After trying out Threads for a while, found a bunch of things which makes it harder to deal with for me personally:

* There is a character limit to posts but no character counter. So I won’t know if I’m hitting the limit till I actually hit it.

* No desktop version. I don’t use mobile that much and switching away from the desktop to use Threads means I’ll use it less often. (Yes, I know about the website and the ability to view profiles, but there's no way to see the post timeline, that I know of, via web)

* No hashtag support. I find hashtags make searching for content so much easier …

* Speaking of search, you can only search for people — not content. So I can’t find people posting about interesting stuff unless I know who these people are in the first place. Or, find them serendipitously by coming across a post of theirs in the main timeline.

* The main timeline appears to be algorithmic, but geared towards those you follow and their follows maybe? I know that I’ve run into duplicates pretty quickly when I scroll down …

* No edit functionality. Which I miss sorely after being on the Fediverse 😛

* No personal timeline — so if you want to see only posts from those you follow, you’re out of luck.

#Threads #FirstImpressions #TwitterReplacements

I thought Threads wasn't going to be available till at least 12 hours from now?

I’m already in. Here are the good points:

1. I’ve found people I know already since I follow them on Instagram.

2. I get to use my Instagram handle. Don’t have to fight over handles 😛

3. I immediately found somebody that I didn’t follow on Instagram, but was interested in following due to their YouTube videos. So discoverability (on a very quick scan) seems to be good.

4. I like their image gallery — the only app (I know of) which doesn’t ape Twitter and do that weird 1/2/3/4 grid. Threads just gives a scrolling gallery. Much nicer.

Haven’t used it enough to have any other impressions. But I do miss not being able to use it from my desktop since I’m not that heavy a mobile user ….

#Threads #FirstImpressions #TwitterReplacements

Can anyone tie a rope with telekinesis?

Thought knot.

@WeavingWithAI If you’ve got a spare one, I wouldn’t mind an invite too 🙂 Thanks in advance!@TriflingTree@mastodon.social

Hi hi, if you are a #sff writer, or #yalit or #mglit writer, or writer who write cross-genres and age groups - *waves*. :)

@mikeymikey Just joined the Slack — took me a minute to figure out that I had to go to the site first and then get to the Slack instead of trying to create an account for the Slack directly 😛 @trode

The particular issue I was working on is solved now — it wasn’t that hard of an issue to begin with, just that most of the documentation I could find pointed to the “security” tool rather than how to do it in Swift 🙂

But the Slack looks like a great resource! And of course, as you suggested, search history is almost always a great place to find an answer since somebody probably has run into the same issue previously — generally the issue is finding the right place to search and it looks as if the Slack will be the right place for my particular needs …

@mikeymikey Wasn’t my intention to imply that @trode's advice wasn't good, by any means. My apologies if it came across that way, Blake 🙂

I didn’t know of the #macadmin Slack before now but will probably lurk there now 🙂

@trode I’ve actually figured out what I needed to do, thanks 🙂 This was more of a reflection (after the fact) on how difficult it is to find info about certain areas of macOS development ….

For work, I'm working on a custom macOS installer at the moment …

"Why an installer when installing a macOS app is as simple as dragging and dropping into a folder”, you ask? Well, because this is for a macOS login/authorization plugin …

At this point, most people will probably go “Huh?” and I don’t blame you, because this is a dark corner of macOS coding that most probably don’t venture into 😛

A macOS login plugin allows you to customise the macOS login flow so that you can add your own layer of authorization/security or carry out some specific tasks that need to happen during the login process.

Unofrtunately, none of that is very well documented. In fact, I spent months scouring the Internet and going through documentation to get our implementation of a macOS login plugin working correctly.

In fact, somebody at work said that I was one of possibly 10 people in the world who understood this stuff. Honestly, I don’t believe that since I think that if I could figure it out, anybody else could too since the information is all out there 🙂

Whatever the case, our login plugin requires particular authorization rules to be set and what most people seem to do is to use a shell script to do this since that’s fairly widely documented. But in our case, while that’s the option we are using now, I want to actually do this via code because it simplifies a few logistical issues.

So here I am, exploring the macOS documentation again to see how you can do what I want to do in Swift and finding that this is not very well documented at all 😛

I do wish that the Apple documentation was excellent throughout instead of being very informative for the areas that everybody is interested in and then getting rather opaque, terse, or downright non-existent for the areas that people don’t venture into often. But I guess that’s how it works out — afterall, why bother spending the time on documenting something that not many people will use?

#Coding #Apple #macOS #Authorization #Documentation #Security #Login #Swift

A little piece inspired from my trip to Scotland, the forests felt positively primordial!

It's started to get hot on this side of the mountains and not for the first time I'm looking forward to cooler weather... but maybe not that much cooler!

#MastoArt #ArtistWorkout #landscape #cowboy #DigitalArt

For a couple of days, I was seeing an above-average number of messages in my home timeline without me following anyone new, but now we seem to have settled down to the older levels.

So I guess the latest migration is over? Or at least has calmed down? 😛

A #picturebook celebrating Hokkien culture and tradition. A letter to grandma.

https://closetfulofbooks.com/products/oyster-girl

#bookstodon #kidlit #kidlitSEA #sgheritage #writing #writingcommunity #pepperdogpress

@davemark I’ll be trying out Threads. It’s good to know the options out there and to figure out what works for you personally 🙂

Got access to T2 today, so trying that out too …

⚪ Ein "Wunderbarer Wunderbaum"
und... ein Lieblingsfoto.
🟤 A "Wonderful Wondertree"
and... a favorite photo. 🌲
📷 by Artist: #MariaTRodgers in Loc.: #Klamath CA USA 🇺🇸 - Title: "Huge tree holding another tree" #Streetart #Art #Mastoart Trees #Photography #Fotografie #WonderTree ➡️ #APhotoLove

Akkoma uses V1 filtering (as I suppose does Pleroma?) But Mastodon support V2 filtering. So, quite a few Mastodon apps seem to only consider supporting V2 filtering.

The app I'm working on now (which is a fork of IceCubes) is running into this issue at the moment. I can kind of get filtering working, but there are a lot of gotchas and edge cases ... Ah, the joys of coding .. or something 😛

#Coding #Akkoma #Fediverse #Clients #YayForDifferences

Do whatever you can to tell the author that you liked their book, if you indeed did. For those of us who aren't ever going to make a living at this, good reviews are the best thing we can reasonably expect to happen when it comes to our writing. I had a coworker tell me today she read Girl on the Moon and was "enthralled" and she's on book 2 now. It really made my day. #writing #WritingCommunity

One more #Junicorn before month ends! I has so much fun doing this and I'm happy with the result. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. What you think?

#mastodonArt #mastoart #digitalart #animalart #equineart #horse #unicorn #digitaldrawing