I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit.
Visit marco.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – Jun 2021
Tech Industry & Business 70Web & Frontend 30Hardware & Electronics 16Society, Policy & Culture 12Tools & Productivity 9Software Engineering 9
As with Instagram, the change does not seem to have affected sharing outwards, but will impede users’ ability to follow friends that they may know from Twitter. This is part of Twitter turning the screws on sharing information about the users of its network out to other services like Instagram (and by extension…
This story will circulate a lot today. I’d like to suggest a more informative and accurate headline than the likely “Lodsys dismisses a lawsuit and donates to charity”.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet, which performs an article-text parse of any web page and displays the results in a highly readable, adjustable format. (It’s like Instapaper’s text view, but nicer and applied in place, instantly, to the web page you’re viewing.)
The more I think and learn about the curious pricing of the 27” iMac , the more bizarre and incredible it seems.
I mentioned earlier on Twitter that my home computer downloaded a 22 GB database dump every three days as part of Instapaper’s backup method, and a lot of people expressed interest in knowing the full setup.
Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.
We’re often told that we should design our websites and software to mimic real-life objects. The iPhone strengthened this idiom, and Apple has been driving this home hard for the iPad.
Chris Adamson notes a significant contraction in iOS and related conferences recently (via Michael Tsai ).
I wasn’t always a fan of Apple’s requirement that all App Store submissions be reviewed by a fairly opaque process before release, which often led to confusing or unfair rejections.
I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.32%.
I recently moved all of my domains away from GoDaddy, because they’re terrible. 1
I know it’s bad form to mention your competitors, but I’ve been asked about Readability’s announcement enough today that it’s more of a charade not to talk about it, especially since a lot of people are under the wrong impression.
The first time I went without RSS in August, I simply went around to three or so of what I consider to be the best sites to get the latest news from. I combined that with my usual e-mail communications … and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I…
Update, July 6: This is now resolved . Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.
Apple’s recently announced App Store for the Mac is a Really Big Deal™, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But a lot of existing Mac developers have pointed out major issues or unknowns that need to be addressed:
This is slightly embarrassing: Instapaper doesn’t show Retina-resolution graphics on the new iPad yet.
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
After reading Ryan McCarthy’s post at Reuters about Business Insider, I wanted to run some numbers.
Today, App.net launched free accounts . Previously, everyone had to pay — originally $50/year, then reduced to $36/year.
Update: This has been frontpaged on Hacker News and I’ve posted Instapaper’s browser usage stats .
With so many Retina iPad updates, it looks like the App Review team is working overtime to approve apps quickly. In a very pleasant surprise, my 4.1 update was approved much more quickly than I expected. Thanks, App Review team!
Apple now seemingly considers most Mac hardware updates boring enough to skip any potential press event and just feature the new models on the Apple website for a while. Event-worthy Mac updates are now limited to entirely new products or major redesigns.
Twitter has posted some of their upcoming API-policy lockdowns and restrictions in this post from Michael Sippey , euphemistically titled “Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API”.
Update: Thanks, Fake Steve Jobs ! I’ve always wanted to be yelled at and berated by the real Steve Jobs, but this is probably as close as I’m going to get. On with the original post:
Google, please set a price — any price — that you determine is necessary to keep anyone’s account running smoothly at all times. I’ll gladly pay it. I don’t care if it’s $100 a year or $1,000 a year. It would be worth it.
I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. I’m just a software developer, and like every software developer, I’ve probably unknowingly infringed upon hundreds of patents while routinely doing my job.
After four years of my serving as Tumblr’s lead developer, Tumblr’s technical management needs have evolved to require types of experience that I don’t have, and my independent career has offered a lot of opportunities that I haven’t had the time to take full advantage of.
Shifty Jelly’s counterargument to some of my Android opinions, which provides a concrete data point showing that money can be made on Android, concludes with this:
Apple’s new subscription-billing requirement has generated a lot of bad press and debate. The new rule, from the App Store Review Guidelines (developer account required):
Apple quietly fixed the apps affected by corrupt App Store binaries in an interesting way.