WISDOM OF THE AGES
The iOS App Store recommended that I check out a meditation app named "Calm", featuring "Wisdom from Shawn and Camila". Shawn is 22 years old; Camila is 24. With due respect, Apple, I’m not expecting a lot of wisdom from a couple younger than the sweater I’m wearing. There are many wonderful things youth can bring. Experience of a life long-lived is not one of them. I don't want to sound curmudgeonly, but they're 22 and 24, and I expect they'll have little to offer on mid-career thoughts, or watching one's parents grow older, or coming to grips with mortality.
Read moreTAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM
Scene: Nick's intermediate league baseball game. Bottom of the last inning. Other team at bat. 2 outs. 2 on base. Winning hitter at bat. Fly to right field. Nick makes a beautiful diving catch and comes up with the ball, ending the game for his team to win… …then runs off the field holding his arm. One rushed trip to the office for x-rays later, and it's confirmed: he broke the same wrist that he broke last year when he fell off his skateboard.
Read moreSIGNAL WAS CHEEKY, BUT RIGHT
In her article "I Have a Lot to Say About Signal’s Cellebrite Hack", the extremely qualified Riana Pfefferkorn argues that Signal's blog post, "Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app's perspective", could have been a bit more serious and professional: On the other hand, although this was serious work with a serious point to it, the unseriousness of Signal’s tone in the blog post and video hampered public understanding of the point they were making.
Read moreREVIEW: JELLYCUTS
Jellycuts for iOS and iPadOS is 2 things: A text-based language for writing Shortcuts, A compiler that turns the text language into "real" Shortcuts, and An IDE for writing the language. As a programmer, this is super exciting to me because it feels like I spend too much time fighting against the limitations of the visual language. Now I can use the programming tools I work with every day to write my little applets, and store them in version control so that I can track changes and roll back mistakes.
Read moreREVIEW: APPLE FITNESS+
I've been using Apple's Fitness+ service since it came available. It's still a young product and has lots of room to improve, but its fundamentals are solid. This is what I like and dislike about it. What I like: doing the exercises First, the workouts themselves are excellent. They offer exercises I'm not used to, and I've found that working with a trainer, even a pre-recorded one that isn't talking to me personally, motivates me to push harder than I do when I'm working out alone.
Read moreREVIEW: HOOK BY COGSCI
I've been playing with Hook, an app I've started hearing about. It’s an interesting bird, and its own docs didn't explain why I should want to use it. That's too bad, because after downloading it and playing around for a few days, I understand why people are excited about Hook. Let me try my own explanation: It makes deep links into apps Hook knows how to talk to a lot of other apps (about 150 as of now) and ask or direct them to do a few things:
Read moreMASTODON APPS FOR IOS
Updated: Mon, Nov 7, 2022 There are several excellent Mastodon apps for iOS and iPadOS. These are the ones I've tried. Criteria: A good app is stable and (at least nearly) crash-free. This rules out a few apps I've tried that I'm not including here. Mastodon evolves with new features like polls. The best apps are updated with support for these new features. I use an iPhone and an iPad. Apps that don't support both platforms are non-starters for me.
Read moreGOOGLE V. ORACLE - VICTORY!
This morning the US Supreme Court ruled for Google in Oracle's case against them. This is wonderful news for American software engineering as the opposite ruling would have been disastrous for the entire industry. Consider a comprehensive, albeit farfetched, analogy that illustrates how the API is actually used by a programmer. Imagine that you can, via certain keystrokes, instruct a robot to move to a particular file cabinet, to open a certain drawer, and to pick out a specific recipe.
Read moreFAVORITE APPS: COPIED
I think Copied is the best clipboard manager available for Apple devices. I use Copied constantly. It lets me copy 3 different things I see on a web page, then quickly paste them into a text editor without bouncing between the two apps several times. It lets me search my history for stuff I've copied earlier, even if I've done other things since then. It's one of the first apps I install on a new device.
Read moreSMART PROGRESS BARS
Progress bars suck at predicting how long things will take. I'll tell you what I want (what I really really want): a system-wide resource that receives a description of what the progress bar will be measuring and uses it to make an informed estimate the entire process's duration. For example, suppose that an application installer will do several things in series, one after another. Perhaps an explanation of that process could be written in a machine-readable format like this:
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