Glad we can count on Apple to feature MLK on their home page today. Sometimes I worry Apple has lost their way and it will just be another big Vision Pro ad, but thankfully no. Great quote they highlighted: "Because of our involvement in humanity, we must be concerned about every human being."
Rabbit R1 has now sold out of their first 30k units (Twitter X link). Still questions about their business model, but maybe they'll make it up on volume. 🤪 I really do think they're on to something with this. Wish I had pre-ordered one, and still might.
Really enjoyed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I had kind of tuned it out when it first popped up on Apple TV... We just watched through the whole first season over the last few days. đź“ş
Micro.blog category improvements
There has been a long-standing issue in Micro.blog where blog category names had to be ASCII characters. No more! Today I rolled out a few major, related improvements to categories:
- Category names can now contain special characters. This is important for non-English languages.
- Category URLs can be customized. So if a category is "Café", the category slug can be "cafe" without the accent.
- Category URLs can even be outside the usual "/categories" path. So instead of "/categories/books", you can just use "/books".
These customizations are available with a new field on the edit category page. I hope folks enjoy this extra flexibility. Also note that it's possible to create new conflicts, such as the same path being used for standalone pages and categories... Just be mindful of this when creating pages.
Finished reading: Godkiller by Hannah Kaner. If I knew this was going to be this good, would’ve started it earlier. Great pacing and length. Glad there’s a sequel not far off. 📚
Iowa caucus night! It all feels a bit ridiculous, like a parallel reality… the freezing weather, clunky voting process, and leading candidate arrested and awaiting trial, but I’m glued to the news coverage anyway. 🇺🇸
Mark Gurman on Apple’s EU plans, although it's not clear whether this is his speculation or actual plans:
Apple will need to split the profit-generating App Store in two: a version for the EU and a version for everywhere else. Those living in the EU will get to install apps from outside the store, use outside payment processors to pay for services and get better integration between first- and third-party apps and features.
Maybe time to relocate Micro.blog HQ to Europe.
Supreme Court has denied both appeals in Epic v. Apple. My reading of this: we can now link to payments on the web from within apps. Apple should update dev guidelines which are now (partially) illegal in the United States. A small win.
Thinking about Iowa results… To the most liberal, progressive folks in the Democratic party: Trump is coming for us. I hear a lot about world events and cultural issues, and not enough about what Biden has done and can still do. Let's get real. Republicans are not going to stop Trump. It's on us. 🇺🇸
Created a very simple web page at blogarchive.org, mostly just a couple links to other resources. Later will have a more formal spec. Now it's at least easier to point people to one place.
I like this closing in Victoria Song's Apple Vision Pro hands-on for The Verge:
I’d been furrowing my brow, concentrating so hard, I felt the beginnings of a mild headache. That tension dissipated as soon as I took the headset off, but walking back out into Manhattan, I kept replaying the demo over in my head. I know what I just saw. I’m just still trying to see where it fits in the real world.
I remain skeptical that this product should be a priority right now.
I have a knee-jerk reaction to products that only the well-off can afford. See also: Apple Watch Edition. All product design is a trade-off on limited time and the constraints of technology. The first iPod was $399 but a few years later it was affordable and everywhere. Apple Vision Pro is not that.
My track record of blog posts that go a little against the grain (but which are later proven right) is pretty good. Early essays about Twitter and the App Store. But I'm wrong sometimes! I was wrong about AI. Ignored it for months, thinking it was a distraction. Maybe I'll be wrong about Vision Pro.
Apple’s new rules for linking out of an app are totally unacceptable. The whole point of the court ruling is that we shouldn’t have to play these games. I’m not going to opt-in to Apple’s terms and probably no developers will.
Tim Sweeney reacts to Apple’s new linking rules (Twitter X):
Epic will contest Apple's bad-faith compliance plan in District Court.
I’ve said before that for devs who want to see the App Store’s payment rules change, Epic was an imperfect champion, but they’re who we’ve got. Glad to see Tim keep pressing this.
There's some interesting stuff in Bluesky's moderation report. Kudos to them for being as transparent as possible. The screenshot of the backend is fascinating too... It's often hard to prioritize tools that no one else sees.
I like Tim Cook, but there are moral issues he seems completely blind to, like this 27% tax nonsense. Forget iOS. By Apple's logic, they could also charge 27% (or anything!) for any business that has a Mac app and links to their web site. Never in computing have we seen a company so overreach.
Brent Simmons blogging after the new Apple linking policy:
But I need to remember, now and again, that Apple is a corporation, and corporations aren’t people, and they can’t love you back. You wouldn’t love GE or Exxon or Comcast — and you shouldn’t love Apple. It’s not an exception to the rule: there are no exceptions.
Not sure if anyone noticed but there was a bit of a rollercoaster going on behind the scenes with Micro.blog's queueing and ActivityPub the last couple of days. Lots of little tweaks later, much happier with everything. Faster and more reliable.
Read And Find Out shirt from Dragonsteel. Brandon Sanderson picked up this phrase from Robert Jordan, answering reader questions that might be covered in future books. đź“š
Apple can be frustrating with the App Store because they will have policies that are plainly wrong, morally if not legally, and still try to convince you that you're the crazy one. Increasingly this is what I hear from Apple: "I'll only be a dictator on day one." Hubris + total control is dangerous.
Iowa sues TikTok over the app's 12+ age rating. From attorney general Brenna Bird:
It’s time we shine a light on TikTok for exposing young children to graphic materials such as sexual content, self-harm, illegal drug use, and worse. TikTok has sneaked past parental blocks by misrepresenting the severity of its content.
This sounds like a legitimate complaint. Does TikTok even have a special algorithm or curation rules for kids?
Fantastic blog post from Andy Baio about the fall of Ello. I would poke in on it every once in a while but didn't realize it was completely offline now. Andy writes:
I was worried that, by taking outside funding, Ello’s values were no longer fully-aligned with the community: they were aligned with their investors. In time, given more money and more pressure, they would be inclined to do something the community, or even the original founders, didn’t want to do.
There are rarely any shortcuts. Steady growth and proven business models are the best path to sustainability.
Recorded a new @coreint that'll be published in a day or two. I think I got all my "App Store 27% tax" gripes out on the show, so now I can resume non-Apple microblogging. 🙂
I said I'd stop writing about Apple for a minute, but this is a really good post over at Daring Fireball:
Essential to the Mac’s continuing relevance is that it is continuously evolving. Much has changed since 2010, and much will surely change between now and the Mac’s 50th anniversary in 2034. But one thing that can’t change without destroying it is its openness to software outside Apple’s control.
I agree that Apple isn't likely to force a 27% fee on all purchases from Mac apps outside the store. Just the idea that they could — with the same legal justification as iOS — is concerning.
I'm not ordering a Vision Pro, but I went through the buying process out of curiosity. Apple put a lot of work into this. The integration with the face scanning and web checkout is very nicely done.
Good post by Paul Frazee on why Bluesky uses rich-text facets. I'm not quite convinced — I think a subset of HTML is a more universal solution that scales from microblogging to feeds to the full web — but lots of respect for the thought Bluesky has put into this. Can't wait to do more with AT Proto.
Life is short, make the most of it. This is on the old El Milagro building. Shame about the misspelling.
While troubleshooting today, I took a minute to notice how many posts are on my blog. About 6400, of which 4700 are short microblog posts, 1700 long-form posts. But the surprise was over 12,000 replies, which I don't really think about. All of this needs to funnel through Micro.blog and Hugo.
Micro.blog has always stubbornly stuck to static-site generation (first Jekyll, then Hugo) and probably always will, even as there is a lot more complexity layered on top. There's just something future-proof about having a folder of HTML files. We need to better expose this foundation, not hide it.
On the latest Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about Apple's new external linking rules and their attempt to audit developers for 27% of revenue. From the show notes:
They talk about what Apple’s balance of priorities with money-making vs. world-changing should be, and whether they are on the right track. Finally, they ask whether Apple is destined to gradually lose its soul over time…
About halfway through the 4th season of For All Mankind. Enjoying it. Sort of forgot some of the characters from previous seasons... Would love to rewatch the whole series when it wraps up.
David Pierce at The Verge on the Vision Pro and Safari-based web apps:
Embracing the web will mean threatening the very things that have made Apple so powerful and so rich in the mobile era, but at least at first, the open web is Apple’s best chance to make its headset a winner. Because at least so far, it seems developers are not exactly jumping to build new apps for Apple’s new platform.
It’ll be great if we see Safari improvements because of this. Maybe Apple can relax the 7-day cookies and local storage.
John Gruber asks the relevant question for Apple's new linking rules:
Here’s a simple thought I had today regarding whether Apple’s new External Purchase Links entitlement policy is a good faith compliance with Judge Gonzales’ order: Will any developers actually choose to use it?
It is hard to imagine even a single developer using this entitlement, even among the many developers like me who want to link outside the store. It doesn't save money and just creates a whole new headache of tracking users and extra bookkeeping.
I’ve read too many articles about the accident with Alec Baldwin’s gun firing on the Rust set, like this new one in The New York Times, and I still don’t get it. Prosecutors really don’t have anything else to do? It’s a tragedy, but I’m not losing sleep that Alec is out there running free.
Speaking of Alec Baldwin, I loved his Trump impressions on SNL, but James Austin Johnson as Trump is uncanny. It's funny but also real, not overplayed. Last night's opening (video clip on YouTube here) is one of his best… Just perfect.
This is a nice write-up by @leonp of the iPhone app Beluga, which essentially publishes a static microblog site to S3. Includes a tip for integrating with Micro.blog too.
I wonder if there's an update on how Apple is helping employees in Texas deal with the abortion ban. Not finding much newer than this 2021 article in The New York Times:
Asked what Apple was doing to protect its employees from Texas’ abortion restrictions, Mr. Cook said that the company was looking into whether it could aid the legal fight against the new law and that its medical insurance would help pay for Apple workers in Texas if they needed to travel to other states for an abortion.
As an Austinite, I don't love seeing all of Texas painted with the same brush, but I understand it.
Accidentally stumbled on my old post from 2011 titled “30% of the future”:
The new Apple has fallen into the trap of thinking they should also be an advertising company and an overpriced payment processor. It’s a slippery slope from here to becoming just another mega-corp that has their hands in everything that can make money instead of standing for something.
Thirteen years later… Mission accomplished.
Jason Snell writing at Macworld:
Now that today’s iMacs and iPads are essentially the same in terms of their internal hardware, maybe it’s time for Apple to do the unthinkable and allow the iPad Pro (and only the iPad Pro) to run macOS in a virtual machine.
I love this, no matter how unlikely.
