The wife wanted donuts for breakfast and I was supposed to order them since I get up early. I forgot all about it since I was busy going through the profiles of Swift devs and following them on here …

Now the delivery app says that there are too many deliveries in my area and I should try in half an hour 😛 The perils of distraction ...

#Life #Donuts #FindingPeople

Where are the Swift/SwiftUI developers at? 🙂

This is something interesting I saw over on Threads — people asking for Swift developers so that they can connect. I should have thought of that myself over here 😛

I would like to connect with other developers — if you do Swift, much better since I can talk at least halfway intelligently about that, but I’ve done development in a bunch of other languages including Python, Kotlin, Java, PHP, Perl, Pascal, xBase (if you really want to dig deep …).

But I’m looking for people who post about their current development journey — what you are working on, what issues you’re running into, what interests you etc. Doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner, expert, or somewhere in-between, I’m just interested in people who post and who want to have a conversation …

If you do post about this stuff regularly, ping me. I’m interested in following you 🙂

#Swift #SwiftUI #Mobile #iOS #macOS #FindingPeople #Coding

I don't always like Arya's movies, but with both “Sarpatta Parambarai" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11580854) and “Kather Basha Endra Muthuramalingam” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24227018) it feels as if he has come into his own 🙂

I’m watching “Kather Basha Endra Muthuramalingam” at the moment and while it’s mostly an average movie with a lot of fights and violence, it does have some interesting moments …

#Movies #Tamil #Arya

I wanted to do some engagement comparisons between Mastodon, T2, and Threads but unfortunately, the character counts foil me 😛

I guess I write way too long posts? 😀

On T2, you get a limit of 280 chars, on Threads 500, and here (on Akkoma) I can have an 8,000 char long post …

In that respect T2 is the hardest to get the full post/intent across on for me.

#Comparisons #Fediverse #Threads #T2

Tried both T2 and Threads over the past week and they have just so very different vibes …

On T2, as soon as I introduced myself, there were people saying hello.

On Threads … crickets 😛

I wasn’t following anybody (or at least many people) on either platform at that point.

The interesting thing is, on Threads there are a lot of people interacting if you are a celeb — but it appears to be transactional. Not a lot of actual conversations.

But, Threads also has the numbers and so there are a lot more people to find for a particular field/subject — iOS/Swift devs, for example 🙂 On the other hand, it’s not easy to find anybody since there is no search except for search by name …

Overall though, Threads doesn’t have the public square feel that they say they want to foster. It feels more like a very crowded mall where everybody wants something but aren’t really interested in those around them …

#Threads #T2 #SocialNetworks #Conversations

We started watching "Tarla" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27816768) yesterday. It is the story of Tarla Dalal, an Indian chef and author of more than a hundred cookbooks. Despite all of this, I had never heard of her and was expecting the story to be similar to that of Julia Child (and the HBO series, "Julia") given the similar time periods, but so far "Tarla" is going down a different path and we are both enjoying the story immensely 🙂

If you love food, cooking, or just learning about india from like 40 - 50 years ago, you might like it too. It's certainly different from the usual Bollywood fare these days ...

#Movies #Bollywood #BioPic #Cooking #RealPeople

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.

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

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!

The Loo at the End of the World. Now in colour! Made in #Procreate using Frankentoon’s great Nomad 2 #brushes #mastoart #mastodonart #digitalpaint #mastoartist #illustration #drawing #seagull #sea #island #boat

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

⚪ 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