Notices by Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social), page 5

Oh yes it's that time of year where home-brew admits it utterly hates and detests its users.

Is it just me or is their messaging getting worse?

One of the two big things I am working on for my day job is a new Swift SVG parser and renderer.

We found problems with all existing SVG Swift renderer libraries that proved somewhat intractable.

Tonight I stumbled upon a SVG map of Middle Earth in the 3rd age and I just had to see how my renderer worked with it.

This is a screenshot from my test app and even though the text is borked (expected, text isn't something I've been focused on) I'm really fucking proud of how good this looks.

And this version of the same map but with vectorized text instead of text elements renders as far as i can tell perfectly.

All the rendering is in a SwiftUI Canvas view (there's an optional CoreGraphics rendering mode too),

@RobW @sommer Apple is the only company I've every worked on where the project/product folks don't get to brush accessibility under the rug and forget about it.

It's empowering.

Xcode's 15 new advanced search queries are … beautiful.

People are going to do utterly terrifying things with Swift Macros.

I am half excited to see what people make with them and half cringing in fear.

One thing we shouldn’t forget coming into WWDC is how successful Apple has been making problematic labour and discrimination issues disappear.

It’s shameful how the Ashley Gjøvik story was basically killed by Apple.

Then there’s Cher Scarlett being forced out for making an internal salary spreadsheet.

And of course the anti-labour practices that Apple is using to prevent organising in Apple Stores.

So yeah celebrate the work of folks building these new products but let’s not forget the cost

This Washington Post article on the effect of AR-15 rounds have on the human body is disturbing. It uses 3d graphics to show that effect in a stylised manner.

What’s more disturbing is what effect multiple AR-15 rounds have on the body of six year old Noah Pozner.

The news reports of these mass shootings refuse to show the carnage. I wonder if it’s past time to show the true impact of what actually happens so that Americans are forced to deal with the truth.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body/

Amazon is in the unique position of being able to almost singlehanded, effectively overnight, reduce most single-use plastics from being used in consumer packaging.

They could demand all suppliers provide alternative packaging within (say) 5 years.

And yet they do nothing. We have such low fucking expectations of these enormous corporations.

@inthehands @sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt it’s literally the gym membership model.

And everyone loooooves paying that

@sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt the current apple subscription model is user hostile.

It’s too easy to be ripped off by unscrupulous developers. It’s too difficult to manage subscriptions. It’s too easy to forget to cancel an app you don’t use.

Every app nickel and diming subscriptions imposes a huge burden onto the users.

It’s not that I don’t like paying for software. It’s that I don’t like paying for software I am not using.

@sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt when i want to try an app i don’t want to be immediately be forced to make a subscription and then deal with either having to remember to unsubscribe or immediately digging 5 layers deep into Sys Prefs to manage my subscriptions.

Complaining that users are cheap totally misrepresents the fact that subscriptions are horrible for users as currently implemented.

We drove a couple of miles down the Mexico border in Calexico two days ago. The desire to head to Canada and do both borders in one trip is strong.

That border wall is a hideous monstrosity and Americans should be ashamed of it, not celebrating it.

If there’s one thing a long road trip in California shows you it’s that America is vast, bountiful and rich and there’s more than enough here for those people brave enough to risk everything for a new life here. The “fuck you I’ve got mine” anti immigration attitude is inhumane and so short-sighted. More immigration will make everyone better off.

“The attack is one of at least 199 mass shootings this year in the US with four or more people shot, excluding a gunman, according to the Gun Violence Archive.”

Ridiculous.

The rust open source community is doing incredibly interesting things - especially in the computer graphics field (also embedded/real-time fields). Every open source project I’ve noticed and been intrigued/impressed by recently seems to be written in rust.

The swift OSS community on the other hand seems anaemic in comparison. Focused purely on yet more mobile development or swift on the server (which has little appeal to me).

@ij_baird I think it's the yearly releases plus difficulty of getting stuff accepted by the swift org (and then being stuck on a nightly toolchain until it lands in an xcode train).

Everything in rust is community driven.