Technology

Vacantly staring (bonus: UI discussion and Mastodon clients)

For the past week or so, my brain has just not been cooperating with this blog. Giving myself permission to write about anything I want here was liberating, but even that freedom hasn’t been enough the past few days. I stare at the blinking cursor, and then I feel my mind drifting off, not to some great blog topic, but just weird little mundane things and thoughts. Nothing that I’d want to share in this space.

I do have a backup–a collection of blog ideas saved in Obsidian. But a lot of the topics I’ve jotted down no longer appeal. A lot of them are Apple kvetching, and I exceeded my quota on that at least 50 years ago.

So I end up doing these meta posts.

Oh, I just thought of a topic: Mastodon clients!

Mastodon is the only social media I use semi-regularly right now and I like it because:

  • No ads
  • No “reels” or other unavoidable short form videos
  • No algorithm–I only see the people/orgs I choose to follow
  • Not overwhelming. I like that I can easily keep up with what I’m following. It feels cozy and approachable.

I also don’t visit Mastodon on mobile. It’s strictly on my Mac or PC. On the Mac, I use the Mona app, which is a one-time purchase (hooray) and works well. On Windows, I use an alternate web version currently in alpha called Elk. It improves on the web interface and is pretty good, with only a few minor shortcomings. Still, I’d rather use a dedicated client, but all the Windows clients seem to have some flaw, the most common of which is they are ugly as butt. Windows apps don’t have to look ugly, but so many do. Every Mastodon client I’ve tried has been butt ugly. So I use Elk.

I don’t know why, exactly, the odds of a Mac app looking better than a Windows app is so high, but I suspect that it has something to do with the Mac GUI always being “good” and remaining fairly consistent over the years, with few dramatic changes. There’s a polished kind of consistency.

With Windows, well, just look at the GUI for different flavours:

  • Windows 1.0. I mean, yikes. But it was also 1985.
  • Windows 3.0. Pretty slick for the time, but crude by today’s standards.
  • Windows 95. Pretty decent, really.
  • Windows XP. Changed pretty much all UI elements in a way some liked, but others didn’t, feeling it was too “cartoony.”
  • Vista. Ignoring the initial quality of the OS, it again completely revamped the look, giving everything a pseudo-3D effect and having a glossy, reflective sheen to it.
  • Windows 8. Another complete change, flattening everything and subbing in garish colours and simplified icons.
  • Windows 10. A hybrid of 7 and 8 that reverses some of 8’s design.
  • Windows 11. A refinement of 10 that again changes the look of many elements, though perhaps not as dramatically as before.

Basically, if everyone followed the design language of Windows 11, apps would look pretty good. But a lot of apps seem to be weird hybrids of older versions of the OS and that’s when you get butts meeting the ugly.

Oh well. In the end, we’re seeing fewer native apps on both Windows and Mac as more devs use tools like Electron to make apps that look and feel the same (and don’t feel particularly native) on all platforms. I guess that’s the future.

The iPad is great until it’s not

Every time I sit down with Jeff to do something on his iPad, I am reminded at how the iPad excels at some things (sketching, reading) and is kind of dreadfully bad at others, especially if you don’t have some kind of pointing device other than your finger.

All of these can be a nightmare of fiddly misses, accidental taps and wasted time:

  • Selecting text
  • Positioning the cursor
  • Moving files
  • Flipping between apps and watching as they have to reload everything
  • Using “sharing” for the most basic functionality
  • Did I mention selecting text?

If you add a keyboard and mouse or trackpad, some of this is mitigated, but it still never feels as smooth to me as on a desktop computer or laptop. In a way, I think Apple would have been better off just making a Mac tablet–looks and feels like an iPad, but functions like an actual Mac. Sort of like what Microsoft did with the Surface (Pro), but better. The iPad, even 13 years after its introduction, still feels hamstrung by the design decisions made leading up to its introduction in 2010, and further back still to when the iPhone was being created in 2006.

Everything we worked on tonight would have been a lot easier on a laptop–even a Windows PC. In fact, since we were using OneDrive, it would have been better on a Windows PC than even a MacBook, which gets second-rate OneDrive support.

Oh well. I just wanted to vent a wee bit tonight, so here we are!

Exciting site update?

WordPress 6.3 adds footnotes and the ability to style captions. Let’s see how they work!

Here is a sentence that ends in as footnote1. And here’s another using the Modern Footnotes plugin1I prefer footnotes that are inline that you can click, read, then dismiss, as they don’t interrupt the flow (man).

And now a photo with a styled caption:

This is the worst shot of a pigeon I’ve ever taken. I mean, the most artsy.

Aw, it appears I can’t do the one thing I actually wanted–change the size of the caption text. Boo.

In conclusion: I’ll probably never use these features, but someone will and it’s good they are here now, for those people.

  1. These appear to be traditional footnote types that only appear at the bottom of a post. I prefer the inline notes. ↩︎

When the spelling checker fails and makes you question everything

I use a spelling checker (specifically LanguageTool) in Firefox because I type like a caveman and make a lot of typos. But sometimes, whether it’s LanguageTool or the spelling checker in some other program, the checking just…stops. I type a word I know is spelled wrong, but it doesn’t get flagged or highlighted in any way.

I then wonder how many typos I’ve been churning out and will now have to find on my own, unaided by technology (the horror). And then for a little while, I no longer trust the software to work correctly, always questioning what exactly it might or might not be doing.

And I think, you’d have to be a real jerk to deliberately build these unpredictable malfunctions into your software. But I could totally see some people doing it for the laffs.

Remember, Bad Software comes from Bad People. This has been your Trust No One PSA for today.

(Also, the spelling checker1Or spell checker, if you prefer. Both are valid, because English makes its own rules. Then breaks them, Then repeats. worked fine for this post.)

When the system knows you shouldn’t read the comments

Ars Technica has a story on how Linux has now surpassed the Mac on Steam, thanks to the popularity of the Steam Deck, which uses Linux as its OS. The race between Linux and Mac is close, but compared to Windows, it’s like a 100-meter dash where the first runner finishes in 10 seconds and the other two cross the finish line an hour later1Windows:: 96.21%, Linux: 1.96%, Mac: 1.84%.

But this post is about that old internet maxim, “Never read the comments.” On Ars, you can vote a post up or down. Too many down votes and the post gets hidden (though you can always click to see it). You know you’re in for a fun ride when the first four posts in a comment thread are hidden:

The first post was a benign but contentless “Ok…”, the second post a comic that Wheels of Confusion points out may have gotten the order of the panels wrong (and for proper comic effect/ting, he is right). The third post was the word “green” (presumably a suggestion for the colour of the dragon, another content-free contribution), while the fourth was the following insightful reflection on the first post: “Sensing pissy Mac fan boy. Could be wrong, could be right.”

It’s actually not nearly as bad as I would have guessed!

For context, here is WoC’s post, which includes the comic in question, in case you are lazy, like me, and don’t want to click links and stuff:

I have to admit, when I started this post, I hadn’t looked at the comments and thought they’d be particularly dumb/juicy. Instead, they’re just kind of lame. This will teach me to look for blog gold in a pile of…stuff that isn’t gold.

Installer dialogues that make you go, “hmm…”

Since I “reset” Windows, I’ve been re-installing apps as I need them, and the time came today to re-install Affinity Designer 2. It presented this dialogue:

Uses all system resources? At least leave enough free so I can use IRC1I’m kidding, I haven’t used IRC in years. I’m not kidding about not using all resources, though. That just seems greedy..

Also, I installed a font today, and it wanted me to restart my PC after. Welcome to the future.

Maybe I’m just being cynical, but…

UPDATE, November 19, 2023: They announced Procreate Dreams, which is a standalone, non-subscription animation app. So I was totally wrong!

I got an email from the team behind Procreate, the terrific drawing app available on the iPad that I use for all of my digital sketching. It talks about an event on September 8, 2023 and if you click the “Learn more” link it takes you to a page where you can subscribe and shows you the following, with “cool” laser light effects:

Procreate is a one-time purchase that currently goes for $12.99 Canadian in Apple’s App Store. It’s a great deal. There are no in-app purchases, nothing to unlock.

But I look at the above, and it is clearly setting up something the developers of Procreate think is Big.

And all I can think is…subscriptions. That they will announce a brand-new version of the app (the old one will be rebranded as Procreate Classic or something similar) and this new app will come with a mandatory subscription with either a) a free trial period or b) a stripped down set of features that can only be unlocked by subscription.

I am so certain this will happen that I’d bet my iPad on it. And it makes me sad.

But maybe I’m just being cynical.

And to be fair, I would happily pay another $12.99 (or whatever reasonable price they ask) for a new version of the app. I just don’t want to keep paying for it, forever.

Creepy vs. non-creepy robots

A company that makes security robots has a photo on their website (you can find it if you’re diligent–I have faith in you!) of several of their models. I have added some text to better provide how I, as a common non-robot human being, rate their creepiness factor.

These blogs that aren’t mine

I came across ooh.directory, which is a site that aggregates blogs (1,966 as of this post). It’s a pleasant and consuming way to find writing focused on a particular subject or theme that isn’t beholden to algorithms and all that.

Also, I love the bizarre, bold combination of colours it uses: dark green, orange and light purple. And light pink, I think, for text, which somehow works with everything else.

Bonus social media thoughts: A July 2023 update

I last wrote about social media stuff just a few months ago: Thinking about how I use social media: A sequel of sorts

At the time, I was checking the usual sites irregularly, as I’d switched to a bedtime routine of reading actual books. Since then, irregularly has become rarely. I just haven’t missed Instagram and Facebook, so this has been a kind of unintentional culling.

The reasons for why I haven’t missed them are summed up pretty much in the post linked above: Once I broke the routine of checking in every night, I found the content was just not interesting enough for me to tolerate the endless piles of “reels” and ads. Instead, I have been spending a bit more time on Mastodon, which has no ads (by design) and no algorithm (also by design). I only see what I want to see. I follow people, then unfollow if they don’t make my socks roll up and down. That is my bar now–you must magically animate my socks or off with you.

It’s worked out decently so far.

Part of me does kind of miss posting my photos regularly, but they were only seen by a handful of people anyway, and now I can focus on posting billions of photos to my blog instead! I think in some small way this may have slightly improved my mental health, too (not visiting FB and IG much, not the posting billions of photos to my blog part, though who can say for sure!)

And now kittens: