Notices by Marco Arment (marcoarment@mastodon.social)

Saw the Minecraft movie with the family. If you know the game or have a kid who does…

GO. See it THIS WEEKEND.

It was so, so stupid… and so, so fun.

Everything was loudly cheered by an entire theater of nerdy middle schoolers, occasionally yelling out smart, funny one-liners. It was like this generation’s Rocky Horror.

I’m so glad I got to be a part of it. (Really.) I was laughing so hard — at and with the audience — that I was crying.

Holy shit, @codinghorror is committing another 50 MILLION DOLLARS to Guaranteed Minimum Income projects: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guaranteed-minimum-income/

We need more people in the world like Jeff Atwood and his family.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Apple's decline in user respect more than the transformation of the Settings app on ALL of their platforms into an advertising vehicle.

Which is impressive, considering it's competing with App Store search ads and using notifications for marketing.

“Image Playground Is Here”

Where? Right there, in that unadorned label in the decontented new Settings app that looks like a rendering bug?

Is that supposed to be a promo? What happens if I click on it? [click]

Oh my god.

Do any UI designers still work at Apple? Can we get some of them assigned to the Mac, please?

OK, how do I get rid of this terrible promo in the sidebar?

i have to open image playground, don't i

what is happening over there

“A rotten Apple: Tim Cook’s betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights”
https://ryanleetaylor.com/blog/a-rotten-apple-tim-cook-betrayal-of-lgbtq-rights

> “If Apple’s leadership is willing to compromise on fundamental human rights, can I, in good conscience, continue to be part of that ecosystem? This question now haunts me, and I suspect I’m not alone.”

You're not. I’m suddenly seeing statements to this effect, public and private, more than ever.

Supporting Apple has never felt morally difficult… until now.

That's entirely on Tim Cook.

It's time for him to go.

Watch everyone now bend over backward to justify this as some sort of forced move that Cook HAD to do.

Tim Cook, reluctantly supporting Trump, because it's the savvy move for Apple…

Tim Cook… reluctantly supporting Trump…

Tim Cook… supporting Trump…

Are we getting it yet?
https://mastodon.social/@appleinsider/113766618970266062

Have you considered the possibility that Tim Cook just… supports Trump?

Like so many other mega-rich CEOs?

I've never thought to try it again.

The same benefits and risks would still apply. CBR is INCREDIBLY wasteful for podcasts, but I bet lots of platforms still don't seek properly in long VBR MP3s.

One solution could be adding multi-enclosure-format support to the podcast ecosystem, where we offer modern clients a list of formats and let them pick more advanced ones if they support them.

But I bet ZERO big DAI platforms, and therefore zero popular podcasts, would support it.

It was still MP3, but I tried VBR encoding.

In 2016, I wrote: https://marco.org/2016/08/15/vbr-mp3-plea

ATP: https://atp.fm/182

It worked! The following year's Apple OSes (iOS 11+) implemented support for all three VBR-seek-table standards — MLLT, VBRI, and Xing/LAME-tag.

ATP: https://atp.fm/228

But when I later tried releasing ATP in VBR with all three tags, we got so many problem reports from Android users that I went back to CBR after one episode:

https://atp.fm/244
https://ioc.exchange/@whophd/113717975279161741

I'd say podcast tech "moves very slowly", but even that's generous — podcast tech hardly moves at all.

But that's a GOOD THING!

Most efforts to move podcast tech "forward" have failed due to insufficient adoption. But most would’ve meant more potential for platform lock-in and increased ad-tech and tracking possibilities, either by design or as unintended consequences.

Podcasts' technical simplicity is not a problem to be solved — it's a defense from platform vultures and ad-tech assholes.

Twitter used to be really fun, too.

The bar is always fun at 9 PM.

But that bar never stops serving, and more people just keep coming in the door.

Just wait until 4 AM.
https://hachyderm.io/@callin/113510753807513632

"I deactivated both my personal account and my app's account from Twitter two years ago, which significantly improved productivity and morale, reduced distractions and PR risks, and hasn't had any noticeable effect on my reach or business metrics.”
https://mastodon.social/@sandofsky/113487634886845014

The remaining Trump voters will NEVER change their minds. It has the psychology of a religion, so trying to argue with or persuade them otherwise is like attacking someone's religion. Walls go up, defenses activate, and discussion ends.

They deserve none of your time or attention.

We don't need them. There are FAR more liberals!

This election will be decided by how many liberals (1) turn out, and (2) vote for Harris (not some third-party waste).

GET OUT THE VOTE! https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/11/05/vote-for-kamala-harris/

Modern Substrings in Swift
A Story in Two Acts

This should be easy!

return s[0..<4]

[X] 'subscript(_:)' is unavailable: cannot subscript String with an integer range, use a String.Index range instead.

AAAHHHH DAMN IT HOW DO I DO THIS AGAIN (furiously Stack Overflows)

- Act 2 -
are you serious, is this really the solution

return s[s.startIndex..<s.index(s.startIndex, offsetBy: 4)]

[X] Cannot convert return expression of type 'Substring' to return type 'String'

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Google continues to shit all over the web unless you sign into a Google account and let them (further) track you everywhere you go.

Just as Apple believes everything on the iPhone is theirs, Google believes the entire web is theirs — a much greater offense to me, and one that shows absolutely no respect for anyone else's property, attention, or privacy.

Vision Pro has been out for two months, and the only new immersive content from Apple so far is a five-minute sports-highlight video from MLS games that happened last year.

I'm not sure what I expected for such a low-volume product… I guess I assumed Apple would be putting out much more content for it.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/03/apples-immersive-mls-highlight-reel-debuts-later-today/

If I ran a website that supported Google-account login, I'd be pretty pissed at how they're suddenly putting up an obnoxious overlay over my site's layout.

Why is this not bothering more people? Does anyone give a shit about their websites anymore?

Does Google?

Never buy anything from Dyson's website.

Never, ever, ever, ever.

Been fighting with them to resolve a duplicate order (from their website crashing) since Black Friday. They've had the return since January 4. I still don't have a refund. (Just filed a chargeback. I hate doing that.)

I've lost HOURS to this. I've never seen a company with such poor basic service.

A social network’s best days are not when we’re using it mostly to talk about another social network.