Watched “Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3679040) today …

I’m not a huge fan of post-2000 Salman Khan. I used to enjoy his 90s movies a lot. In fact, his “Maine Pyar Kiya” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100095) was instrumental in me getting back into Hindi movies and for me learning Hindi. But the post-2000 (or somewhere after the 2010s maybe?) Salman Khan became a bit of a cliché for me — he lost the charm that he had in the early movies and became all about the muscles and about speaking a certain way.

This movie started in the same style that has become habitual for Salman Khan movies these days. Then I began to get a sense of déja vu, it felt as if I’d knew certain plot elements from somewhere but couldn’t quite put my finger on it …

A little bit of research revealed that this was a remake of 2014’s “Veeram” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3320578). OK, so that made sense 🙂

The good parts? The callbacks to “Maine Pyar Kiya” (and the Bhagyashree cameo) which brought back old memories, the appearance of Telugu stars like Venkatesh and Jagapathi Babu and the bit of South Indian exposure.

The rest, for me at least, was mostly average. I find it interesting that “Veeram” was written for an older Ajith Kumar and it mostly worked, but here, Salman still tries to be a young man instead of playing an older character 😛

#Movies #MiniReview #Hindi #Bollywood #Remake

So, I've been working on a new Mastodon client. (It’s what, my fifth or sixth Mastodon client? 😛)

I started with IceCubes since it seemed to work well with Akkoma and I simply wanted to add a couple of features that I wanted and then be done …

But unfortunately, “seemed” turned out to be the operative word here 😀 The existing implementation worked relatively OK with Akkoma, but there were things which were failing behind the scenes with no warnings.

Basically, their POST implementation for API endpoints was flawed, especially when it came to non-Mastodon servers. I had pointed this out a while back and they seemed to have made some changes but the changes basically worked for some API endpoints but not for others and when it failed, there was no warning to the user.

So I had to either know that something failed, or run the app via Xcode and watch the console for issues.

I basically ended up reworking the project totally so that it was easier to work with and then began adding the fixes that were needed for Akkoma and the features I wanted.

It’s taking shape slowly but I’m happy with where it’s going …

#Coding #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS #MastodonClient

@trode Glad that it’s working for you 🙂 Yeah, I think there was a bit of a period when there was a lot of confusion about who can access the betas and who cannot, but I believe the Apple line is that anybody with a developer account (whether paid or free) can download the betas ...

Enjoy!

I’m looking forward to trying out macOS beta 2 … but only in a VM for the time being 😛

Part 3 of Karl Guttag's series of articles analysing Apple Vision Pro is now up. The first two parts looked at the hardware and possible pitfalls (as well as what Apple did right, or at least, better than Meta) and this part (and the following ones) take the same approach with the software.

Interesting (and thought provoking) reading 🙂

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/21/apple-vision-pro-part-3-why-it-may-be-lousy-for-watching-movies-on-a-plane/

Note: If you’re an AVP fan and don’t like the article, please don’t bother messaging me to tell me how much you disagree with Karl. I’m not his messaging service 😛

But if you’d like to discuss AVP (or AR/VR in general), I’m happy to do so …

#Apple #VisionPro #Software #AR #VR #MixedReality #Entertainment

@trode Is it? I thought that they said that any developer account (paid or free) could download the betas? Or was that only for iOS and not for macOS?

Xcode 15 beta 2 with just macOS 14 beta 2 support built-in, is about 3.5GB. iOS 17 simulator is 7.5GB. And then VisionOS 1.0 simulator is another 7.5GB.

So it all adds up to about 18GB in terms of the download. Wondoer how much space it takes up on disk …

Gotta install it all to see how it works, right? 🙂

#Xcode #Betas #BleedingEdge #Downloads

New iOS, iPadOS, and macOS betas are out! Alongwith Xcode 15 beta 2 with VisionOS 1 beta support. I guess time to start downloading and testing?

#Xcode #Betas #VisionOS #BleedingEdge

@atnbueno Thank you 🙂

I did find Shortery when I was searching for a solution before coding my own. But the features I wanted required the premium/paid version and since I only want this for a one-time thing, paying for the functionality didn’t seem viable. So I coded my own quick-and-dirty solution instead …

But if you do want multiple shortcuts to run on a schedule, I agree, Shortery looks great 🙂

@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