@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

frankreiff

@frankreiff@mastodon.social

I'm Frank Reiff, #mac #indiedev since 1996. I am mostly known for A Better Finder Rename, A Better Finder Attributes (bad names that stuck), Vitamin-R & Big Mean Folder Machine.

I endlessly toot about #indiedev, #mac, #ukPolitics, #climateEmergency, #games & #scifi.

Living in Luxembourg with my wife & 2 teenagers.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Oh, Apple.

You just understand us Pro users so well.. of course we were waiting for the latest iPad Pro and are happy to wait for new pro desktops until the current ones are half the performance of our phones. 🤪
https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/112467705596604346

danielpunkass, to random
@danielpunkass@mastodon.social avatar

Bertrand Serlet: “Why AI Works” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtyIDmhxh4

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@danielpunkass thanks for this superb super-high level explanation. Not something that you can find easily. 👍🏻

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

My ideal iPad is a 15" iPad Pro with an M4 Pro, combined with a Magic Keyboard with 2 Thunderbolt ports (that do both data & power) and a built-in second battery, that can run macOS and all my legacy software/workflows in a virtual machine, and can be operated entirely in clamshell mode from an external monitor. A drafting table when I need it, a pro workstation when I need that.

If such a machine existed, I would never buy a Mac again. That's what I've wanted on my desktop for the past decade

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I hear you. I like the idea of a keyboard-less drafting table and notepad that will unlock my creativity, etc.. but 5 minutes in I just want to use a text snippet to reply to an email, or just plain copy and paste some text.. and then the iPad nightmare starts until I get up resignedly to go and fetch my MacBook.

I’ve got the 15” Galaxy Tab Ultra and while not perfect.. at least I can read a kindle book and take notes on NEBO side-by-side. 😎

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Does anybody have any experiences with using Apple's in-app subscriptions for an AppKit app? I understand that third party frameworks like RevenueCat are unavailable.. so how hard is it to implement yourself and how much hassle is it day-to-day release-to-release?

Any feedback would be very much appreciated.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@agiletortoise Thanks.

So the server component is still necessary 😦. I’m really surprised by that. I would have thought that Apple would have optimized the hell out of this by now.

For my scenario that probably is too much setup and recurring work just to dip my toe into the subscription well.

RevenueCat seems to have no AppKit version and their pricing is.. weird anyway.. zero.. or $1,700 from $2,500 onwards.. 🤯

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@tapforms I just went through their documentation and there was a catalyst section but not a cocoa or app kit. I would be likely to end up in the $1500 to $3000 a month category, so would have to pay the $1700 a month.. after Apple’s 15%..

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@tapforms Thanks. I just read through quickly before going out this morning & thought I’d ask about people’s experiences.. it looks like RevenueCat is the way to go.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Look, Apple, it's really not helpful that App Store Connect is refusing visionOS uploads from Xcode 15.4, when iOS and macOS are perfectly happy. It just means my updates for visionOS are unnecessarily falling behind all the other platforms, as I'm not about to waste my time reinstalling a second, older copy of Xcode and the visionOS SDK. Keep these things in sync!

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith don’t program for legacy platforms I guess 😉

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Vision Pro is going to be an even harder sell now that iPad is two CPU generations ahead of it. You just know too that, like every single first-gen Apple product, it's going to be left behind by OS updates way sooner than you'd hope 😔

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith always assuming that there will be a 2nd gen. 2026 is a long time off and they don’t want to make big changes..

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

OK, creatives, is this really about the ad, or is this latent existential angst about generative AI?
https://mstdn.social/@TechCrunch/112407557601933446

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith @TechCrunch My gut reaction was that having a cute innocent creature crushed and having “blood” leak from the side.. was ill judged and it made me think of the Kristi Noem brag about killing a defenseless dog. I thought “who authorized this in corporate America”?

The big corporate machine killing and destroying everything good around it to make a slightly “improved” product is too obvious a read.. especially for a company at odds with its own workers, partners, the law, etc.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith @TechCrunch .. most of all, it shows that Apple’s top brass is completely unaware of its public profile having shifted from the Think Different days to Evil Corp over the past few decades. They still see themselves as the plucky underdogs who symbolize all that is right and virtuous, surrounded by corporate sharks.. they are profoundly out of touch in their white room corporate bubble.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

One thing Apple doesn't seem to be cognizant of is that once developers flip the bozo bit on a platform, they never come back — it's a death spiral. That's the danger visionOS faces with its current strategy.

You know what other platform launched with half-finished/emulated system apps and no content? Windows 8. And Microsoft literally paid third-party developers to come onboard, sent them devices, gave them all the support they needed, even ported their apps for them, yet it still didn't work

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I think visionOS is already dead.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Really sounds like next week's Apple Pencil 3 will work with visionOS, huh?

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith sounds like it.. just not sure how much sense it makes.

Without having a surface to write on, it’s likely very difficult to properly write or draw with a pen.. and being able to write on physical stuff.. well why not just write on it outside of the VR bubble?

As a 3D controller, it’s also kind of the wrong shape. Beat Saver with two pens?

Maybe they’ve got something fantastic on their hands.. but given their other VR/AR forays up to now.. it could also just be more BS.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I can imagine this making some sense for 3D sculpting.. but then you’d need to save some like Z-Brush running on the AVP.

Perhaps 3D sculpting on iPad and AVP!?

Still.. very niche.

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Germany has just “survived” its first year without nuclear power.. and nothing bad has happened. At all. Nothing.

It was supposed to be the end of industrial Germany, blackouts everywhere, etc.

.. and nothing happened.

Which does not prevent the same doomsayers from insisting that without nuclear energy, Germany is finished.

Presumably their lobbying contracts haven’t run out yet..

icanzilb, to random
@icanzilb@mastodon.social avatar

So um, I tried something that I didn't do in a long time - went to see a movie in a cinema. Here are all the trailers I had to watch for half an hour before the show:

  1. Two black cops karate a whole lot of people while cars constantly explode in the back.
  2. Ryan Gossling karates dozens of bad guys while a female screen partner falls in live with him. Cars explode continuously.
  3. Rabid apes karate half naked humans. And to my surprise- a lot of explosions in the background...
    (1)
frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@icanzilb You’re not wrong, but Dune is a space opera, so it’s not a great movie to choose if you don’t want to see spice harvesters blow up..

Poor Things is still on and is bloody excellent. No karate. No explosions.

Challengers and Wicked Little Letters are supposed to be good.

There’s plenty of action movies, but there’s also a lot of non-blockbuster movies around.. of course I personally like exploding spice harvesters and Gladiator-in-infrared 😎

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

We're 5 years in now and even the most talented and experienced SwiftUI devs aren't building apps that are better than what you could build before, nor does it seem like there are kinds of apps that weren't possible before.

And still, a large chunk of dev energy is spent just trying to make it ‘as good as' before, too. Churn for the sake of churn. Some big apps have fancy new UIs with terrible layout performance, completely squandering the long-held lead Apple's chip teams bought the platform

frankreiff, (edited )
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith Fundamentally declarative programming is best kept in academia.

It’s cool, but the problem is that the abstraction breaks down as soon as non-functional aspects become important, eg performance.. or you have a bug.

Now suddenly you need to understand how it works.. or rather how its engine works.. which happens to be a black box.. so you need to probe it, to theorize about what might be going on.. and the whole thing descents from high level abstraction into tinkering.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith .. then there’s the question of whether it fits the UI problem at all.

It fits the static layout quite well, but for a dynamic interface it’s often easier to think in terms of “what should be happening, and in what sequence” rather than “this is what it is”.

Being able to drop down from declarative to imperative programming easily would be great.

Perhaps a more appropriate way to use this would be to generate imperative code from the declaration.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith ..in my own private Mac frameworks, I use builders to create NSView hierarchies, perform auto-layout, configure views and controls, set callbacks, etc.

That let’s me run as native AppKit, while being able to drop into the debugger to follow the flow of control, mix non-builder code, etc.

It’s not as elegant as full-declarative coding, but it’s fast, easy, flexible and transparent..

frankreiff, to random
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

Phil Schiller has no idea whether the AppStore is profitable.. and he works 18 hour days to make it ever better.. and nobody at Apple is even thinking about profits.. and it’s all been leaked by independent observer John Gruber.. also there are no notes on any meetings or any decisions.. 😉

marcoarment, to random
@marcoarment@mastodon.social avatar

It's absolutely possible. But millions of people had strong reasons to use iPhones even before there were any apps, and then also before the apps were plentiful or compelling.

The customers were already there.

The challenge Apple faces with AVP is getting enough people to buy (and keep using) a device type that they weren't already buying (headsets), which is VERY expensive and limited, to accumulate enough customers for the content and software ecosystem to develop.
https://mas.to/@DrewTheLoud/112276696057829298

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@marcoarment @DrewTheLoud VR headsets have been around for a while.. and people have made content for them.. and there are 3 things that have found a market: games, fitness-as-a-game & 3D video (almost exclusively of the “prurient” kind).

AVP is bad at games (no controllers), fitness (too heavy) and .. well.. hand tracking.. 😱

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

It's all well and good that Safari is doing faster on synthetic benchmarks, but the fact that it still locks up multiple times a day on little-known websites such as /TikTok/ kinda tempers my excitement, you know?

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith I like the way that Apple has confronted the problem of slow web pages head-on by bringing up a blame-someone-else “this webpage is using significant resources” dialog 😎.

caseyliss, to random
@caseyliss@mastodon.social avatar

Also, since I'm v grumpy rn, let me tell you that I LOVE living in Virginia but April can kindly go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-itself.

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@caseyliss @caseyliss Don’t worry.. I live in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg sandwiched between Germany, France and Belgium (🤷‍♂️).. and my black car is covered in blotchy streaks of rain mixed with sand dust from the.. wait for it.. Sahara..

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@dxzdb @caseyliss yeah.. winds from Africa used to be very rare.. now it’s a yearly occurrence.

stroughtonsmith, to random
@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social avatar

Supporting visionOS be like

frankreiff,
@frankreiff@mastodon.social avatar

@stroughtonsmith Don’t worry. It will be rolled out in China soon.. 🤪

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