"It is currently estimated that new models with significant changes to the Vision Pro specification may not be in mass production until 2027," Kuo said today.
This makes me glad I bought at launch as opposed to waiting, and even more glad I opted for monthly AppleCare payments as opposed to buying the fixed two-year contract.
Until yesterday, I had never heard anyone but me in the Ruby community express confusion over the fact that Rails produced both paper_trail the audit log gem and Papertrail the logging SaaS.
But seriously, how the hell did everyone else keep these straight in conversation? (My bet is that they didn't, actually)
[UPDATE: In this episode, I referenced Stripe having an IPO in the past
tense. I was mistaken, they are not (yet) publicly traded. We regret the
error.]
The audio is better this week! I'm learning.
Also, I finally had something to talk about that has nothing to do with Apple!
The target of the ion cannon that is my mouth this time? drumroll… it's
Stripe! Sorry, Stripe. If you like rants about software quality and the systemic
reasons everything is terrible, hoo boy! This one brings the heat. 🔥🔥🔥
We're starting to work down our mailbag backlog, so help me freshen it up by
e-mailing the show at podcast@searls.co and our
dedicated staff (me) will read it and—potentially, maybe—respond on the air!
Thanks to recent advancements in AI, the only way to pass this captcha and prove
you're a human is to mutter, "what the fuck are we even doing here anymore,"
into your device's microphone.
Two decades as a programmer hasn't made me any better at estimating how long it'll take me to write software, but it's made me MUCH better at estimating how long other things will take. I'm a master at intuitively timing multiple dishes to finish simultaneously, for example.
In hindsight, I think I may have spent a large number of years misdiagnosing myself as having a push notification management problem when I actually had a "too many people in my life" problem.
What's a framework feature you probably ought to use but you nevertheless avoid?
For me, it's file generators. I can barely remember why, but with the sole exception of database migrations I never take advantage of any of Rails' generator commands.
A lot of people are surprised Vision Pro's field-of-view is so narrow, but it makes sense if you think about it: even if Apple invents all the technologies needed to release a Vision product in an eyeglass form factor, it'll never be much wider than 90º.
Apple's resistance to proper VR features suggests they don't want us getting used to anything that wouldn't be possible in their ideal version of the product.
There are exactly three things I want from a 404 page:
Something approaching an apology
An easy way to report the broken link
Copy that might elicit a sensible chuckle
This page only took a few minutes to make. The "let us know" link pre-populates
the entire e-mail and is implemented in a Rails view thanks to a helper method
that makes constructing mail_to links a little nicer:
<%= link_to "let us know", mail_to_url("support@betterwithbecky.com",
subject: "I got a 404!",
body: "I clicked a link that led me here, but got a 404 message:\n\n#{request.url}"
) %>
Wish people spent more time sweating details like this.
v5 -
Regressive Web Apps
Breaking Change
Subscribe:
Welcome to Breaking Change, the 14th most popular technology podcast in
Argentina! (And 30th in Norway!)
It's been a couple weeks since my last breaking change and, guess what, I done
broke things again.
If you would prefer I not make so many breaking changes (or if you wish me to
break even more of them!), e-mail me at
podcast@searls.co and let me know and/or share your
darkest secrets under a pseudonym using a throwaway account. Nobody needs to
know.
I haven't been happy with the size or weight of any of Apple's notebook
computers since 12" MacBook. And since moving to 14" and 16" for the MacBook
Pro, I've been praying for a 12" MacBook Pro to be released. But now, with the
Vision Pro among us, my desire for an ultralight Mac has only increased. In
fact, about a month ago, I tried to get DALL•E and Midjourney to generate images
of a headless MacBook Pro device (like an Apple
II but in a modern industrial
design language), but they weren't up to the task.
I had never even considered beheading a MacBook Air, but this guy sure did:
The fact this mod is as straightforward as it is is a real testament to Apple's
improvements in repairability over the last few years. The only shame of it is
that there's no way to reliably log into the device after a reboot (short of
guessing at the state of the password entry screen). If it weren't for that I
seriously might consider doing this to my own M2 MacBook Air after its warranty
is up.
UPDATE: Rob Carlson inspires some
hope that a headless MacBook
isn't as unusuable at boot as I might have worried:
I log into a headless MacBook Pro all the time. Just hit the "up volume" key
a bunch of times until VoiceOver turns on, then it'll prompt you for
username, then password, and give three beeps if you're right.
One tidbit from a week ago was that third-party browser rendering engines
wouldn't be able to be saved to the home screen and launched as progressive web
apps (PWAs). Well, in order to level the playing field, Apple's apparently
decided to just disable PWAs entirely for EU customers:
Apple appears to be turning off the ability to use web apps right from the
iPhone's homescreen in the European Union. Support for progressive web apps
appeared to be broken inside in the EU during the first two betas of iOS 17.4,
but today developer Maximiliano Firtman said in a post on X that web apps are
still turned off in the third beta, which arrived yesterday. "At this point,
it's a feature disabled on purpose," Firtman wrote.
If you haven't heard Firtman's name before, he's been the guy following
Apple's largely-undocumented, unnecessarily circuitous path to progressive web
app support in iOS, so if that's his read, that's probably the case.
I know a lot of people are angry at Apple's flagrant display of spite as they
take their ball and go home on all these issues, but I really can't manage any
other reaction but to be impressed by their commitment to the bit. After the DMA
passed but before Apple released their response, there was expectation that
similar laws would pass in other developed countries over the next 18-24 months.
But Apple's ability to outpace this months-old legislation so completely is
probably throwing cold water on those plans, if they exist. The EU could choose
to deny Apple's proposals, but something tells me that substantive changes would
require even more complex legislative changes which would only invite even more
sophisticated technical and policy countermeasures by Apple.
A frustration I've had since switching to VS
Code last year from terminal vim is that the
built-in source control extension isn't very keyboard-friendly. As a result, I've
been tabbing back and forth between VS Code and Fork and
kicking myself every single time, especially when I'm just editing a single file
and I really don't need to review my changes before I push.
Well, I finally took the five minutes to write a VS Code
macro
to do this for me. First, run Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) and add this
to the array of keyboard shortcuts:
Now when I smoosh command, option, and control, then hit P, it'll pull
from the tracked remote branch, stage & commit everything, open a window for me
to enter a quick message (usually "lol"), and then when I hit command-w, the
result will be pushed. Saves me about 10 seconds per commit.
It's now been 20 years of fighting with it sporadically and I still can't figure out how to use launchctl to successfully automate tasks reliably on macOS. Such a frustrating piece of software.