The ActivityPub federation on my server must have suddenly caught up or something (or there was a slew of activity from @gruber) but I suddenly got a whole lot of posts in my feed from Gruber in reply to responses from people on his post on Apple’s Vision Pro …

I found it interesting reading, just to see all the different responses and Gruber’s take on things. But I also was left wondering how somebody like Gruber deals with all of these strong (at least it feels strong) feelings directed towards him …

I wrote something about SharePlay a few days ago and got somebody telling me how SharePlay was “dystopian” 😛 It feels a bit jarring, at least to me, to just talk about tech because you find it interesting to have somebody disagree with you vehemently. My general approach to things is, if you love it (and it doesn’t harm you or anybody else) then that’s your right, I don’t need to love it too, but I’ll always fight for your right to love/like it.

But to have somebody disagree with something that wasn’t aimed at them and to spend time trying to convince me that I was wrong (or so it felt) just felt a bit strange. But I guess that’s what being on the Internet is?

I just don’t get this kind of thing that much. So I just wonder how it feels when you are John Gruber and you get so many varying kinds of arguments (or just comments) from hundreds, if not thousands, of people?

Not sure I’d have the mental bandwidth for it 🙂

#Reflections #OnlineDiscussions #Responses #BeingOnline

I have a Python script which posts a protest post to Twitter every day using their API — it’s a political thing related to Sri Lanka that nobody else probably cares about 😛 (And that’s my only activity on Twitter for months now …)

Today, the script stopped working. I go to the Twitter developer dashboard and my app which was used by the script is no longer there. It also looks as if I can’t create a new app/project.

So I don’t know if this is a temporary outage, or another change in direction, but it looks as if using the free API (even if it is only to post 30 tweets a month and not 1,500) is out — at least for the time being.

I guess the slow collapse continues?

#Twitter #API #NonFunctional #TwitterCollapse

One my fellow #DoctorWho fans will hopefully enjoy.
Prints here: https://mark-tisdale.pixels.com/featured/tardis-in-the-rain-london-mark-tisdale.html

#DigitalArt #Painting #London #BigBen #Tardis #FediGiftShop #MastoArt #MarkOnArt

It is kind of surprising that it took Reddit self-destructing for the Star Trek communities there to join the federation.

@denisdepalatis I wanted to test out iCloud sync but haven’t gotten around to it yet. If that part’s buggy, then the rest won’t matter as much for me 😕

But hopefully, they get the kinks worked out by the time iOS 17 releases?

@jknlsn Things I can confirm works with a quick test on an M1 Mac:

* Works great on even non-Mastodon servers with Mastodon API support, like Akkoma. Not all clients do this. In fact, a lot of them don’t.

* Works fine on a Mac, but does show a tiny UI. I know that this might not be a huge priority for you, but adding iPad support would make it work better on M1 Macs too.

Will send more feedback later on once I’ve had a chance to use it more.

Hey folks! I've opened a bunch of new beta testing slots for @radiant, my Mastodon app for iPhone.

Get them while they're hot 🔥

I'd love to get any feedback and find any new bugs before I submit a day zero v1.0.1 update to App Review.

Boosts / reblogs appreciated 🙏

https://testflight.apple.com/join/ZIPbEz2e

#MastodonApps #MastodonClient #IndieDev #SwiftUI #iOS

@chrisoffner3d First thing you might want to try is deleting the DerivedData folder entirely (not via Clean Project). I had some initial weird issues after trying to compile a project that I’d already compiled fine on Xcode 14.x with 15.0 beta. A clean up of DerivedData seemed to fix it.

Of course, then opening the project in Xcode 14 gave me similar issues. So had to delete DerivedData again … 🙂

If that fails, have you tried a reboot? That seems to fix a lot of Xcode issues …

If you’ve tried both and it still doesn’t work, lemme know. I’d be interested to figure out what is going on …

@at

@denisdepalatis At least, it works now, right? 🙂

Without knowing anything about gameplay, and based purely on first-impressions, “Star Wars Outlaws” and “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” look interesting.

The fact that they are both available for PS5, Xbox, and PC doesn’t hurt either 🙂

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-outlaws
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/avatar/frontiers-of-pandora

Guess we’ll find out if they are any good sometime towards the end of this year and the beginning of the next (hopefully)?

#Games #StarWars #Avatar #Console #PC

Dear ACL Community, If you are PhD student, postdoc or are preparing for your PhD right now after http://M.Sc., we invite you to share your experiences and thoughts on working in the field of NLP. We plan to present the main results of this survey at the upcoming ACL'23 , Toronto & in a future publication, of course always in anonymous form. The online survey will take about 5 minutes to complete. To participate, please click on this link https://lnkd.in/gzmRhamu
#NLPRoc

Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, and James Earl Jones, who provided the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars in 1977, met for the first time on a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.

@nicemicro As I said before, you are thinking only of your own use cases 🙂 If you don’t like the tech (or the company) that is totally fine. That’s your prerogative.

I can think of several use cases that are actually solved by SharePlay. But of course, then people say things like “That’s a niche case” 😛 But it’s always a niche case when it’s not the one you want …

For example, watching movies together on a big screen when you are on a plane (which I do want), watching together on a huge screen when you travel around a lot and can’t cart around a big TV with you, working together on code on multiple large virtual monitors instead of crowding around a single tiny screen. These are just a few. There are quite a few variations on these that I can think of too …

@Jrogger Ah 🙂 I figured it might be that — I mean non-name order. I mostly have things in name order and so this doesn’t hit me most of the time. But then again, I switched to PathFinder a long time ago because of issues like this and the inability to customise a lot of options …

@nicemicro Each to their own 🙂 I’ve realized when talking to people online that a lot of the time, they imagine that everybody else’s situation is the same as theirs. Not saying that this is the case here, but it’s hard to know what works for somebody else and why …

Not sure why you get “dystopian vibes” about sharing content but then again, consider the fact that people said that radio, TV etc. also would destroy society when it first appeared 🙂

When I was young, the only way to watch a movie with somebody else was to go to the movie theatre. Then TVs and VHS came along and you could watch a movie at home. Was the change dystopian? I guess that depends on your viewpoint and your own needs.

As I said, each to their own 🙂

Installed iPadOS 17 on my iPad and thought that I discovered a new setting “Use Large App Icons” only to realize that it’s there on iOS 16 too 😛

For some reason, I never noticed this setting. But it’s rather useful when you’re as old as me and icons aren’t that easy to see. So, just mentioning in case there are others who didn’t know about this setting.

The Settings app section is different in iOS 16 — I believe it’s called “Home Screen & Multitasking” instead of “Home Screen & App Library” but the setting is the same.

#iPadOS17 #Apple #iPadOSBeta #LargeIcons
Screenshot of the “Home Screen …

@kn Given that I’ve been watching Apple keynotes since at least 2016 (or maybe 2017) hoping for an announcement about the headset, that sounds about right 🙂

@gruber

@gruber For media consumption by yourself, $3500 is certainly a bargain. But what if you want to consume with others? Does Apple have a plan for this? That’s what I’m curious about …

Sure, SharePlay is there. And Apple seems to be beefing up SharePlay with the latest OS releases, but how well will it work? Will it work when there is no Internet? Will it allow some sort of peer-connectivity if there is no network for instance? That’s probably what will tip the scales, at least for some of us 🙂

@nicemicro That certainly is one take on it 🙂 But what interests me is not the phone/communication factor, but being able to share an activity (like watching a movie) together.

And not on the phone, but on something like VisionPro where the activity would normally be considered a solo activity but where SharePlay could allow two or more people to watch the same movie, talk about it, and even pause/resume at the same point …

As somebody who moves around a lot, but who still consumes content with others, I find this very interesting 🙂

Also, you don’t have to go as far back as the 19th century to see telecommunications in action connecting people hundreds of miles apart, I’ve seen that in action in my lifetime. In fact, as a kid I used to have to go next door to make a phone call to my parents who were hundreds of miles away since the people with whom I lived did not have a phone 😛

When Apple first introduced SharePlay a couple of years ago, I was certain that this was to support their to-be released AR headset 🙂

But then time passed and nothing much appeared to happen with SharePlay. In fact, I had almost forgotten about it since adoption of SharePlay seemed to be mostly limited to streaming service apps or music apps, and that was about it ... Even amongst streaming apps, the ones I used like Neflix or Amazon Prime did not have SharePlay.

But this year, it appears that SharePlay is back with a vengeance 😛 Check out the following WWDC session to find all the new functionality being added to SharePlay:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10239/

My Favourite? SharePlay over AirDrop so that you can start shared activities with people in the same room by just bringing your phones together — no need to start a FaceTime call!

The thing I don’t know at this point is, will SharePlay work if there is no network (or at least, no Internet)? I’m guessing not, but I’m curious to find out.

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SharePlay #SharedActivities #VisionPro