2023.12.09.

2023.12.08.

Read “Michael Tsai – Blog – Mac Menu Bar Icons and the Notch”

On my 13” Intel MacBook Pro, the icons reached to about halfway across the screen. On the 14” M3 MacBook Pro, ironically a machine with a larger display, at least 3 icons get hidden.

This “design” (or lack thereof) is so dumb. It is utterly ridiculous to me that this is still how it “works” two years after the introduction of the redesigned MacBook Pro with a notch. How hard could it be to add an overflow menu with a “«” (or should it be “»”?) button that shows the remaining apps and icons that can’t be displayed? This entire situation with the notch is ironic, because the iPhone notch and “dynamic island” are so thoughtfully designed with zero compromises regarding the functionality of iOS. In fact, they actually provide a better user experience. Yet on the Mac, how the notch interacts with macOS is laughably incompetent. It is shockingly lazy regarding attention to detail, and results in an outright disruptive and confusing user experience.

Here’s my current menubar:

I try to keep my less frequently used icons (like Hookmark) on the left because I mostly invoke them from the keyboard anyway. But I hate when Docker gets stuck behind the notch, and I have to quit other apps on the right to get Docker back to the screen.

Apple should do something about this behavior because it’s really annoying. And no, I’m not going to install a 3rd-party app to fix these issues, even if I love its icon.

Read “Jack Wellborn: “I just recently discovered tha…” – Mastodon”

I just recently discovered that you can select and drag multiple Safari tabs by holding shift or command, just as you would to select and drag multiple items in Finder.

I’m sure it has been added recently or hidden in the system for like 15 years.

Sadly it’s Safari only, so it doesn’t work on other system tabs like Finder or iA Writer.

Gordon Smith:

My use case is to select those tabs I want to save as a group, right click one of those tabs to add them all to a new Tab Group (to keep things neat and tidy).

Read “What I Miss Most About the iPod”

Little things like this have me thinking more and more about the control I have over my music library. I love having access to any song at any time. But, at the same time, I want more control. Apple could easily allow for smart playlist stacks to exist on the cloud. I’d have nothing to write about at that point. But, as we’ve seen with Sony lately, Apple could take away content at any point, even if you paid for it in their store. It would be a much more expensive route to maintain a physical CD collection that I then rip into a media library.

I still maintain my local music library in the Music app and buy music from the iTunes Store, Beatport, and sometimes CDs from Discogs (which I rip later).

At one point I even turned off iCloud Music Library and synced my music locally, which is still pretty cool, since it’s free and completely peer-to-peer. On the other hand, your music library turns into read-only mode, so I can’t edit my synced playlists on the device, which sucks (if I remember correctly, I can edit new playlists on the device).

I currently have iCloud Music Library turned on, but I always archive music files separately before importing them, and I also keep my library backed up by Time Machine. The problem with this approach is I have 3 Macs, so I have to pay attention to which one is holding the original song since iCloud Music Library doesn’t upload the original file but rather fetches the song from the iTunes Store. To avoid this problem, I basically keep a master library on my 16-inch MacBook Pro since I use that the most; all other devices are using the iCloud Music Library directly.

The iTunes Music Library and cloud streaming destroyed all of this, primarily because it wouldn’t allow syncing of smart playlists built off other smart playlists.

I tried this, and smart playlists based on top of other smart playlists are not synced to iOS devices. I couldn’t check if it syncs between Macs, which I want to know.

2023.12.07.

2023.12.06.

Read “Web Apps Are Better Than No Apps”

Since web apps can’t just use the components provided by the operating system, they have to recreate everything from scratch. And this creates a lot of burden for developers and, I think, lowers the quality floor. Creating beautiful, compelling apps is possible, but it requires so much work. People building native apps get it all “for free”. In fact, this could be one of the reasons Apple still has such a vibrant ecosystem of great artisanal apps since developers can build most things out of nice ready-made components.

Well, yeah!

2023.12.05.

2023.12.04.

Read “How I Take and Publish Notes – Jim Nielsen’s Blog”

Jim writing about his reading note publishing process:

I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.

I don’t do this. If I see something interesting, I usually publish it immediately (like this post). On the other hand, I have a Zettelkasten site, which contains more in-depth notes that are also coming from reading notes. However, that site is so new that I haven’t really published anything that counts as reading notes there yet.

2023.12.03.

2023.12.02.

2023.12.01.

2023.11.30.

2023.11.28.

2023.11.27.

Read “Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet – Cal Newport”

Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic.

2023.11.25.

2023.11.24.

2023.11.23.

Read “Ben’s Journal: Cutting the electronic cord: Setting up a fully paper TODO list tracking strategy”

While git + emacs + org-mode was certainly functional, I never had cause to do anything particular sexy with the setup. In fact, I was hoping this experience would convert me from a fan of subversion to a fan of git, but alas, it only reinforced my appreciation for the simplicity of subversion.

The index cards, on the other hand, were a joy to use. I love that each project is represented by a single card, and that spreading out the cards gives me an overview of all possible tasks to work on:[…]