Perfectly Cropped

Here’s a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI when things are redesigned. My wife typically only charges her phone when she’s at her desk during the day. She doesn’t leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS’s software update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently upgraded to iOS 13 a few days ago. Fast forward to today… She claimed she couldn’t save photos to her phone that someone else texted her. My first thought was "oh god, it’s something to do with her iCloud account" that I tweeted about a …

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Feels like the future

Nick Heer writes about AirPods at Pixel Envy: It’s also the category of tech products that, I think, comes closest to feeling futuristic today I’ve never managed to phrase it like that in my head, but that’s exactly my feelings, too. For two reasons: One: AirPods are a damn marvel of technology and miniaturization. They’re literally the same form factor as the EarPods we’ve had for almost a decade, and yet Apple somehow managed to fit inside a Bluetooth transmitter, optical sensor, accelerometer, and still had enough room left over for five hours of battery. And two: Nothing better illustrates …

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Aftermath

So last week was incredibly stupid. I’ve had one thing I’ve written reach the #1 spot on Hacker News before, plus an old website that reached the top of the trending del.icio.us charts, as well as a few moronic tweets that garnered a couple hundred likes, and one appearance on Slashdot back in the day. But the last seven days were my first real taste of how awful it must be to actually be, you know, internet famous. So, because all this was new to me and I’m a data geek, I’d thought I’d share some final numbers. And if …

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Broken

This isn’t the blog post I intended to write. In fact, last night I drafted up one about my problems sending background push notifications with Amazon SNS (coming soon!). And after the ridiculously over-the-top shit-storm that blew up over my dumb tweet earlier this week, the last thing I wanted to do was step back in that arena. But this needs to be said. But, first… I’m an Apple developer. It’s the specific nerd sub-culture that I identify with the strongest. I’ve been writing and selling my own software for macOS since 2003 – back when it was still Mac …

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macOS 10.15 Vista

I completely realize and wholeheartedly own-up to the fact that I’m a geek and a Mac power user above and beyond what normal muggles will ever experience, nonetheless, this is the first-run experience I was greeted to this afternoon after upgrading to Catalina. Another update… It’s now 48 hours later. Ignore my original update below. Go read this instead. Update four hours later… Well, that escalated quickly. I’ve been on Twitter for twelve years, and OF COURSE my two biggest tweets would be me making a dumb joke and dunking on Apple. Anyway, the screenshot above deserves a full explanation. …

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