Blessed be the Mail.app View menu and the option to hide the useless Apple AI priority messages. My Inbox is now slightly more sane.
Completely agree with Matt here, and not just about Apple. App developers too should think of the needs of the more advanced users, despite taking up a smaller proportion of the user base. Very few users stay beginners for ever. Your best ones, the one’s that keep coming back, are likely going to know your app inside out. It’s worth building features for them.
Airing Of Draft Posts
A collection draft ideas and reflections, amassed over the last year, highlighting a mix of topics ranging from technology insights to personal musings.
🔗 Anime.js: JavaScript Animation Engine
This looks really interesting. Should look more into this.
I just learnt that Nintendo is requiring at least 50 hours of game play on the Switch before one can preorder the Switch 2. That’s a pretty clever way to avoid scalpers. I approve, despite not qualifying.
In a world where every cafe opens at 8:00 on Sunday, the ones that open earlier are guaranteed at least one customer. That customer has two thumbs, and is using them to type up this post on a phone.
A page of pure CSS loaders and spinners. Click on each one to get the source. No GIFs required.
If maintaining code is harder than writing it the first time, maybe Perl had the right idea all along. Just write it once. Then when you need to change it, delete it all and just write it once again. 😀
On Go And Using Comments For Annotations
Some thoughts of whether Go should have a dedicated syntax for annotations that comments are currently being used for.
🔗 Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft
A nice retrospective on Altair BASIC — Microsoft’s first product — from Bill Gates. And quite a flashy page as well (maybe a little too flashy: it wasn’t really possible to select text). No spoilers, but it’s amusing to see them pull the same trick with MITS and Altair BASIC as they did with IBM and DOS.
Via: Manton Reece
This week’s earworm: Chronology, by Jean-Michel Jarre. 🎵
It’s telling that the word “stupider” is growing in our lexicon. I’m all for language evolving, but seeing this is just making online reading “painfullier” (10 points to anyone that gets this obscure ‘90s reference).
My trumpet playing skills are what got me into the strings section. 😄
Free B-movie idea: you have a large multi-national company, like one of the large tech coorporations. One day, the CEO is away for an extended period of time. They might be on leave or something, but it’ll need to be for a few weeks or more. During that time, a new hire that looks exactly like the CEO begins working there. They start doing their medial tasks until one time during lunch, one of the executives mistakes them as the CEO, and starts asking for directions about company strategy, etc. Well, you can probably imagine how it goes from there.
Maybe give it it title like “The New Hire” or “The New Job”1 or something, and boom! You’ve got a blockbuster summer hit on your hands. “Fun for the whole family.” 😄
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Both of these are already the titles of real movies so maybe not these. Honestly, must be super hard for producers to come up with original titles these days. ↩︎
🔗 512 Pixels: A Fresh Coat of Paint
Stephen Hackett’s new site looks quite nice. Although I didn’t mind the orange, he’s right about the blue. I do wonder about using “Source Sans 3” for the body text; not sure it’s quite my cup of tea. But the rest looks quite nice.
Via: Mastodon
The Switch 2 looks pretty exciting. If I were ever to spend money on a game console, I’d probably go for this.
Tina Arena is a really underrated artist. Her music is really good.
Started working on world 2, and one of the main mechanics of this world: quicksand. It won’t kill the player directly, but it will make it difficult for them to manoeuvre, and getting too low could cause death. Might be one of the more annoying mechanics in the game, but that’s kind of the point.
The results of my first play-test are in. And overall, they were pretty positive: movement was good, hit-boxes were fair, and it was described as “quite fun,” which was better than I was hoping for.
One thing I’ll need to look out for is telegraphing secrets. The number of secrets is indicated at the end of the level, and based on the play-tester’s feedback, they seemed to have spent a lot of time running against walls trying to find them. There is one secret in the level 1-1 that I thought was telegraphed well, and I can confirm that the player found them all. But I will concede the others required the player to make a leap of faith, and fall into an area that the player will usually want to avoid, which is pretty unfair. So I’ll need to fix that.
Ugh, dealing with financial institutions is so annoying. Forms, solicitors, settlements; everything’s more complicated than it first appears.