Day: 16 August 2021

Readers Should Not Be Renters ⇥ thenation.com

Maria Bustillos, the Nation (annotation mine):

The very role and meaning of libraries relies on their right to own books, because books that can expire are books that can disappear permanently — books that can be taken away. There is a cultural, a political, even a civilizational danger in this vulnerability that can’t be overestimated.

“Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together,” as Jonathan Zittrain wrote last year [Correction: earlier this year.] in The Atlantic in an article about the Internet’s weaknesses as a cultural archive. When a link disappears, when an online publisher goes out of business, readers, researchers, and scholars will hit a dead end—unless digital libraries are given the same power to archive that traditional libraries have had for centuries. Digital media is recklessly burning its own record to ash behind it, so we need institutions and systems to affirmatively protect and preserve 21st-century knowledge.

So much of the consumer’s digital world seems designed to be a temporary state. DRM attempts to restrict media to a single copy verified every time it is opened. Software licenses make it clear that we only own the hardware and rent everything that makes it valuable. The promise of something like digital copies of books or movies is that they are only ghosts of their physical versions. But so much of what we now create exists solely as bits, and it is all stored in a semi-ephemeral state within the controlled architecture of software and services. I do not think we have come to terms with this, in Bustillos’ words, “cultural […] vulnerability”.

Improvements to Photos in iOS 15 ⇥ tomsguide.com

I completely agree with Philip Michaels at Tom’s Guide: Photos in iOS 15 is a great upgrade in lots of little ways. The information card that reveals EXIF data is way better, and I appreciate the better Memories features.

Best of all, for me, is the Photos widget. I cannot remember what it was like in iOS 14, so it might not have changed that much. I added the iOS 15 one to a home screen stack when I installed the first beta and it makes me smile all the time. It somehow manages to surface photos I have not seen in ages but are absolute gems. Not always, but with more consistency than I expected from a robot.

That is the best tip I can leave you with: add the Photos widget somewhere on your home screen. Maybe it will light up your days as often as it has mine.

Mela Is a New Cooking App From the Creator of Reeder ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Silvio Rizzi, the developer of RSS client Reeder, has released a brand new recipe and cooking app called Mela for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which has immediately become my favorite apps for planning and preparing meals. For me, the two essential aspects of an app like this are how it handles adding new recipes and whether it is easy to use while you’re cooking. Mela excels at both.

I have been using Mela for a few days and I could not agree more with Voorhees: it is fantastic. Recipes are laid out beautifully — including in print — there are several ways to import new recipes, and the cooking mode is simply excellent.

Because it is related to Reeder, it also has a feed reader built in. It will intelligently show only the posts that contain recipes. It is very clever, but it also reveals that many popular food websites do not have RSS feeds. For example, Serious Eats used to have one, but it was removed after the site’s redesign. According to a May tweet from Daniel Gritzer, its deactivation was only temporary, but it has not returned since.

Many food websites run on Squarespace. Even if they do not surface an RSS feed, you can try to URL hack your way into getting one by appending ?format=rss to the address. This does not always work. If you run a food blog on any platform and happen to be reading this, please make sure that you enable an RSS feed on your website. It is often something the CMS will generate for you, and it means that great apps like Mela will get even more useful.

1Password Goes Electron ⇥ sixcolors.com

Michael Fey of 1Password:

We could support as many versions of macOS as we wanted using Apple’s AppKit framework, but that meant adding another frontend toolkit to the mix. We could go all in on SwiftUI, but that meant reducing the number of operating system versions we could support. We could go all in on the same approach we were using for Linux and Windows, but that made it very difficult to create an app that looked and felt at home on macOS.

Ultimately we decided for a two-prong approach. We would build two Mac apps. One written in SwiftUI that targeted the latest operating systems and another using web UI that allowed us to cover older OSes.

[…]

Ultimately we made the painful decision to stop work on the SwiftUI Mac app and focus our SwiftUI efforts on iOS, allowing the Electron app to cover all of our supported Mac operating systems. We could have started over with AppKit as the UI toolkit for our Mac app, but this would have put us significantly behind schedule and also would have added another frontend toolkit to maintain over the long term. This decision came with a big challenge, however, as we knew we still needed to deliver a top-tier user experience on macOS.

Even as someone who does not currently use 1Password, I first found myself irked by the rationale laid out in Fey’s post. As much as possible, customers should not see the impact of financial decisions on a business. When a restaurant is impacted by rising food and labour costs, it can make choices about how to compensate: it can raise prices, reduce the ingredients that go into each dish, or eliminate items. But when I sit down to my meal, I should not feel like something is incomplete or missing.

As I thought more, I realized that being annoyed at Fey’s arguments was only scratching the surface. Yet another Electron app in the lives of many Mac users should be seen as a reflection of the great demand placed on developers by cross-platform availability, and the poor quality of tools to make that happen. 1Password is not a small company — it has nearly 500 employees — and the history of its product indicates that it cares deeply about a great Mac experience. Years ago, when I was a 1Password user, I remember it being among my favourite apps to use. Who knew that something as boring as a password manager could be fun and beautiful? If a company like 1Password feels like the Mac can share an Electron app with Windows and Linux, that seems like a concerning state of affairs.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I have to read this as a (gently stated) indictment of the current state of SwiftUI. AgileBits was willing to put in the extra work for iOS, because it’s an important platform and SwiftUI is clearly the future there. But implementing it on the Mac required a lot of duplicate work — and what’s worse, SwiftUI apps aren’t compatible with older versions of macOS. AgileBits was planning on covering the older versions with an Electron version, but once it decided the SwiftUI implementation for the Mac was too much work, it pulled the plug — and now plans to ship an Electron version to all Mac users.

Rich Siegel, in a lengthy Twitter thread about cross-platform frameworks and app efficiency (I have merged several successive tweets and, with editorial discretion, converted these thoughts into paragraphs to make everything easier to read):

Electron is an *extremely* effective way for developers to rapidly bring up an application. It’s a fully functional application framework. It’s as close an expression of the original ideal of “write once, run anywhere” as I can think of. (That term first came out of Sun’s marketing for Java. A lot of us made fun of it back then, mostly because it wasn’t true at the time.) And of course with Electron, you get a common UI/UX for all of your target platforms, deploy everywhere make use of existing Web design and development resources, etc, etc.

But. All of those upsides come at the cost of everything I’ve just finished laying out. And things start to get really sticky, because if you take a survey of the Electron products that have become entrenched in our daily lives, they almost all come from companies that have specific BUSINESS goals for developing them that way.

Siegel’s thread is not specifically about 1Password and, if anything, Snell’s post uses 1Password’s announcement to frame some of the issues facing developers on MacOS. 1Password is merely a symptom of a greater set of issues; Electron is a weak patch on a leaking tire.

I know that Electron has its defenders who might write to me and tell me that I have always been wrong in disliking it and that I should try using better apps like Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. But I have tried VS Code, and if this is the best that Electron can offer, I do not see why I should retract my criticisms. It is this decade’s Java.

The fact of the matter is that there has never been a good cross-platform framework — not when developers only had to worry about Windows and Mac OS X, and not now when they are trying to cover at least twice as many operating systems. Apple’s attempts — SwiftUI and Catalyst, the latter of which 1Password’s Fey does not mention — have not corrected that problem, and they only cover half of the platforms developers commonly support. When even premiere Mac developers think Electron is the best option they have, it makes me worried.