Wednesday, February 19, 2025 →
This Humane buyout by HP reminds me a lot of when HP bought Palm. However, in that case, the Palm brand and tech lived on for a bit longer than I expect Humane.
Swift Playgrounds is nice and all…but nothing beats the good old macOS Command Line Tool project template!
Still tinkering with SwiftData and finding a lot of nice improvements to CoreData. Little things like support for external storage of data for images aren’t too bad. Although, I do wish SwiftData came with more out-of-the-box support for basic external data types like images, just to make it easier for everyone.
developer.apple.com/documenta…
Out of Scope Sunday: My favorite part of any new hobby…organizing and cataloging!
Tried yet again to use SwiftUI on a Mac app, and it didn’t quite work out. Thankfully, I was able to use SwiftData, which really is such a big improvement over CoreData.
Great episode of Reconcilable Differences today, all about deciding where to put your work on the web so that you end up owning as much of it as possible.
I feel like this pro-personal web sentiment has been growing a lot over the past few months, and I’m really hopeful it continues to strengthen over the rest of the year. If the history of the web has shown us anything, it’s that all of the social platforms, even the ones we view as the “good” ones at any given point, will eventually fade away or become one of the “bad” ones.
It’s not clear whether you’ll be able to boot up a Macintosh five years from now or not”
Steve Jobs, Interview about Pixar, November 22, 1996
Managed to last a whole lot longer than 5 years…30+ years and counting.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 →
Using my iPad Mini as an almost iPhone replacement really makes me hope Apple is exploring and planning to release a foldable iPhone. An iPad that folds in half for portability, but expands for extra space, would make it the perfect everyday device. And knowing Apple, they would find some way to make the folding experience unique and enjoyable.
Came across this post by Stephen Hackett on 512 Pixels talking about the new page that David Sparks is building on his blog, MacSparky. (Following the links, this idea stemmed from Derek Silvers) Interesting experiments like this “Now” page show just how unique and interesting blogging can still be in 2025. Can’t wait to build mine and start using it as a way to stay focused on various projects and hobbies.
NSWorkspace has to be one of the more obscure AppKit classes. Really powerful features, even with the limitations of App Sandboxing. Interesting though that it never got fully transitioned to a newer Swift class where it would have dropped the NS prefix.
While there has been a lot of bad press lately about Apple and the App Store, it’s still inspiring to see small apps being clever and unique. First, I had ever heard of the Bears Gratitude app; however, it’s great to see Apple highlighting a fun app created by a small husband-and-wife team. Reminds me of the heyday of the App Store during 2008-2010.
I played a fair amount of my Asus ROG Ally today, and it makes me wish more developers, and more importantly, Apple, would have put additional effort behind using the Game Porting Toolkit announced back in 2023. Sure, the chances of Apple making a device like the Ally are slim to none due to…physical buttons, but the idea of a M series portable game console sounds like a dream.
Of all the features Swift brought to developing on Apple platforms, the .filter and .map functions on arrays are by far my favorite and most used of any Swift feature.
Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on the Vision Pro in the Moon environment feels like the future. I may not use the Vision Pro every day, but these small experiences make me wish more people could experience the Vision Pro.
Apple Intelligence Writing Tools
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
While everyone appears to be pretty lukewarm about Apple Intelligence, besides Apple’s marketing department, I wish there was a more streamlined and cohesive way to use the one feature I do like: writing tools.
Whenever I use the Proofread feature within an app like Ulysses, I just get this big proofread text with no annotations for changed content.
It is amazing that a year in to the Vision Pro and Personas are still in “beta”
This must be one of the longest “public betas” Apple has ever had.