@jgcaruso All I can tell you is that you are not alone 😀

I don’t know how many Mastodon clients I tried and discarded because they wouldn’t remember the last scroll/reading position and would insist on reloading the whole feed and taking you to the top … Once I found one that I actually liked, I had to tweak it (it was open source) till it worked for me.

Now I’m doing it again since I found one tiny flaw in the last Mastodon client and so want something better but couldn’t be bothered to modify that one 😛

I get you about the weather apps too. I was in the midst of adding weather info to an all-in-one timer/alarm app that I was coding but that got put on the back burner due to other apps that I just “had to have” … I’ll probably get back to that at some point, but probably after I get the Mastodon client done.

You can't spell the word gullible without the word acrobat.

I think it was only yesterday that I posted about needing to cut down on personal coding projects since they put the burden of maintenance on me, and what do I do since then?

I’ve gone ahead and started yet another project 😛

I’ve been using a macOS-ified version of Tusker as my default Mastodon client. I had it tweaked to fit exactly my needs — it had filtering, cleaning up the main timeline based on list membership and/or hashtags, showing images in a gallery instead of the tile layout most Mastodon clients seem to have inherited from Twitter and so on …

But … I discovered a few days ago that for some reason, the post threads on Tusker are not as comprehensive as they are on at least a couple of other clients I knew of.

The sane response to this probably would have been to fix Tusker by figuring out why the post threads in Tusker did not pull in all the relevant posts. But instead, I decided to take one of the clients with the right post threading and update that to work for me under macOS 😀

There are reasons as to why I opted to do it this way, but the biggest is that the new client (Ice Cubes) is easier/cleaner to modify at this point than it would be to work on Tusker to achieve what I want.

Unfortunately, since Ice Cubes does not have some of the features I had implemented on the Tusker side, I’ll end up having to do that too. C’est la vie? 😛

#Coding #PersonalApps #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #MastodonClients

@austinsart Yep, the subtitles are in English 🙂

“El Ministerio del Tiempo” is a bit old but it ran for like 3 - 4 seasons. It’s about time travel and we really enjoyed it since we were learning Spanish at that time and it helped with that …

“Black Knight” is fairly recent (as far as I’m aware) since we watched it about a month ago maybe? “Black Knight” is Korean but dubbed in English on Netflix.

Some other good Korean shows (which all have subtitles but I don’t always remember if they were dubbed in English. Plus, Netflix dubbed some of them later) - “Memories of Alhambra”, “Vincenzo”, “Sisyphus”, “Kingdom”, and “Extracurricular” …

They come from a bunch of different genres - science fiction, gangster/comedy, zombie horror etc. but we loved all of them ...

Thanks for the “Bia” recommendation 🙂 Will check it out.

@austinsart We (my wife and I) love Spanish shows too 🙂 We loved “El Ministerio del Tiempo” and recently, (of course) “La Casa de Papel” …

“Flower of Evil” has subtitles but as far as I’m aware, not dubbed (at least, not in English). I have found a dubbed Hindi version online, but that probably won’t help you?

If you want a good English-dubbed Korean show, then Netflix has “Black Knight” which is pretty good. Netflix has a bunch of Korean dramas where some were really great and different from ordinary fare. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll let you know some of our favourites …

We are swept in the dark to see the light in our dreams. #AI #Midjourney

@austinsart Welcome 🙂

I don’t really discuss #TV and #Movies as such since I haven’t really found anybody else on here who responds to my posts about those subjects, but I’ve been known to post about those from time to time …

But then again, the issue might be that most of the movies and TV shows I comment on are generally either not from the US or are in a different language 🙂

For example, at the moment we are watching “Flower of Evil”, which is Korean. Good show though …

One thing that's often annoyed me about Mac Catalyst apps is that when you close the app (via the Close butotn on the top left of the window) the app terminates instead of minimising to the dock.

This behaviour can be changed with two Info.plist changes:

Application Scene Manifest > Enable Multiple Windows - YES
Application can be killed to reclaim memory - NO

#Xcode #Catalyst #Coding #Fixes

I had a Python script which would post a daily dynamically composed tweet to Twitter. That stopped working last week because something went wrong with Twitter’s API set up. The service came back a couple of days later but my old info was gone and registering again apparently did not fully work.

So I decided not to rely on the API service and looked around for an alternative …

One possibility was to use macOS Shortcuts to create an automated tweet. Most of that seemed fairly straightforward and I got a workable workflow, but on macOS, there is no way to run a shortcut on a schedule …

So I thought of coding a quick app to do the job. The job would compose the tweet with the dynamic bits set up in Swift and then pass the tweet content to Shortcuts to be used as input. The app would also handle the scheduling so that the shortcut is executed daily at a given time and give me some logs indicating how it all went …

Seemed simple enough and the basic implementation was pretty easy. The only fly in the ointment was that I decided to use a third-party library to handle the scheduling 😛

It was a great library. It had all the features you could think in terms of defining a schedule, but it also seemed to not quite work in subtle ways. I discovered this only after I’d used the new app for a couple of days and had to debug scheduling issues.

I ended up writing the scheduling part as a custom component which handled only the scenario I was interested in and not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. But using the third-party library did give me some great ideas about features to add to my own scheduler to make it (and the reporting) better 🙂

#Coding #Swift #macOS #Shortcuts #Automation #Scheduling

@unknown8bit The trouble with that is that not all of us live in the US 😛 Plus, the issues that Karl talks about are long-term ones. How do you suggest that you test for those? Buy a $3,500 device that might actually create health issues after a few months of use?

Sure, if you love Apple and want to use Vision Pro, that’s totally your call. But some of us would rather be informed than simply go for the hype.

Saying that’s “criticism” and not “encouragement” isn’t very helpful either, especially since all you had to do was disregard the “criticism” if you didn’t like it …

@dubdub

When I can’t find an app that does what I want, or, if I feel that the available apps are too heavy/resource hungry, I tend to write my own apps to fill the need.

The trouble with that approach is that I sometimes end up with a lot of software to support/maintain. Since I’m also the customer, it can get a bit hectic 😛

This week was one where I was reminded (once again) why I try not to write my own software — I had at least two apps that I’d coded over the past couple of months that needed that one extra feature that I wanted. Then, I discovered that I needed a whole new app (because of Twitter shenanigans … grr) and that I had to add a new feature to yet another one of the apps that I’d coded.

That was a lot 😀

I managed to get quite a few of the changes I wanted done over the weekend (and also coded a new quick-and-dirty app for the Twitter issue) but I’m not sure if I should continue doing this … sometimes it just gets to be soo stressful juggling all these to-do items 😛

#Coding #PersonalSoftware #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS

@dubdub That might be accurate for a child, but for a product, especially a product that costs a lot of money, I am not really interested in people telling me how awesome it is because they used it for a bit 😛 I’ve already used AR/VR headsets and am interested in the product because I see the potential.

I want to know what can go wrong and what I should look out for so that I can make an initial assessment without having to plunk down the money.

If you want posts on how awesome the AVP is, I’m sure you can find them all over the place 🙂

In case you’re not aware - I’m working with the Mastodon team on #DevRel and community 🚀

If you’re building a client on the #MastodonAPI I would love to get connected and help you stay up-to-date. Drop me a line andy@joinmastodon.org and let me know what you’re working on! 🙏🏻

(pls boost for reach / tell the devs of your fave apps)

Part 2 of Karl Guttag’s series of articles on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro is now up on his site.

He discusses the possible issues with the AVP this time around from a hardware perspective. If you’d like to get a thoughtful perspective on all the various factors that you might want to consider when trying to decide if AVP is for you or not, you might want to give the articles a read and so that you can make your own mind up instead of relying purely on hype, or how excited others are about it 😛

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/16/apple-vision-pro-part-2-hardware-issues/

#Apple #VIsionPro #Dissection #Analysis #Hardware

@AngelaPreston Back in the late 90s and early oughts, I used to develop a lot of software. It was all distributed for free over the Internet since I actually believed in the concept of free software 🙂

I enjoyed talking to people about the software I developed and getting their feedback and had quite a community going around the stuff I developed. And as far as I can recall, I never felt as if people should pay me money for the work I did. I did it because I loved it and I continued to do it because people enjoyed it.

However, I must also add that back then it wasn’t as easy to sell stuff. No app stores were present and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to sell anything online — especially if you were not in the US (as I was for at least part of that time).

So yeah, there are some of us who do like just creating things. But the flip side of the coin is that these days, there also seems to be more of a sense of entitlement to people 🙂 Even if they get something for free, there seem to be more people who seem to feel that they are owed something just because they used the software. At least in my hazy recollections, that didn’t seem to be so much the case back then — people appreciated what somebody did for free and contributed in their own way, either as feedback, art, spreading the word, or simply talking to you.

So the current situation might be a mix of a bit of both — creators getting more money-concious as well as users getting more entitled? I don’t know if that is indeed the case, but just a possibility ….

@jknlsn Some more feedback in case it is helpful — just a caveat, I don’t know if the features I look for in a Mastadon client are the ones that other people are interested in 🙂

What I really liked about the app:

* The home feed filtering option to view just links, media etc.

* Multi-tags

* The threading — I like how your post thread view looks like. The client I’m using at the moment gives a way abbreviated thread of messages. I hadn’t looked into it till now since I didn’t notice that the threads were abbreviated 🙂 Will need to dig into it now ….

* Post scheduling

* The ability to create post threads

Things that didn’t work well or features I’d like to see:

* I get an “Error 404” whenever I restart the app. MIght be due to me being on Akkoma and some API endpoint being different.

* Remembering your last position on the feed so that you don’t have to scroll back each time you launch the app and try to find where you were ..

* The post editor does not appear to query the server to see what the character limit for a post is. My server has a character limit of 8000 but it shows 500 per post.

* The ability to filter out by followed hashtag and/or list members from the main timeline

* I can’t seem to create lists. Not sure if this is failing because I’m on Akkoma and the API endpoint might be different (in case you’re creating the list on server as well and not just locally) or something else but just letting you know.

* If I go to a user’s profile, I notice the menu has an option to add to a list, but the menu option does not seem to do anything when you click on it. But this might be related to me not being able to create lists in the first place.

@davemark I believe the Fediverse has Lemmy? Not sure how widely used it is …

https://join-lemmy.org/

I’ve seen some Reddit communities suggesting moving to Discord too …

I’ve never been one for role models — once you see your role model’s feet of clay, things change forever.

The closest I’ve come to a role model is probably Terry Pratchett — from all accounts, he was a good person as well as a great writer. I’ve never met him, but in all my online interactions with him, that’s the impression that I got.

But before PTerry, one of my favourite writers (if not the most favourite) was Isaac Asimov.

I started reading Asimov in my teens. He wrote on a huge array of subjects, across multiple genres, and always spoke about himself in his writing in a way that made me think that I knew him.

It was only in the last 10 years or so that I learnt that I didn’t know him at all, and that he might have been *all* clay feet 😕 Apparently, Asimov was somebody who harassed women, a lot.

He appeared to have thought that this was part of his charm — or, his admirers/supports/apologists made that out to be the case. I don’t know. But what was evident was that he did harass women and seemed to think that it was fine — that it was all fun. I suppose for him it was.

Interestingly, I found out recently that Alfred Bester, another great from the golden age of science fiction, would effusively kiss Asimov on his cheeks and pinch his bottom whenever they met — somewhat similar to Asimov's behaviour with the women he harassed. Apparently, Bester did not do this with anyone else, and so one has to wonder if he was trying to make Asimov realize the error of his ways.

Asimov seems to have almost come to a self-realisation since he writes that this made him feel uncomfortable and he even wonders about the women he treated the same way. But that’s about where the self-realisation ends since he ends with “It took the joy out of my interactions” or something similar. Basically, going back to me-me and not worrying about his victims and how *his* behaviour affected *them*.

I was thinking about all of this a couple of days ago because I came to realize that I don’t trust anything I hear/read any longer, and I used to. I used to think that the impressions that I got from reading somebody’s writing defined that person. Alas, no more …

But in this day and age, where people believe that artificial intelligence exists and are happy to believe anything that is churned out by a glorified random word generator, can we afford to believe everything we read?

I wonder …

#Reflections #IsaacAsimov #AlfredBester #Harassment #RoleModels #Trust

Karl Guttag always has very detailed, technical, and thorough write ups about AR/VR headsets. I love reading his analyses because I come away learning something new 🙂

He’s done a write-up on his thoughts about Apple Vision Pro and while I have not read all of it yet, it already sounds like something which asks the hard questions, unlike any of the thoughts/discussions I’ve read yet from people who did get to spend some time with the headset.

Or, as Karl says in his article: “Unfortunately, I didn’t see a lot of “critical thinking” or understanding of the technical issues rather than having “blown minds.”” 😛

If you are interested in a technical and critical look at Apple Vision Pro, you’re probably not going to go wrong reading Karl’s post.

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/13/apple-vision-pro-part-1-what-apple-got-right-compared-to-the-meta-quest-pro/

#Apple #VisionPro #AR #TechnicalDissection

@AngelaPreston Ah 🙂 Thank you for the confirmation. At least, I know now that it’s legit. It’s gotten to such a state these days that you can’t really be sure of anything unless you’ve verified it yourself a few different ways …

In fact, I was thinking about this most of yesterday about how suspicious I had become, after writing about the Amazon incident. I intended to make a post about how I used to believe in people that I’d never met (like Isaac Asimov) till I started learning about them through the Internet and how that shattered my image of them.

It’s all still very incoherent in my head though and so I’m not sure if I will make that post or not 😛