Technology
- For reasons, Iāll touch on later, this is mostly about desktop browsers.
- In terms of privacy and security, Iām approaching this from a reality where 65% of people use Chrome. So in this context, vastly improving the privacy from that, is more interesting than saying someone is a gullible idiot if they donāt use a Tor browser. š So while Iām not saying those things shouldnāt be part of the discussion at all, Iād like to talk more about user experience and features than hardening if you catch my drift. 1
- Very simple ā In your head
- Simple ā A calculator (app)
- Medium to complex ā A spreadsheet app
- Why do you use the one you use now?
- What are your favourite (large or small) features? Please be very specific!
- I donāt love that Arc is built on Chromium ā as I think Google has more than enough power over the web as it is.
- Iām not against supporting any VC funded company ā but in combination with an unclear business model, I become more skeptical and worried if our incentives align. 2
š± Some Quick Mastodon Client Reviews
One of my favourite things about Mastodon, is that, as opposed to most other social networks, the service is completely open for other developers to make their own clients. And this has lead to a remarkable ecosystem of third-party options.
Now the official ones, are pretty mediocre (especially the web app, IMO) ā but I like this prioritisation. They couldāve sacrificed precious dev time to make their own clients great ā but this would have to come at the expense of improving the core service. And the only thing we would gain, is āanother great way to use Mastodonā.
āHow good are the default apps?ā is a far less important question than āHow good are the best apps for Mastodon?ā. Also, whatās a good app isnāt the same for everyone ā so why on earth should there only be one client (like Instagram, Facebook and, now, X)?
If youāre new (or old) to Mastodon ā donāt be afraid to test different clients! They can be used in complete parallel ā so you could just download a bunch on your phone, and log into each of them with your username. And then you could just āmainā one of them for a couple of days (turning on notifications on that one, for instance), and then move to another one.
But letās get to the main point: Some quick reviews of some of my favourite clients!
Anyone Else Feel Like They Should Use Firefox
ā¦ but Still Struggle With It?
This post was originally (and still is) a forum post on the MPU forums. I have two concrete question blocks Iād love feedback on, which I will present during the post. I would love to hear from you, either over at MPU, as a comment to this post on Micro.blog, via Mastodon, or email. š
Iād like to talk about browsers! And people are of course welcome to comment whatever they want ā but some notes on what my intentions for this discussion are:
OK, letās go!
Ethics are always difficult to discuss. Because while I think everyone should be mindful of the small things we should do to improve things, people have different priorities and possibilities. And where should we draw the line while consumers in a problematic system? Like, I should probably use a Fairphone over an iPhone even though itās worse, right? How much worse should I accept? How hard should I pull away from things like Facebook or X?
Still, Iām at least trying to try ā and as the browser is perhaps the most used app, the choice of it is among the things Iām thinking about.
And hereās why I feel like I should use Firefox:
The Case for Soulver, and an App Between a Calculator and a Spreadsheet
The iOS counterpart of Soulver 3 just released ā and is being discussed a bit over at the (excellent) Mac Power Users forum.
This post is (mostly) an answer to the following post there:
Soulver is a fun app to do simple math, but it is no substitute for a spreadsheet. Can it do any of this Numbers - Function list - Apple (AU)?
Can it graph data?
So I would buy it again if it was cheaper, but $35 for the Mac app plus another $34 for the iOS apps is definitely not worth it to me. Iāll keep using my free, constantly improving Numbers app.
Plus it took 5 years to finally recreate the iOS apps? Seriously? Why would I trust this developer after borking a perfectly good iOS app and taking so long to finally add it back to the App Store.
I think youāre misunderstanding
ā¦ what Soulver is trying to be,
even though you mention āa fun app to do simple mathā.
When discussing solving math problems, different complexity levels make us turn to different tools. Iād say it usually looks something like this:
Input wanted!
In principle, I think I should use Firefoxā¦ So Iām digging deep to see if I can make it not-bad! š
So, my question to those of you who use a (desktop) browser:
A Very Good All-Round Game Controller, With One Major Flaw (for Me)
A quick review of the 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller
I mostly play boring strategy šļø games that are just as good to play with a trackpad as anything else.
But every so often, Iāll play something thatās best played with a controller. Thatās usually on my Switch, where Iāve used the joy-cons with a charging grip ā but thatās never been great. Also, my joy-cons have started to driftā¦
So I wanted to buy a single controller that could fit all my use-cases, and my choice fell on the 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller šļø. And itās a great controller, with many smart features. But did you know that a controller can support 2.4 GHz, Bluetooth, Switch, PC, Steam Deck, Android, iOS and iPadOS, but not support macOS?? Well, I didnāt.
š± A Shortcut for lite-youtube-embed
YouTube embeds take up way too much on a site - so luckily someone has made lite-youtube-embed.
āRenders faster than a sneeze.ā
Provide videos with a supercharged focus on visual performance. This custom element renders just like the real thing but approximately 224Ć faster.
First you have to include some CSS and JS on your site. 1 And then when you want to embed a video, you could just add this piece to your post/page:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" playlabel="Play: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)"></lite-youtube>
This will embed the video, but over 200x faster - nice!
However, you have to manually add the videoid and the video title.
And theyāve also made a variant named āPro-usage: load w/ JS deferred (aka progressive enhancement)ā, which I think is even more optimised. But then you have to add all of this:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" params="controls=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1" style="background-image: url('https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CItvhGl__Mk/sddefault.jpg');">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItvhGl__Mk" class="lty-playbtn" title="Play Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)">
<span class="lyt-visually-hidden">Play Video: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)</span>
</a>
</lite-youtube>
Why I Donāt Love Web Apps
And a call for help
I absolutely get why companies make web apps instead of native apps. Why juggle tons of platforms and languages if you donāt have to? Furthermore, being on the web makes you free from platform gatekeepers!
It can also benefit users, by giving the same experience everywhere, making more software cross-platform and accessible on more niche platforms, and more.
And if a developer has 100 hours to develop a client for their service, the user experience very well might be better if they spent all of it on a web app, instead of spending 25 hours on four different native clients.
Thereās also a bunch of terrible native (or ānativeā) apps. One example is phone apps that simply are terrible web wrappers that just want to be able to track and notify you more than they can in a web browser. 1
When I say that I prefer native apps, I donāt mean that there are no great web apps (like Figma) or bad native apps. My point is that the ceiling of the latter is higher, and that all the best apps Iāve tried are native.
OK, I just spent way too long on something unimportant (again):
I bring to you: smooth linear clamp() scaling, but with increasing something as you decrease the screen width!
From 1rem to 3rem: clamp(1, -0.5rem + 6.67vw, 3rem)
Ā«BackwardsĀ» (video): calc(clamp(-3rem, -4.5rem + 6.67vw, -1rem) * -1);
Now that Iāve gotten my CSS like I want it, Iāve started the total rewrite. š
Now I know what I want to be variables. And thereās too many ideas in the design, as I through every idea out there while making each element. But now I know which ideas I like the most, and will keep.
The thing I like about being a noob, is that itās fun to see quick progress. Stuff I wrote two weeks ago seem stupid now. š
Chromium and Nested Backdrop-Filters
If youāre like me, you sometimes get these small (often technical) problems, that you work on for so long ā and you refuse to surrender.
I had this with CSS a couple of months ago:
I had a menu, that had transparency and blur, and then I also had a submenu that I wanted to have the same. But the submenu just. wouldnāt. blur!
It works perfectly in Gecko and WebKit ā but after countless hours, I found the problem: If an element has a backdrop-filter, Chromium wonāt let its children have it as well. 1
I had to design around it, and moved on with my life.
A few moments laterā¦
I recently moved to Micro.blog. And one day I was scrolling down my timelineā¦
Then I opened the submenu:
There it was ā the same bug! Iām not alone!
The fix
āļø š± To SigmaOSā CEO: This Is What I Donāt Like About Arcās Direction
I really, really like the Arc browser. But as I alluded to in this post, I have some reservations regarding it, and donāt feel like itās going in a direction that I like. In the post, I said that I might try SigmaOS again ā and I am. 1
I mentioned this in their community Slack, and their CEO, Mahyad, asked me what about Arcās direction I donāt like. I must say, the dev team seems very active, nice, and open to input! So this post is my reply to his question.
(And hereās a link straight to the TL;DR at the bottom.)
Hi, Mahyad ā and thanks for asking! I wrote a blog post called Ā«I Just Want A Nice Browser!Ā», which might give you a hint, heh.
And let me also say that Iām a bit worried about your direction as well ā but Iāll come back to that. š
Two fundamentals I donāt love, but that I donāt need to go too much into
My main issue, though, is regarding AI
You know that trick companies do now, where they write helpful (or Ā«helpfulĀ») articles that people search for, and then you end up on a car companyās website when searching for how to change a tire?
Well, that kinda backfired for SigmaOS today, as I was trying to figure out how to install a custom search engine on itā¦
I Just Want a Nice Browser!
Two sad browser stories
Iāve followed the Spicy Takesā¢ļø surrounding the Arc Browser recently, that started in the Ruminate podcast and went on to the MacStories Weekly Issue 408.
And I agree with most of what John Voorhees is saying, and also Matt Birchler, who said: Ā«The Browser Company feels gross to me right nowĀ».
Much of it is about ethics and AI. In general I agree with them, but this subject wonāt be the focus of this post. (Iāve written more about AI here and here.)
Instead Iāll tell my browser story, and explain why both Arc and Firefox makes me sad.
š± AI Is Just Different
The discussion around the ethics and legality surrounding AI has been a constant the last year ā and itās culminating in some important trials thatās coming up.
I wonāt go into the entire thing here ā I just want to focus on a specific argument that I often hear when it comes to the way these large models are trained. It oftes goes something like: Ā«But how is this different from how humans have always been learning and iterating on previous knowledge?Ā» or Ā«The information was available on the open web, so it can be used for anything!Ā».
I think these are terrible arguments.
Humans are allowed into shopping malls.
However, thatās simply not an argument for that cars should be allowed there as well ā whether theyāre driven by a human or autonomous.
I liked this blog post, by The Jolly Teapot! šš»
Ā«A happy snobĀ» is very much how Iād categorise my own taste in software. šš»
Iāve been thinking way too much about music streaming the past month - so now Iāve gathered my thoughts in a blog post!
I have an idea and dream, that Iām sadly woefully unequipped to actually build. š
Itās a cross between podcasts, Mastodon, PeerTube and the MusicKit API!
š± An Idea For Better Music Streaming
I sadly donāt have the abilities to live out this idea ā at least not alone. So everyone who finds this, is welcome to steal it or riff with me!
Iām currently trying to transfer from Spotify to Tidal. The main reason is that I want to use a service that pays artists better ā and itās a nice bonus that the sound quality is better. However, I prefer Spotifyās app and features. 1 And this inspired me to write out an idea Iāve been thinking about for a while.
Inspired by Mastodon, Appleās MusicKit API, Podcasts and PeerTube
Third-party first
Iām trying out Tidal for a bit, so cancelling my Spotify Premium subscription. Got this pretty obnoxious screen. šš»
š± Apple Is Not the Reason Iām Buying Apple Products - These People Are
In the court cases against Epic, this round of regulatory scrutiny from the EU, and other more, Apple has made their sense of entitlement abundantly clear. Every piece of business that happens on their platforms, is to their credit. And developers are lucky to be able to pay them almost a third of their revenue for the privilege of being on their platforms. If Apple understands that their relationship with developers is reciprocal, theyāre hiding it well.
I like all my Apple hardware. Heck, I even love some of it! I also like the operating systems, the general focus on privacy, and the way the different parts of the ecosystem work together. But I think I could enjoy a Framework laptop, Asus phone and some Sony earbuds as well! The things Apple makes and does isnāt the main reason I keep buying Apple products. Itās all the fantastic third-party developers, mostly indie, who make great software for the Apple platforms.