surface. I will be interested in seeing how Basecamp operates going forward. An event like this could have a lasting impact on a company, it’s founders, and it’s employees, and it would be interesting in seeing how to move on from it.
Some thoughts on Apple Subscription Podcasts offering
Youāve probably seen the blog post outlining the details of Appleās new Podcast Subscription offering. The latest post from Daring Fireball has a link to it if you havenāt seen it on Twitter already.
After reading this, Iām not sure who would choose to go with Appleās Podcast hosting. Money aside, it looks like another case of Apple mediating the relationship between host and listener, not to mention keeping subscriber content exclusively on Appleās app.
The easy money doesnāt sound like itās worth the cost of independence that comes from publishing shows on the existing open podcast ecosystem. Sure it would be harder ā youāll have to build your audience yourself, and it will likely take some time before you can get sponsors or a membership program ā but the benefits that come from independence sound to me like it would be worth it. And once you have the audience, the support will follow: just look at Dithering, ATP, and Relay.
I hope podcasterās realise this. Thereās a good thing here: podcasters connecting directly to listeners via the open web. I donāt want one more large company coming in to wreck that.
Surmounting The Hill
Sometimes adding features to software is like cycling on a hilly road.
You start off at the bottom of the hill, a little unsure of the hight and gradient, and how well you’ll be able to tackle it. You start the uphill climb, writing new code, adding tests, trying an approach that may not work, backtracking and starting again. This uphill climb is starting to tire you out. You’re making forward progress, even thought it may not feel like it, but it’s slow and you’re not sure how much longer you can keep cycling for.
Eventually, you reach the top: you have a solution that does what it needs to do with decent test coverage, but it’s ugly as sin. There’s an approach there that works, but it’s hidden underneath all the attempts that didn’t. You’re tired, but you’ve got a sense of accomplishment.
Now the downhill coast begins. You begin hacking and slashing, deleting code that you no longer need, and generally simplifying the solution, every time running tests to make sure you haven’t removed too much. Travelling further along the road gets easier with each file deleted and each model refactored, until you have something that actually looks good. Eventually you level out, and you’ll need to start peddling again, as you tidy up and add documentation in preparation for the pull request.
The feature is built, the hill is behind you, and you are further along the road, ready to tackle the next hill.
A Year Under The Pandemic
This was originally a journal entry but I thought Iād share it here as well. Today is the end of week 52, almost a year to the day that the pandemic became all to real for me. Iāve taken today day off to spend some time in Warburton. It was in Warburton last year, almost to the day (13th of March), that things began to get serious. The news coming out of China and Italy was grave: hundreds of deaths, thousands of new cases, hospitals filling up, lack of ventilators and staff to operate them, PPE shortages, scenes of people locked down in their home. The outbreak in New York was becoming serious as well, and the US government announced closure of their borders to Europe.
There were also a number of new cases here as well, it may have been 100 or so around the country. That Friday a number public events were cancelled, like the AFL and Grand Prix, and the borders were closed off to the rest of the world ā nobody was allowed in or out. There was a run on things at the shops as officials advised people to be stocked for two weeks should you need to isolate. Toilet paper was in short supply, along with some other staples like pasta and tuna. There was a general sense of unease around the place.
It was also the time when I started working from home. I returned one last time to the office of my old job on Tuesday the following week. The city was quite quiet. A lot more people were wearing marks and half the cafes were closed for the afternoon. I havenāt been back to that office since. I think the weekend following I stopped meeting my parents for dinner, and only went out for groceries.
I guess itās hard to describe how scary the situation was at the time. The testing and tracing infrastructure was not yet setup, so nobody really knew where the virus was. The government ensured us that there was no local transmission, but it was difficult to believe them, especially as case numbers were rising rapidly. The reported death rate was also terrifying ā up to 3% at the time but higher in certain places. I was fearful of everyone I loved, as well as myself, catching the disease and ending up on a ventilator, or worse, dying. Taiwan was the only country at the time to have curbed the virus: most Western countries were struggling with outbreaks, so at the time I had little faith that Australia would be able to manage the virus as well.
I was also afraid that the lock downs would last until a vaccine is available. At the time medical experts were tempering expectations of a speedy delivery of a vaccine. Turnaround times were usually 1 to 1.5 years. The fact that they were ready the same year was considered a bit of a breakthrough (I guess these things really do happen).
A lot has happened this past 52 weeks. The nation has managed to keep the virus more or less under control. There were setbacks though: the second Melbourne lock down was regrettable. But we have managed to setup a somewhat decent testing and contact tracing regime, along with hotel quarantine, and new local cases have been at or close to zero for most of the past 5 months. Vaccinations of the border workers, front line workers, and people at risk are currently in progress.
A sense of normalcy has returned, in what is generally called āCovid normalā. The borders are still closed to everyone except New Zealanders, and no one is generally permitted to leave the country. Since November, things have pretty much remained more-or-less opened. Events like the AFL are back on with small crowds that are socially distanced.
But the threat remains. Every day Iām looking on Twitter to see what the latest number of new cases is. Thereās a constant trickle of positive cases coming in from overseas, where the virus is still raging. There have been new, more contagious and deadly, variants popping up, and itās a constant struggle to keep them out: we have had to go through a 5 day snap lock-down to stop local transmission of one.
So thereās little to do but wait. I appreciate that weāve managed to gain some semblance of normalcy back, something that Iām aware others around the world have been denied so far. Eventually this will pass as well, but Iām hoping it doesnāt take another 52 weeks.
Australiaās ABC News shot to the top of the App Store charts following Facebookās news ban
From the Verge:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporationās ABC News app shot to the top of Appleās App Store charts in Australia over the course of the last few days, not long after Facebook banned Australian news sources on its platform.
[…]
ABC News currently sits at No. 2 in the App Storeās overall app rankings in Australia, according to the analytics firm App Annie, and No. 1 in the news app charts. When Patel noticed the change, the app was also briefly No. 1 overall, ahead of Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook app itself.
I’ve been seeing these banners on ABC News site myself, and I was sceptical that anything would come of it. Turn’s out I’m pleasantly mistaken. It’s really good to see people choosing to go to a reputable news source directly.
Some uninformed thoughts about the ACCC Media Bargaining Code
Yesterday, when the news about the news and Facebook was making the rounds in Australia, I have been wondering about my position about the whole thing. After listening to the Stratechery Daily Update1 from Ben Thompson about it, I think my position on this has solidified.
I’m no fan of Facebook, but I can completely understand why they took the action they did, and I believe that it is in their right to do so. It could be argued that banning links and pages from government and NPO organisations was wide-reaching, and for that, I think it’s important to consider the motivation here. Was Facebook being cautious about their interpretation of the proposed law, which was written so poorly to suggest that anything related to the goings on in Australia fell under the code? Where they just being sloppy about which organisations were banned? Or were they going to such broad lengths to make a point and leverage their negotiation position? I don’t know: all three scenarios seem plausible.
But I think Ben Thompson is spot-on in making the point that there was a lack of political ground work prior to Facebook taking this action. Contrast that with Google, which since last month was warning about maybe pulling out of the Australian market if there was a chance that they would violate the code. I didn’t see anything like this from Facebook, and Ben Thompson made the point that this was a lot like the saga around WhatsApp and the privacy changes. Who knows? Maybe if they did this, they would have more sympathy in the eyes of the public.
It may sound like I’m taking Facebook side here. I won’t go so far as to say that, but living in a society with free enterprise I don’t see why they couldn’t do what they did. No one is preordained with a right to post on Facebook, and expect that they can extract rent for doing so. It was a mistake on part of the government and media organisations (hi, Mr. Murdoch) to think otherwise.
The whole mess is regrettable but I hope everyone comes out of this a little wiser. I think for me it just reinforces the importance of maintaining your own, independent position on the web. There might be subsequent words on this thought down the line.
A $2000.00 Smartphone with Ads
I just learnt today that the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has ads. I’m generally not that interested in Samsung phones, but the idea of putting ads on a device that costs up to $US 2,000.00 offends me so much that I had to comment.
If I shell out that amount of money for a device, I expect an experience that is worthy of that price. Having that experienced degraded with crappy banner ads, and a built-in app1 which hijacks the lock screen, really brings down the intrinsic worth of the whole device to a point that doesn’t justify the price they’re asking for. It shows contempt for the customer ā you know, the person that, by right, is the owner of the phone they paid for ā and it’s just overall dishonorable.
I know how difficult it can be for Android OEMs to compete given the current race to the bottom. But my understanding is that Samsung is actually second to Apple in terms of revenue per device, so I see absolutely no reason why they would consider a move like this.
Yeah, I know it’s a first world problem, but I’m seeing more and more phone vendors thinking that the device that they sell, supposably at a profit, is also a vector for which they can push marketing messages through without regard, and I really don’t want that to happen.
Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting
Seth Godin on Rank Choice Voting:
The surprising thing? In a recent primary in New York, some people had trouble with the new method. Itās not that the method of voting is particularly difficult. The problem is that weāve trained ourselves to be RIGHT. To have āour candidateā and not be open (or pushed) to even consider that there might be an alternative. And to feel stress when we need to do the hard work of ranking possible outcomes, because that involves, in advance, considering acceptable outcomes that while not our favorite, would be acceptable.
Living in a country that has rank-choice voting across the board, I could be biased in this, but I think that’s one of the beautiful things about this voting system. It changes the thinking of “will my candidate win” to “what candidate can I live with”. A candidate representing several thousand people is not going to be everyones first preference, but they might be happy enough if they’re their second or third.
A Feature Request for Twitter, Free of Charge
It looks like Twitter’s product design team need some help. Their recent ideas, “inspired” by the features of other companies like Snap (Stories) and Club House (Audio Clips), don’t seem to be setting the world on fire. Well, here’s an idea for them to pursue, free of charge.
A lot of people I follow seem to use Twitter threads for long-form writing. This might be intentional, or it might be because they had a fleeting thought that they developed on the spot. But the end result is a single piece of writing, quantised over a series of tweets, and assembled as a thread.
I’d argue that consuming long-form writing this way is suboptimal. It’s doable: I can read the thread as they’re currently presented in the Twitter app and website. But it would also be nice to read it as a single web page, complete with a link that can be used to reference the thread as a whole.
Now, I don’t see these writers changing their behaviour any time soon. It’s obvious that people see value in producing content this way, otherwise they would do something else. But it’s because of this value that Twitter should lean in to this user behaviour, and make it easier to consume these threads as blog posts. The way they should do this is:
I know that this is possible now, with things like the Thread Reader app, but there are some benefits for Twitter adding first party support for this. The first being that it keeps user on their “property”, especially if they add this feature to the app as well as the Twitter website. This neutralises the concern of sending the author or reader to another site to consume or publish their content, thereby feeding into the second benefit, which is that it elevates Twitter as a platform for writing long-form writing, in addition to microblogging. If their content can be enjoyed in a nicer reading experience, more writers would use Twitter to write this form of content, keeping users and writers on Twitter. The user benefits, the publisher benefits, and Twitter benefits. Win-win-win all round.
So there you are, Twitter, the next feature for the product backlog. It could be that I’m the only that that wants this, but I personally see more value in this than their other pie-in-the-sky endeavours that Twitter is perusing.
One final thing: I’m a big proponent of the open web and owning your own content, so I don’t endorse this as a way to publish your work. I’m coming at this as a reader of those that choose to use Twitter this way. Just because they’re OK with Twitter owning their content this way doesn’t mean I should have a less-than-adequate reading experience.
Adding Blog Posts to Day One using RSS
Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this.
I’ve since discovered, after reading this blog post, that Day One actually has an IFTTT integration. This means that it’s possible to setup an applet that takes new entries from an RSS feed, and add them as entries into a Day One journal.
I decided to give this a go, and it was quite simple to set up. I’m using the blog’s RSS feed as the source, and a new “Blog Journal” as the destination new entries will be created in. Setting up the integration with Day One was straight forward, however I had to make sure that the encryption mechanism of the new journal was “Standard” instead of “End-to-end”. This is slightly less secure but everything in that journal is going to be public anyway, so I’m not too concerned about that.
The Day One integration allows you to select the journal, any tags, and how the content is to look. This follows something resembling a template and allows the use of placeholders to select elements of the post, like the title and the body. The integration also allows you to specify the location and entry image, although I left that blank. In fact, I ran into trouble trying to set the entry image when a post didn’t have one: journal entries were being created with a generic IFTTT 404 image instead.
So far it’s been working well. I’ve only being writing short posts without a title ā this will be the first long post with a title ā but they’ve been showing up in Day One without any issues. There are still some unknowns about this integration. For example, I don’t know how images will work. I would hope that even though they’re links that Day One will handle them properly if you wanted to do something like make a physical book. It’s likely I’ll need to make a few tweaks before this is perfect.
But all-in-all, I’m pleased with this setup. It’s nice seeing everything I write show up in a single place now. In fact, I’m wondering if there are other things this integration could be useful for, now that I know that all that needs doing is setting up an RSS feed.
Some thoughts on app permissions in macOS
Itās funny how the casual meandering of your mind can be a source of inspiration. This morning, my mind casually turned to thinking about all the work that Mac developers need to do to get access to privileged APIs ā like location, contacts, or the accessibility APIs. My experience of going through the motions to enable these permissions for the apps I use, along with hearing of the lengths developers go through to make this as seamless as they can, reveals to me the clunkiness that this entails. I could imaging this being a huge source of frustration for these developers, not to mention a huge source of support requests.
It’s laudable of Apple to lock-down access to these APIs: the days of assumed access to everything is over, and I believe we are better for it. But I believe itās worth considering ways to streamline the process of granting these permissions, making it easier to work with them without any sacrifice to the user’s security or privacy.
I’m wondering if one such approach could be to do something similar to how permissions for web pages are managed. In most browsers, clicking on the pad-lock icon just left of the URL brings up a popup listing all the capabilities the website has access to, such as whether they can use the microphone, whether they can show notifications, etc. Within this popup, the user can grant or revoke these permissions, controlling which APIs the JavaScript on the website can use. The web-site itself cannot do anything with this pane: all that can be done is to provide instructions on how enable these permissions, and progressively enabling or disabling features based on whether those permissions are granted.
Maybe something similar would help for macOS apps. What I had pictured in my head is something similar to the following (no mock-ups, sorry; youāll need to use your imagination):
I can see this approach having some benefits to both users and developers. This will reduce the level of friction involved in dealing with permissions, making it easier for the user to enable, and most importantly disable, these permissions when needed. The app developer has an easier time asking the user to enable these permissions: no need to do things like open the Settings app and draw arrows on screen pointing to the accessibility pane. Since this is all managed by the OS, the various setting panes can still exists, but they become secondary avenues to controlling these permissions. Conceptually, the permissions belong to the app, which maintains the wholistic app paradigm that Apple is moving towards, not to mention eliminating the need for the user to context switch when they open the Settings app.
Iām not a Mac developer so Iām not sure how possible this is. I canāt imagine this approach would break any of the existing APIs of AppKit: this will all be stuff that Apple needs to do. Iād be interested in hearing what others think of this approach, so let me know your thoughts on this.