I’d really love for Patreon to try leaving the App Store and making a go of it as a progressive web app on iOS. I’d happily use it in that form.

iOS 18 Public Beta 3 feels like the solid one that’s ready for most people to install. Photos no longer crashes for me on launch; widgets stay where you put them on your Home Screens; and battery life feels back to normal. #Apple #iOSbeta

A quick writeup of my Apple Vision Pro demo experience. TL;DR: It’s fun! You should try it!

https://kevinyank.com/posts/apple-vision-pro-demo-review/

I’d buy an Apple Vision Pro if #Apple freed it from the constraints of the App Store. If they want to usher in an age of “spatial computing”, they need to let it be a computer, like a Mac, not an iPad. Only for an open platform could I justify that cost to myself.

Gotta take my iPad Pro M4 to the Apple Store because a vertical stripe about 1cm wide has become unresponsive to touch and Apple Pencil input. 🍋

Seeing opening night of Beat Café before performing in Songs from a Spellbound City at Impro Melbourne tonight.

Feeling lucky to be attending the TechDiversity Awards tonight, helping to represent Tech Career Paths 4 Girls, who are nominated for an award. I’ve been spending my Social Impact leave days at Culture Amp to help them polish up the videos that make up their choose-your-own-career experience for school-age girls.

Trying out ScreenMemory as a replacement for Rewind. It only does screen recording with OCR search (not audio recording), but I rarely used Rewind’s audio recordings. I hope it continues to gain features!

Rewind.ai’s launch of Limitless.ai includes a lot of claims about privacy and encryption of your data, but as far as I can tell it sends a copy of “everything you see or hear” to OpenAI, where it is held in the open for 30 days for “monitoring and detecting abuse”. That doesn’t sound private to me, only anonymous. Think I’m going to have to cancel my preorder for their “privacy first” Pendant product.

Conversely to the colors on the box and bottle caps, #Lamy Cliff (2024 Special Edition) appears to be a more saturated, lower shading ink than the standard Lamy Blue Black. #fountainpen #fountainpens #fountainpenink

Every #SparkMail update adds AI features designed to avoid reading or writing email, while the Mac app gets slower and flakier as an actual email client. Might have to jump back to Mail.app until #MimeStream supports IMAP/JMAP (hopefully someday 🙏).

Wanted to start #Jusant today, but it seems the just-released 1.05 update is too buggy to play, at least on PS5. #games

Finally platinumed #SeaOfStars. Really enjoyed my time with the game, although it was definitely longer than I was hoping for. Could have done without the “true ending” rigamarole. That said, I’ll almost certainly be back for the DLC once it’s released. #games

Using #TailwindCSS in both a design system component library and the apps that consume it is non-trivial, and not well documented! Wrote up everything we have learned at Culture Amp: https://kevinyank.com/posts/use-tailwindcss-prefixes-for-shared-design-system-components/ #designSystems

Not buying until it gets copy and paste.

Playing Echoes of the Fallen, the first of the two announced #FinalFantasyXVI DLC. It’s shockingly good: new music of the same stellar quality that won the main game Best Music at #TheGameAwards, sweeping vistas of greater scope even than the main game, and fun new items that mix up the gameplay in fresh ways! Highly recommended. #FF16 #FFXVI #videogames

#Amazon had two options for how to frame their #PrimeVideo pricing/ads change: “we’re adding ads but you can pay more to avoid them” or “we’re raising prices but we will introduce an ad tier if you prefer to save money”. It’s fascinating to me that they thought the ads-first option would be easier to swallow than the pricing-first version.

While I consider #Mastodon’s non-algorithmic Home timeline one of its most attractive features, I do occasionally want for an algorithmic “discovery view” (where the algorithm works in my interests, not the platform’s). There are a few experiments like this out there, but nothing quite like what I’m imagining: surface toots and links based on favorites/reblogs/“quote toots” of people I follow (and people they follow). I’m tempted to try building it over the holidays to see if the feed it produces is any good.

Miyazaki’s The Boy And The Heron is both more accessible and more abstract than his previous “final film”, The Wind Rises. It’s worth seeing for the art alone, and if you go in expecting the story to disappoint I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. A worthy final work, if indeed that’s what it will be. 7/10

The YouTube version is up of my #MelbJS talk yesterday about how we’re using #StorybookJS as our primary test tooling for UI at Culture Amp: “Help! Storybook is eating all our tests!”

Where’s all the AirTags product placement in Apple TV+ content? Everyone has iPhones and MacBooks, but I have yet to see the bank heist or alien invasion foiled by the hero saying “I can tell you exactly where it is.” and flipping open the Find My app. #Apple

Had a lot of fun presenting “Help! Storybook is eating all our tests!” at #MelbJS + #ReactMelbourne tonight. I’ll put up a nice YouTube version tomorrow, but if you’re in a hurry, the stream is here.

Can you imagine if Tom Cruise’s death-defying super-spy character in Mission: Impossible was named “Rollin Hand”? 😂

Not enough people know that the equivalent of Ethan Hunt in the original “Mission: Impossible” TV series, played by Martin Landau, was first named “Martin Land” in the pilot script, and then at the very last minute was renamed “Rollin Hand”. #MissionImpossible

Sent my 2-week-old @playdate@panic.com in for warranty replacement in mid-September. When I chased @panic@panic.com for an update a few weeks later, they said they were “making changes” to how they handle warranty replacements, and hoped to ship mine in “early November”. I had to chase them for an update again when they missed that date, and now they’re just saying “soon”. 😞 #Playdate