Notices by sandofsky@mastodon.social

People of Mastodon: explain in one sentence why your company should wind-down their Twitter account.

Pitch it like you’re pitching your CEO.

Portra 400.

Halide now supports the iPhone 16's capture controls!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259340/halide-camera-control-button-exposure-focus-iphone-16

They didn't ask us to change the location permission prompt, but I threw in a limerick for good measure.

The latest Halide update was rejected because, after seven years, a random reviewer decided our permission prompt wasn't descriptive enough.

I don't know how to explain why a camera app needs camera permissions.

I submitted an update with our permission prompts in iambic pentameter. It was approved.

(We won't release it. I just had to know.)

This was one of those rejections where they're like, "If this is a bug fix, we can accept it for now, but you need to fix this in your next update."

We replied, "Yes, please approve, we'll fix it." 36 hours later, they approved, but we still need to deal with this.

So it turns out Founder Mode means coke. https://twitter.com/yanatweets/status/1830728471380902048

It took five years to write, but here's the full story behind Lambda School, Silicon Valley's disastrous foray into for-profit education.

I explain how they burned through $120 million in funding, why Income Share Agreements failed, the crimes committed along the way, and how one developer turned journalist put an end to the fraud.

https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/

Men will start a PR war with Apple over an app rejection instead of going to therapy.

On Threads, my algorithmic timeline is full of right wing garbage, thirst traps, and Facebook employees complaining about Apple.

If I point this out, my replies fill with Facebook employees telling me it’s my fault for not following enough people, or that I should just switch to the “Following” tab every time the app launches.

I suspect the real problem is Threads has cooled off. With fewer posts coming in, it doesn’t take much engagement for trash to float to the top.

Because these billboards are just monitors rotated 90 degrees, they’re invisible to polarized sunglasses. It’s like a real-life ad blocker!

South Colorado at sunset, shot on film.

@Gargron Canon AE-1.

July 4th weekend with family, shot on film, unedited.

@nicklockwood @gruber @matt this largely worked for us, but there are still people who complain that it’s too expensive. They think software should cost between $0 and $5, no matter what. Part of it is Apple’s fault, and part of it is a decade of VC subsidized apps.

I’d love to see these people’s reaction to the price of shrinkwrapped software 20 years ago.

@adamconover Having lived through this battle in a past life, I think it went down like…

Some high ranking figure at Apple gave the manager in charge of Pages flack because their average review score was low.

In reality, the review system is broken. Tons of users write reviews to get tech support, which make them overwhelmingly negative. So every large app games the review system to compensate.

But the Pages manager can't control the App Store, so he rolls with it and adds an annoying prompt.

You just know Elon wouldn’t make it out of the Wonka factory.

Mastodon has cracked the top ten social networking apps in the App Store. For context, Signal is at 15.

Experimented with reach on Twitter vs Mastodon by sending the same “canary” post on both platforms. I saw about the same engagement on both, despite having 4% the followers here.

Feels like the value of Twitter’s network is overestimated. If you’ve been there 10+ years, I bet most of your followers are inactive, and it’s harder than ever to get your tweets viewed because of the algorithmic timeline. Mastodon might be at the point where it delivers the same value. At least in my circles.