Coyote Cartography
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  • The common wisdom is that movie theatres may go the way of the dodo now, but I suspect, in a few years, we may see a revival of the old “movie palace,” much grander theatres owned directly by movie studios.

    → 7:50 PM, Dec 31
  • Somehow Clermont, Florida, became interesting when I wasn’t paying attention.

    → 5:14 PM, Dec 30
  • As an SF Bay Area resident, I shouldn’t idly look at Kansas City real estate. “3BR/2BA 1850 sq.ft. downtown penthouse, $350K!” “3BR/2BA 1800 sq.ft. home built in 1905, walkable neighborhood, $200K!”

    → 7:54 PM, Dec 28
  • Many years ago Tampa tried a “Channelside” entertainment district that largely flopped. For its replacement, Sparkman Wharf, the new owners apparently decided “okay, what if we make it interesting this time.” Good call.

    → 4:18 PM, Dec 27
  • Michelle Yeoh mostly sells it through the sheer power of being Michelle Yeoh, but Star Trek: Discovery’s long and wobbly redemption arc for Emperor Georgiou would have worked better if the first season hadn’t gone in so damn hard on making her irredeemably evil. 📺

    → 5:54 PM, Dec 17
  • San Francisco’s Cliff House restaurant is shutting down, a combination of the pandemic and disputes between the National Park Service and the family that’s run it for ~50 years. I’ll miss using it as a remote office once in a blue moon.

    Cliff House's upper level, a bar on the balconyA Sidecar cocktail (I think) at the balcony bar.Sutro's, the fancier restaurant on the Cliff House's lower level. The balcony bar is visible at the top of the picture.

    → 7:19 PM, Dec 14
  • Taking a personal day, and taking advantage of outdoor dining while it’s still available. The weather app says it’s only 63 out, but it is quite warm nonetheless.

    → 5:19 PM, Dec 4
  • I’ve been at my current job over two and a half years—the longest time I’ve been at the same company in two decades. I’m not a job-hopper by choice; I just have a knack for finding companies that have money issues or do big pivots, and I fill in with short-term contracts.

    → 2:58 PM, Dec 1
  • Finally admitting that “nag self to do healthy things” apps just irritate me and moving WaterMinder and Round off my Home Screen.

    → 2:25 PM, Dec 1
  • Finally buying a Blu-Ray player before the Thanksgiving weekend sales disappear. I’m not sure this is a great idea, because it occurs to me (now) that I am historically just not the kind of person who frequently re-watches movies.

    → 6:25 PM, Nov 30
  • “All Things Must Pass,” Colin Hanks’s documentary about Tower Records, is a lot of fun. And it has impeccably typeset titles and captions. (Yes, I am the sort of person who notices that.)

    → 8:36 PM, Nov 29
  • For a few years now my Thanksgiving quasi-tradition has been me and two or three close friends going to a restaurant. This continues this year—sort of: I’m in a “quarantine bubble” with one friend and another is my roommate, and we’ve gotten takeout from Manresa.

    → 2:51 PM, Nov 26
  • Despite often making fun of smooth jazz, I’ve found it’s great to have on as background working music. The downside is that I’m training Apple Music to suggest endless Dave Koz and David Sanborn clones.

    → 1:45 PM, Nov 19
  • Giving Zenni Optical a shot for new glasses. I’m annoyed that they won’t let me enter the separate prescription I have for computer/reading glasses, instead insisting on calculating it from my standard prescription and then telling me the numbers are wrong, though.

    → 6:56 PM, Nov 18
  • I’ve been using Ulysses off and on for years and just figured out what filters are good for. I’m still not sure it can match Scrivener for serious novel-writing, but I’m definitely not sure it can’t.

    → 12:33 PM, Nov 18
  • Trying to figure out how to minimize risk to myself and my mother for Christmas, as I’m supposed to make a cross-country trip (and back). I suspect it involves self-quarantine on both ends of the trip and testing.

    → 9:44 PM, Nov 16
  • It’s been fascinating to go into the Trailers app on Apple TV, or trailer web sites, and see what shows up as 2020 marches on and tentpole features fade. It’s a growing collection of indies, VOD releases, obscure documentaries, imports, and category-defying oddities.

    → 2:37 AM, Nov 16
  • I appreciate this place having outdoor patio seating, but it’s approaching the time of year where they really need some patio heaters. It’s 57 in the sun, but it feels a lot colder in the shade.

    → 4:24 PM, Nov 14
  • You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but apparently you can fool 70 million people four years and counting.

    → 11:50 AM, Nov 13
  • I am tempted to buy the M1-based MacBook Air despite having bought, earlier this year, a (cough) MacBook Air. I’ll probably resist, though.

    → 9:33 PM, Nov 12
  • From mid-2018 through early 2020, my iPad Pro was my main portable. In early 2020 I bought the (last Intel!) MacBook Air and the updated iPad Mini, and they’ve completely displaced it: the Air is (mostly) better for creation and the Mini is (mostly) better for consumption.

    → 1:37 PM, Nov 11
  • The Hacker News community celebrates the Mac moving to an entirely new CPU architecture with the spirit of the true computer enthusiast: whining that they (probably) can’t put Linux on it.

    → 11:03 PM, Nov 10
  • Ulysses has behaved well enough under previous Big Sur betas that I wasn’t prepared for it to go comically south under the 11.0.1 beta. I see a new version that cites Big Sur compatibility as its main feature is on the horizon, at least!

    → 5:44 PM, Nov 6
  • I may have to break down and order another keyboard with Matias Quiet Click key switches. I love the feel of their non-quiet switches, but man, they’re loud. Back to the noticeably quieter MX Clear keyboard for now.

    → 12:53 PM, Nov 5
  • I am not quite making good on my quasi-joke to my boss at virtual standup today about working somewhere with comfort food and no internet, but sitting in an odd little tree-canopied nook with laptop and latte, I’m getting pretty close.

    → 6:48 PM, Nov 3
  • I don’t know whether this is celebrating victory or drowning sorrows yet, but it’s this kind of day either way. 760AF484-E577-478E-8856-FA2C3339CE00.jpg

    → 4:32 PM, Nov 3
  • I’ve encountered the first use of iOS “App Clips” in the wild I’ve seen, a menu at a very old pub in Oakland.

    → 3:15 PM, Oct 31
  • Hacker News is angry with me for criticizing Glenn Greenwald, but sorry: his work on Snowden doesn’t give him a free pass for spending two years arguing Russian interference in the 2016 election is a Democratic hoax and now going on to push the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    → 12:08 AM, Oct 30
  • I am losing a 606-day stand streak on the Apple Watch because it lost data when I had to erase and reset my new phone due to a SIM error. That’s… not a great feeling. It better start counting correctly again tomorrow, or I may just be going back to mechanical watches…

    → 12:12 AM, Oct 27
  • quibi (KWI-bee), noun. A unit of time for measuring the lifespan of ill-conceived internet startups: “Pets.com lasted four quibis.”

    → 4:46 PM, Oct 21
  • In an article about Tab diet cola ending production, I learned Odwalla has also entirely stopped production. I think I’ll actually miss it.

    → 9:06 PM, Oct 19
  • A lot of iPhone nerds seem to be dithering about choices this year: the Pro phones have both gotten marginally bigger, while there’s a new smaller option. Coming from the iPhone XR, though, for me the 12 Pro is a no-brainer.

    → 5:15 PM, Oct 16
  • First world podcast addict problems: I really dig Castro’s inbox/queue model for organizing and triaging episodes, but Overcast is equal or better at literally everything else. (Especially CarPlay, which I use a lot.)

    → 7:21 PM, Oct 13
  • There are persistent rumors that Apple will make portless iPhones next year that only charge wirelessly—but the port is there for data, too. A lot of cars have CarPlay, and most (like mine!) need those cables.

    → 5:44 PM, Oct 13
  • If you can’t shake the HomePod Mini and have its display light up with ALL SIGNS POINT TO YES or REPLY HAZY, ASK AGAIN LATER, a huge opportunity has been wasted.

    → 4:07 PM, Oct 13
  • Mini-rant: whenever people want to mock audiophiles they joke about “gold cables.” Y’all, there ARE crazy expensive cables, but gold ones are like five bucks. And gold contacts resist corrosion. (You don’t think that’s important, you haven’t lived in Florida.)

    → 12:55 PM, Oct 8
  • A brief chat about Chuck Wendig, the Internet Archive, and bad information spread in good faith

    Because I’ve got a bug up my butt about this again, let’s briefly dig into a social media myth that Will Not Die:

    “Chuck Wendig is suing the Internet Archive!”

    No. No, he is not.

    There are two important bits of background here.

    First, the Internet Archive. If you know them, you probably know them because of the “Wayback Machine” that archives millions of web sites. They do a lot of other archive-ish stuff, though, including collecting and scanning books. A while ago, they decided to create a digital “library” of those books: anyone could “check out” as many copies of those books at one time as the IA had physical copies of. This is more or less the way digital lending works from your local library: they pay for, say, three copies of a given ebook title, and now three library users can “check out” that book at once.

    Well, that’s the “more” part of “more or less”; the “less” part is that the IA was doing that with physical books and technically lending digital copies is not the same thing under copyright law. Even so, publishers mostly looked the other way.

    Until.

    At the start of the Great Pandemic, the IA decided they were now running the “National Emergency Library” and lifted the per-copy limit. If they had ten copies or a book or two or one, it didn’t matter, however many people wanted to check out a copy at once could. And the IA sent out press releases about this. They wanted everybody to know!

    I’m not going to argue about the ethics of modern copyright law, but as a legal matter, this is not a gray area, kids. It just isn’t. The Internet Archive was all but sending out notarized letters to publishers saying “we dare you jerky jerks to come after us with everything you’ve got,” and golly gee, they got sued by the Authors' Guild and several publishers. Who could possibly have predicted that outcome other than, you know, fucking everyone.

    You will notice, perhaps, that the IA was not sued by individual authors over this. They were sued by publishers and a writing guild.

    Second, Chuck Wendig. Wendig is a science fiction, horror-ish author who runs a popular blog and has a freewheeling, gonzo, over-the-top style—I’d argue more in his non-fiction than his fiction—that, well, you could call polarizing. (I enjoy it, most of the time, but I could see how many might be driven far away at high speed.) He also wrote a couple Star Wars novels, famously introducing the saga’s first major gay character in Star Wars: Aftermath.

    And this was not popular with a predictable loud subset of reactionary fans, who carried a hate-on for Wendig that culminated in the trolls getting him fired from Marvel’s “Shadow of Vader” comic book, ostensibly because of his “vulgarity” in expressing what Quartz calls, with delightful understatement, “his unabashedly left-wing political views.”

    So if Wendig didn’t sue the IA over the Emergency Library, how did he get involved in all this?

    Well, he called it a “pirate site,” which he pretty quickly apologized for, but also wrote a much longer statement on the subject.

    The problem with bypassing copyright and disrupting the chain of royalties that lead from books to authors is that it endangers our ability to continue to produce art—and though we are all in the midst of a crisis, most artists are on the razor’s edge in terms of being able to support themselves. Artists get no safety net. We don’t get unemployment and aren’t likely to be able to participate in any worker bailouts. Health insurance alone is a gutpunch cost, not to mention the healthcare costs that insurance wouldn’t even cover. I’m lucky enough (currently, at least), that I can weather a bit of that storm more easily, but most can’t, particularly young authors, debut authors, and marginalized authors who are already fighting for a seat at the table. I’m also not alone in calling this site out—others like Alexander Chee, NK Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, and Seanan McGuire have noted their concerns over this.

    I am all for access to information and entertainment, and remind folks that libraries here already allow you to take out e-books, even while their brick-and-mortar locations are closed. I used to work for a library system here in Pennsylvania, and libraries all around the country deserve their time to shine in this crisis, as we realize what vital institutions they are, both intellectually and as a service to the community.

    Come on, how could anyone read that and, in anything even approaching good faith, take major offense at it? This is empathetic to authors and libraries. Yes, it’s (gasp) making a claim that copyright does have value, and maybe you don’t see that. But I hope you at least see why a lot of authors feel they should be the ones to make the choice about how their books get distributed. I’m not against giving my own work away for free, but I am against you telling me that you’re going to give my work away for free and I have no choice in the matter.

    In fact, I don’t think the people who started this “Wendig sues the IA, film at 11” bullshit did so in good faith. I think many people spreading it are doing it in good faith, but bluntly, I think they’re being used by trolls relying on it being way easier to click “like” or “retweet” than to do fact-checking. (Frankly, I despair at how often I see left-leaning friends gleefully retweeting the most dubious shit that confirms their biases, but that’s a bridge I won’t burn today.)

    While this whole nonsense is months old, I’m seeing another new thread floating around today fisking an older book of writing advice from Wendig, inviting us all to mock how weird and bad his writing is and how awful his advice must be and oh yes remember he sued the Internet Archive!, and I’m out of patience nuggets for this one. If that’s your image of Chuck Wendig and what he’s like and what he writes, let me offer a different one, from “Follow the River, No Matter Its Rapids, No Matter Its Turns”:

    It’s a lot right now.

    I think if we can agree on anything, anything at all between us, it’s that everything is a whole lot. It’s too much. If you’re not screaming into a couch cushion soaked with gin right now, who even are you?

    But here’s what I’m thinking.

    I’m thinking all of this is a river. It’s a dark, fast river. It crawls serpentine through the earth, through the forests. Sometimes it moves slow, other times it’s all rapids. Sometimes it is eerily serene, and sometimes it’s rough enough to knock your teeth into your knees and draw blood. It’s waterfalls and eddies, it’s deep and it’s cold. Like all rivers, it can soothe you, and it can betray you.

    This river, the river we’re in and on now—it’s harder, meaner, a river after a flood, a river whose waters are not sated, who will not abate. It’s mudded up and frothing like the muzzle of a rabid wolf.

    You can fight against that river.

    We often do, in writing. We often go against our own moods, against the news of the world, against bad reviews and against poisoned thinking. Our work is often an act of anchoring our boots against the soft slick weeds and the water-smoothed stones and move against the current.

    Upstream, stories can be born.

    Sometimes, though, I think you gotta do the other thing.

    Sometimes, you go the other way.

    You go with the flow.

    You run with the river, not against it.

    And what that means, practically speaking, is you let it happen. What you’re feeling, what you’re seeing, sometimes those elements demand to be seen in the work. Sometimes the river is the channel that feeds the narrative sea, and that means you need to put it in there, out there, all over it. You don’t escape. You confront. You ride the turns, you rough out the rapids, you take all your fear and your anger and your confusion and you put it on the page. And not even in a way of trying to write something that’s marketable or sellable—but just trying to speak honestly about who you are, about the world in which we’re living, and about your grappling with all of it. It’s not even about writing a cogent book or a collective piece. It can be about taking the time to punch that keyboard and scream onto the page—if only to clear the water and find time to climb back onto shore to write something else. It can be the thing you’re writing, or it can be a way to get to the thing you’re writing.

    I don’t mean to suggest this as good “advice”—it’s certainly no requirement. You have to do what feels best and right—and, further, what feels most productive in the direction you need to be going. I’m only saying that, if it’s that much of a slog, if the slow churning march upriver and against the current feels like you’re fighting too hard and losing to the pressure, turn around and go the other way. Sometimes we want to, even need to, write about what’s going on inside our heads and our hearts. Sometimes we can’t ignore the room on fire. Sometimes we can’t get out of the river or go against it. And in those cases, let the waters take you. Write what needs to be written. Write what the river tells you to write. Follow the water, and see where you go.

    You may still hate that writing, but if you do, who even are you?

    → 7:36 PM, Oct 1
  • I have enjoyed having lots of craft beer to support local breweries during the Plague Year, but it is time to replenish the vermouth and garnishes and do some more manhattans and martinis.

    → 9:55 PM, Sep 28
  • Ever so slightly alarming that when I search for “panic nova review” in both Duck Duck Go and Google (in incognito mode) my own review appears to be the first hit. I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it just hasn’t gotten that many other reviews yet.

    → 1:50 AM, Sep 28
  • Ah: I hadn’t realized “Ted Lasso” was co-created by Bill Lawrence, of “Scrubs” fame. Anyway, this Variety column is terrific: variety.com/2020/tv/c… (And yes, I will keep stanning for this show.)

    → 11:08 PM, Sep 24
  • The local Rock Bottom Brewery has re-opened with a LOT of patio seating. It’s sort of odd: they’re a chain and not even my favorite as far as chains go, but their closure felt like a huge hole in this neighborhood somehow.

    → 3:30 PM, Sep 24
  • Well, the new speakers sound terrific if I stuff foam into their rear ports, but is this an acceptable condition for greatness? If Klipsch had the EQ-adjusting app they’ve apparently been promising for months ready, it’d be a different story, but…

    → 12:39 AM, Sep 24
  • It seems like the same Catalyst apps are better on Big Sur than they are on Catalina, like the TV app and the official Twitter client. (I’m hoping against hope Twitterrific or Tweetbot will take a chance on supporting Twitter’s new API, assuming it’s possible, though.)

    → 8:54 PM, Sep 22
  • “Ted Lasso” is, at least three and a half episodes in, not only a needed injection of cheer but almost shockingly well-written for such a brazenly fluffy comedy series. 📺

    → 8:37 PM, Sep 22
  • Now that macOS Big Sur is almost out, I guess it’s okay to update my iMac to Catalina.

    → 8:01 PM, Sep 20
  • I really shouldn’t buy new things as a way to relieve stress, because the way this year is going I’m going to end up with two new cars, nine computers, 28 smartphones and, I don’t know, a microbrewery near Arcata or something.

    → 12:36 AM, Sep 19
  • After a bit of hammering, I have tentatively concluded that in fact I can’t make an Intelephense PHP plugin for Panic Nova, but I’m not sure if the problem is Intelephense, Nova, or me.

    → 6:32 PM, Sep 17
  • Panic's Nova text editor (a review)

    Panic, the long-established makers of Mac utility software, seems fully aware that introducing a new, commercial code editor in 2020 is a quixotic proposition. Is there enough of an advantage to a native editor over both old school cross-platform editors like Emacs and explosively popular new editors like Visual Studio Code to persuade people to switch?

    I’m an unusual case as far as text editor users go: my primary job is technical writing, and the last three jobs that I’ve worked at have a “docs as code” approach, where we write documentation in Markdown and manage it under version control just like source code. The editor that works best for me in tech writing is the venerable BBEdit. When it comes to editing code, though, BBEdit lags behind. My suspicion is that BBEdit’s lack of an integrated package manager has hurt it here. Also, BBEdit’s language modules don’t support extending one another, making it effectively impossible to do full highlighting for a templating language like JSX or Jinja.

    When I was a web programmer, I was one of many who moved to TextMate, and used it for everything for a while. When the Godot-like wait for TextMate 2.0 became unbearable, I wandered the text editing wilderness, eventually splitting my loyalties between BBEdit, Sublime Text, and more recently VS Code. At this point, I suspect nothing will pull me away from BBEdit for technical writing, but for programming I’m open to persuasion.

    So: meet Nova.

    A screenshot of Nova's main window, showing its sidebar and a Ruby file.

    I’ve been using Nova off and on in beta for months. I’ve reported some bugs, although I may mention a couple here that I didn’t catch until after 1.0’s release. And, I’m going to compare it to the GUI editors that I’ve been using recently: BBEdit, Sublime Text, and VS Code.

    Nova is a pretty editor, as far as such things go, and with files of relatively reasonable size it’s fast. With stupid huge files its performance drops noticeably, though. This isn’t just the ridiculous 109MB, nearly 450,000-line SQL file I threw at it once, it’s also with a merely 2MB, 50,000-line SQL file, and Nova’s offer to turn off syntax highlighting in both files didn’t help it much. This may sound like a silly test, but in my day job I’m occasionally stuck editing an 80,000-line JSON file by hand (don’t ask). This is something BBEdit and VS Code can do without complaint. Panic wrote their own text editing engine for Nova, which is brave, but it needs more tuning for pathological cases like these. They may not come up often, but almost every programmer has one stupid huge file to deal with.

    Nova has an integrated terminal and an integrated SSH client, and even an integrated file transfer system based on Panic’s Transmit. In fact, if you have Transmit and use Panic Sync, it knows all of those servers out of the box. Nova has a task workflow system for automating building and running. You can associated servers, tasks, and more with individual projects; Nova’s project settings are considerably more comprehensive than I’ve seen in other editors. You can even set up remote tasks. Nova has a serviceable Git client built in, too. Like VS Code, Nova uses JavaScript for its extension API, and it has built-in Language Server Protocol support—it’s a superbly solid foundation.

    Beyond that, some smaller features have become table stakes for modern GUI editors, and Nova handles them with aplomb. “Open Quickly” can jump to any file in the open project, as well as search by symbols or just symbols in currently open files; it has a command palette; you can comprehensively edit keybindings. It has multiple cursor support for those of us who like that, and a “mini map” view for those of you who like that, although know that you are wrong. Nova’s selection features include “Select all in scope” and “Select all between brackets,” a command I often use in BBEdit and miss dearly in Code. (Both Nova and BBEdit select between brackets and braces, although BBEdit also selects between parentheses.) This effectively becomes “Select between tags” in HTML, a nice touch. There are a few other commands like “Select all in function” and “Select all in scope” that I didn’t have any luck in making work at all; a little more documentation would be nice.

    That’s worth an aside. Panic has created a “library” of tech note-style articles about Nova sorted by publication date rather than an actual manual, and it’s not always easy to find the information you want in it. I know this is just what a technical writer would say, but I’d dearly like to see a human-organized table of contents starting with the editor basics and moving to advanced topics like version control, server publishing and extension authoring.

    The Zen of Language Servers

    A lot of Visual Studio Code’s smarts depend on the implementation of a “language server” behind the scenes: language servers offer almost spookily intelligent completion. For instance, take this PHP snippet:

    if ($allowed) {
        $response = new Response(405);
        $response->
    

    If you have the Intelephense PHP language server plugin, Code understands that $response is an instance of Response and, after you type the > above, offers completions of method names from the Response class.

    Right now, Nova’s mostly limited to the language servers completion systems Panic provides, and they’re… not always so smart. In that snippet above, Nova starts by offering completions of, apparently, everything in the open project, starting with the variables. If I type “s,” it narrows things down to methods that begin with “s,” but it’s all methods that start with “s” rather than just the methods from Response. The “Jump to Definition” command shows a similar lack of context; if I highlight a method name that’s defined in multiple places, Nova shows me a popup menu and prompts me to choose which one to jump to, rather than introspecting the code to make that decision itself. (Edit: Panic said on Twitter that they’re not using LSP in any of their built-in languages yet!)

    But, this is a solvable problem: there’s (I think) no reason someone couldn’t write an Inteliphense plugin for Nova. If Nova’s ecosystem takes off, it could be pretty formidable pretty quickly.

    Walk like a Mac

    Even so, LSP support isn’t Panic’s biggest selling point. Unlike Sublime Text or VS Code, Nova isn’t cross-platform: it’s a Mac-only program written to core platform APIs. Is that still a huge draw in 2020? (Is it instead a drawback?)

    You can definitely see a difference between Nova and BBEdit on one side and Sublime and Code on the other in terms of resource usage. With the two Ruby files shown in the screenshot above loaded, I get:

    • VS Code: 355 MB, 6 processes
    • Sublime Text: 338 MB, 2 processes
    • Nova: 101 MB, 2 processes
    • BBEdit: 97 MB, 1 process

    Code is an Electron-based program, although Microsoft famously puts a lot of effort into making it not feel like the black hole a lot of Electron-based apps are. Sublime uses its own proprietary cross-platform framework. In fairness, while us nerds like to harp on resource usage a lot, if your computer’s got 16G or more of RAM in it, this probably isn’t a big deal.

    You notice Nova’s essential Mac-ness in other ways. Its preference pane is, like BBEdit’s, an actual preference pane, instead of opening in another tab like Code or just opening a JSON file in a new tab (!) like Sublime. And while all editors better have first-class keyboard support—and Nova does—a good Mac editor should have first-class mouse support, too, and it does. You notice that in the drag-and-drop support for creating new tabs and splits. Nova’s sidebar is also highly customizable, possibly more so than any editor I’ve regularly used. (Yes, Emacs fans, I know you can write all of Nova in Lisp if you want. When one of you does that, please get back to me.)

    Unlike BBEdit, though, Nova doesn’t have a Mac-like title bar, or a Mac-like outline view of the project files, or Mac-like tabs. (Well, BBEdit doesn’t have tabs at all, which turns out to be a great UI decision once you have a dozen or more files open, but never mind.) This isn’t necessarily bad; people often say BBEdit “looks old,” and it’s hard not to suspect that what people mean by that—whether or not they know it—is that it looks like the long-established Mac program it is. Nova is relying less on “we have a Mac UI and the other guys don’t” than on “we have Panic’s designers and the other guys don’t.” Make no mistake, having Panic’s designers counts for a lot.

    What may be more disappointing to old school Mac nerds is AppleScript support: none whatsoever. It doesn’t even have a vestigial script dictionary. Again, this may not be something most people care much about; personally, I hate having to write AppleScript. But I love being able to write AppleScript. BBEdit’s extensive scriptability is one of its hidden strengths. Nova’s Node-based JavaScript engine is probably more powerful for its own extensions and certainly more accessible to anyone under the age of 50, but it may be hard to call it from external programs.

    So is it worth it?

    That probably depends on where you’re coming from.

    If you loved—or still use—Panic’s older editor, Coda, this is a no-brainer upgrade. If you used Espresso, a Coda-ish editor that always seemed to be on the verge of greatness without ever reaching it, Nova may also be a no-brainer for you.

    If you’re a fan of Sublime Text, BBEdit, TextMate, or another editor that doesn’t have native Language Server Protocol support, you should definitely try Nova. Sublime and TextMate have more plugins (especially Sublime), but many extensions seem to be languishing (especially TextMate). BBEdit never had a great extension ecosystem to start with. All of these editors have strengths Nova doesn’t, but the reverse is also true, and Nova may catch up.

    If you’re an Emacs or Vim power user, we both know you’re just reading this out of academic interest and you’re not going to switch. C’mon.

    If you use Visual Studio Code, though, it’s way tougher to make the case for Nova. Code has a vastly larger extension library. It has the best support for LSP of any editor out there (LSP was developed for Code). Despite being Electron-based, it’s pretty high-performance. Code doesn’t have an integrated SSH or FTP client, but it does have an integrated terminal and task runner and Git client. If you don’t object to using an editor that isn’t a “perfect fit” with the Mac UI, Code is very, very good… and it’s free.

    I don’t object to Nova’s pricing model—$99 up front including a year of updates, $49 for future years of updates—but I can’t help but wonder if Panic should have gone with super aggressive introductory pricing. Also, I saw more than a few suggestions on Hacker News about how there should be a Code-to-Nova extension translator; I’m not sure automatic conversion would be practical, but a guide on manual conversion seems like an excellent idea.

    For my day job of technical writing, I’m going to stick to BBEdit. (One day I’ll write up an article about why I think it’s the best “documentation as code” editor on the market.) For programming and web editing, when I was working on both a Ruby and a PHP project—the former a Rails learning exercise, the latter an obstinate “I am going to write a modern PHP app without using a framework” exercise—I kept trying Nova’s betas and then switching back to Code for Inteliphense and, I swear to God, MacVim for Tim Pope’s amazing rails.vim plugin. I suspect Nova could duplicate both of those, but I’m not sure I want to be the one to do it. (Also, while Panic has decent reference documentation for writing extensions, I’d like to see a few simple end-to-end walkthroughs for those of us who look at a huge list of reference topics and don’t know where to start.)

    But Nova isn’t just pretty, it’s powerful, and has a lot of promise. The editors I’ve been comparing it to have been around since 2015 for VS Code, 2008 for Sublime Text, and 1992 (!) for BBEdit; it’s not reasonable to expect Nova to blow past them in every respect right out of the starting gate. Even so, they are Nova’s competition. Catching up fast is an essential requirement.

    So: yes, I’ve bought Nova, and I’m rooting for Panic here. I’ll come back in a year and report if I’m willing to stay on the update train.

    → 1:01 PM, Sep 17
  • The air is clear for the first time in nearly two weeks and I am going to Shake Shack, dammit.

    → 1:54 PM, Sep 16
  • I feel like writing up a review of Panic’s Nova code editor, but I have to decide if I’m really that motivated.

    → 4:55 PM, Sep 11
  • Switched back to my old desktop speakers to see whether the new ones really sound better to me. And they do, but the old ones (Audyssey’s sadly short-lived “media speakers”) still actually pack a heck of a punch. I should really see if I can find a good home for them.

    → 5:17 PM, Sep 10
  • Well, it’s sure nice that the high temperatures today came in about ten degrees lower than predicted thanks to [checks notes] smoke from the wildfires thick enough to block out the sun.

    → 7:17 PM, Sep 8
  • I keep toying with the idea of buying a Linux laptop, then remind myself that the chance of me actually using it, let alone moving to it as a daily driver, is still very small.

    → 2:05 PM, Sep 5
  • Blue Apron has been good for kicking me in the butt a bit for cooking again, after many years, but it’s nice to be doing dishes they’d never do—like pork slow roasted in apple cider for eight hours.

    → 9:18 PM, Sep 4
  • The new desk is here, and—I’m conflicted. It’s pretty but clearly not well-built, and right now I kind of wish I’d stuck with the old desk and just gotten speaker stands. I’ll see if it grows on me, I guess.

    → 10:07 PM, Aug 28
  • ‪I like the Art of Noise and Tom Jones cover of “Kiss” better than Prince’s original. Sorry, everyone‬.

    → 9:22 PM, Aug 25
  • My “day job” work setup is setting a laptop up on a stand on the desk in front of my iMac and reconnecting the external keyboard and mouse to it. And until the new desk arrives, using the iMac as an AirPlay speaker with Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil and SoundSource doing EQ.

    → 1:03 PM, Aug 25
  • Update: the new speakers came in earlier than expected. Also as expected, they do not fit on the old desk, so they stay in the box a few days. #FirstWorldProblems

    → 8:07 PM, Aug 24
  • Now that I’ve cleared everything off my desk but the iMac in preparation for a new desk later this week, the old desk looks way more spacious!

    → 7:15 PM, Aug 24
  • I’m always irrationally amused by putting in an address of a company I’ve just done business with into Google or Apple Maps and discovering the address is actually a “Mailboxes Plus” or similar store.

    → 4:02 PM, Aug 24
  • I’ve finally ordered a slightly bigger desk and, with some trepidation, new powered speakers that seem to be largely audio-nerd-approved. Not cheap, but less than good desktop-sized passive speakers and an integrated amp—and a 30-day return policy, just in case.

    → 10:53 PM, Aug 21
  • For years I’ve expected to move back to Florida to take care of my mom. Despite a push this year—as much from her as me—to consider Sacramento or the far reaches of the SF Bay Area, I’m increasingly suspecting Florida’s going to make way more sense financially/logistically.

    → 1:39 PM, Aug 20
  • So now it seems like I’m going to end up with a binder for CDs and a separate photo album-style box for the liner inserts, mostly because I don’t want to try and track down a new binder suitable for both and start completely over.

    → 5:02 PM, Aug 13
  • In preparation for a possible (seemingly down from “probable”) move, I’m trying to move all my CDs in huge binders, throwing away the jewel cases. Part of me wants to keep the booklets—but I know I’m not likely to ever even open the binder if the CD is already ripped.

    → 10:38 PM, Aug 12
  • After using Big Sur for less than a week, my two biggest aesthetic complaints are (1) the menu text is a point size too small and (2) if you’re going to give everything rounded corners, mask out the corners of the screen so they look rounded, too, like 1980s-era Macs did.

    → 12:55 PM, Aug 12
  • Currently reading: It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens 📚

    → 3:50 PM, Aug 11
  • I really, really liked HBO’s noir revival of “Perry Mason.” Four out of four moodily lit shots of bourbon. 📺

    → 12:42 AM, Aug 10
  • I’m bemused to say it, but I think I liked the first episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. 📺

    → 1:04 AM, Aug 8
  • When I launched macOS Big Sur, I thought, “Oh, that transparency isn’t much at all,” then realized I’d been running Catalina with the “reduced transparency” setting on and the setting had stayed enabled.

    → 11:55 AM, Aug 7
  • Immediate impression of macOS Big Sur: Apple looked over at the sweeping UI changes Windows made a few years ago and said, “Oh yeah? Hold our rosé”

    → 10:22 PM, Aug 6
  • Currently reading: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson 📚

    → 12:23 PM, Aug 5
  • As much as I feel like I should be moving away from Google services, I’m finally getting serious about filters and labels—which only work well in Gmail’s web view and Mailplane. Am I going to end up with one mail client for Gmail and another for “legacy” IMAP? Sigh.

    → 1:27 PM, Aug 4
  • I have discovered that I still have the box for my iPhone 3GS, and inside it is: my original iPhone. 63B88A53-7BB1-49AC-A10D-6602CB8D49A0.jpg

    → 7:34 PM, Jul 31
  • I’m narrowing in on the desktop audio system I’m likely to buy, but since I will have to buy the bigger computer desk I’ve been putting off for years to support this and I may be moving next year, I’m forcing myself to go all Marie Kondo on the office space first.

    → 11:28 AM, Jul 31
  • Well, I suppose Apple technically has one more day to get the Big Sur public beta out in July? My suspicion is they’re waiting to base it off developer beta 4, though.

    → 4:20 PM, Jul 30
  • Trying a bit of an experiment with indiebookclub, an “IndieWeb” experiment in Goodreads-like book tracking. It’s very minimal, but I don’t mind that—and I’m trying to decouple from Amazon.

    → 6:04 PM, Jul 29
  • Finished reading: The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald 📚

    → 5:59 PM, Jul 29
  • Hmm. Well, I was going to securely erase my old backup drive, but after an hour or so of trying I appear to be unable to mount it. So, maybe it really doesn’t need erasing…

    → 7:25 PM, Jul 28
  • Taking the shocking step of finally cancelling Netflix.

    → 7:09 PM, Jul 28
  • I’m realizing, after years of pretending otherwise, that I’m not really a headphone person, and I’d rather have bookshelf speakers for my “home office” sound system. (Which would require me to buy a bigger desk, and maybe an amp, and…)

    → 1:36 AM, Jul 27
  • Today’s very expensive lesson: Magic Trackpads are super fragile. I didn’t know this was in my bag, which is how it fell. Just three feet, but right onto its corner, apparently. 7E964A24-B3F2-484D-8052-9B4B34ADEF81.jpg

    → 3:49 PM, Jul 23
  • I have come out of the virtual writing workshop I’ve been at with ~1300 words written on a new novella whose working title is “Fixer and the Circus,” although I don’t think that’s going to stick. (Granted, “Kismet” was meant to be a working title…)

    → 5:20 PM, Jul 19
  • It’s so hard to find a café or brewery that I’m comfortable sitting at now—it needs an outside patio with actual shade—that now that I’m at one, I’m not sure I know how to get going on writing here.

    → 5:09 PM, Jul 19
  • After a year or so with iA Writer, I’m trying going back to Ulysses again as a writing machine. There are still a couple things I like more about Ulysses, although I prefer iA Writer’s relative openness in file storage. (And I’m bringing iA’s typeface with me.)

    → 12:37 PM, Jul 18
  • I really want the public beta of macOS Big Sur; I’m wondering if they’re not releasing it because they want to fix the bug that screws up Catalina updates if you install the two OSes on separate file system volumes within the same container.

    → 5:27 PM, Jul 16
  • I feel like I’m in quite a minority in actually liking macOS’s full screen mode on laptops.

    → 9:39 PM, Jul 13
  • I’ll be surprised if John Lithgow doesn’t get an Emmy nomination for “Perry Mason.” 📺

    → 12:16 AM, Jul 13
  • It feels like every indie podcast I listen to has started a new paid membership program in the last two months, and while it’s understandable, it’s oddly dispiriting. I know it’s super controversial to say “actually sometimes free ad-supported things are good,” but, well.

    → 8:59 PM, Jul 9
  • Socially distant. 2AB59398-BC4D-4894-B002-D08602AC1132.jpg

    → 5:02 PM, Jul 8
  • I’ve just started reading the third Travis McGee Novel, A Purple Place for Dying. McGee, a PI who described himself as a “salvage consultant,” starred in nearly two dozen books by author John D. MacDonald; I read the first book as quasi-inspiration for my two Florida noir shorts, and I’m considering getting back to that character/series. But yikes, the book kicks off with casually misogynistic action/narration, in that sort of sublimated, ambient way that I suppose one might expect in an adventure story written in the 1960s. Fifty-odd years later, though, it’s…disconcerting at best.

    On the one hand, I’m surprised no one’s successfully made a movie or TV series about McGee. They came close in the early 1980s, with a TV movie starring Sam Elliott that inexplicably traded Florida for California, something Elliott thought was a mistake. On the other, one can argue that there effectively was a successful Travis McGee TV show in the 1970s that also traded Florida for California—and named the main character Jim Rockford.

    → 1:27 PM, Jul 4
  • Trying to learn how to stop multitasking is quite a struggle now.

    → 10:34 PM, Jul 2
  • Finally giving Spotify a good trial run after years of using Apple Music, and…eh? I like Apple’s “For You” better than Spotify’s “Daily Mixes,” but neither has a real edge—but I really miss iTunes/Music’s miniplayer mode

    → 12:35 PM, Jul 2
  • Blue Apron has just informed me “Important update! Your order has changed,” by which they mean “your order has been cancelled.” Well then.

    → 12:52 PM, Jul 1
  • The more I play with other editors, the more I realize what I really want is BBEdit with two modern big-ticket features it currently lacks: integrated package management, and Language Server Protocol support. (Which could be a package, if BBEdit expanded its event model a bit.)

    → 10:28 PM, Jun 30
  • Realizing that I have an Apple developer account which has expired—and is associated with a company that no longer exists, even though it is my personal email address. I bet fixing this will be fun!

    → 6:58 PM, Jun 28
  • Since I’ve been blocked on a theoretical sequel to “Kismet” for…two years, maybe I can come up with a novel or novella around Fixer, the eponymous protagonist of two 1970s Florida noir shorts. This seems like a good time for noir.

    → 10:10 PM, Jun 26
  • Microsoft is closing its retail stores. This is a retreat from the consumer market, which makes me wonder about their long-term plans for the Surface line.

    → 1:06 PM, Jun 26
  • I am usually fairly reticent about installing beta OSes on my devices, but I really want to install a beta of macOS 11 on my laptop to try and adjust to the new look. (My iMac, meanwhile, is still hanging out on Mojave.)

    → 1:28 PM, Jun 25
  • www.theverge.com/2020/6/24… This makes me sad and a little nervous about my great (and woefully underused) PEN-F camera.

    → 2:22 PM, Jun 24
  • I just realized that Reeder, my RSS app, has a “Reading List” account that can save any web page for reading later. I’ll have to see if I like it more than Instapaper…

    → 1:07 AM, Jun 20
  • Teriyaki quest update: I made a version earlier this week which was good but not correct, and this has sent me down a bonkers rabbit hole of competing recipes and food science questions. But I have concocted a new recipe to try next week sometime.

    → 8:47 PM, Jun 19
  • Visual Studio Code with Intelephense is so good for PHP work it’s making it hard for me to give Panic’s upcoming Nova editor a truly fair shake. I’m trying, though—Nova is pretty neat.

    → 12:08 PM, Jun 16
  • True confession: I really miss mall chicken teriyaki, and am probably going to have to break down and learn a copycat recipe.

    → 1:28 PM, Jun 15
  • In my ongoing effort to make a work-from-home setup that involves a personal iMac, an office-supplied MackBook Pro, and a pretty small desk, the MBP is now set up on a stand in front of the iMac, This isn’t bad, but it’s weird.

    → 1:52 PM, Jun 10
  • So, on my first day out to see Sunnyvale’s new outdoor dining area, I can back to find my car covered with pine sap that two car washes have only smeared (and, to be fair, cleaned). How’s your day?

    → 5:59 PM, Jun 8
  • A little weird being in Sacramento with so few people wearing masks compared to the Bay Area.

    → 4:33 PM, Jun 7
  • You know, I didn’t actually hate Apple’s butterfly keyboard until I bought the new MacBook Air with the Magic keyboard, and then went back to my work laptop. Yikes.

    → 4:19 PM, Jun 1
  • Trail at Sabercat Historical Park in the Fremont hills. C736115A-995F-45BC-98DB-1B828CD3A3B9.jpg

    → 6:16 PM, May 30
  • Finally making my way into the second season of “Counterpart,” and Olivia Williams is SO GOOD in this episode. I mean, she’s been good throughout, but holy hand grenades. 📺

    → 9:55 PM, May 29
  • I kind of want a new Mac mini, but I’ve already bought too many gadgets in the name of End Times Blues.

    → 9:39 PM, May 29
  • Man, some people on Hacker News get super cranky when you say web fonts make sites more consistent across devices than using whatever fonts are available on the user’s system. It’s not a moral judgement, people, it’s the literal definition of “consistency.”

    → 3:41 PM, May 29
  • After years of a muddled music library, I’m revamping it all to have local music entirely out of iTunes, and may consolidate my streaming entirely onto Spotify.

    → 8:53 PM, May 28
  • I seem to be starting the process of semi-seriously looking for a home in Vallejo. I’m as surprised by this as anyone.

    → 12:36 PM, May 28
  • The exit survey page when I canceled my TIDAL subscription is broken in Safari, which somehow seems symbolic of the whole affair, really

    → 7:32 PM, May 27
  • The awesome Mac OS Catalina fonts you didn’t know you had access to - Typography.Guru

    → 11:50 AM, May 26
  • I still want a program that’s basically Scrivener for Markdown—organize files into folders with arbitrary ordering, be able to display panes side by side with attached notes, have a research folder, be able to collate files together when exporting. Nothing quite does this.

    → 9:08 PM, May 23
  • Sitting on a bench in the shade in a park with my laptop isn’t the same as sitting in my favorite café, but it’ll do.

    → 5:19 PM, May 23
  • I’ve again given up and gone out shopping rather than getting delivery, after Safeway’s online checkout system broke in two different browsers. If I get the plague, at least I have an impulse buy of mint It’s It ice cream cookies.

    → 9:31 PM, May 21
  • I headed out for lunch with the intention of getting ingredients for that broccoli salad, but ended up taking an unnecessary drive and getting a takeout pizza and donuts. My quarantine diet has regressed to college, sans the Perkins to hang out in at 10pm.

    → 4:11 PM, May 21
  • I’ll miss Sweet Tomatoes sort of in spite of itself, but at least I’ll still have Joan’s Broccoli Madness salad.

    → 12:49 PM, May 21
  • It occurs to me that I’ve gone for some kind of takeout every day for the last three. I won’t say this makes things feel normal, per se, but they feel just a little bit closer.

    → 6:28 PM, May 20
  • Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use a design pattern.” Now they have two problems.

    → 11:16 AM, May 19
  • I’m amused that the first ticket filed against my Nova theme came about an hour after it was posted, from @danielpunkass, no less. :)

    → 10:30 PM, May 16
  • Working on a theme for Panic’s Nova editor based on the default theme from Espresso, a web editor I never really got into but thought was beautiful.

    → 2:28 PM, May 16
  • After stumbling into his YouTube channel, I have bought the ebook of Kent Rollins' cookbook “A Taste of Cowboy,” which is as far as I know not as risqué as it sounds. (I bought on Apple Books, because (1) color and better typography, (2) not giving money to Amazon.)

    → 9:51 PM, May 12
  • I’ve always loved the five o’clock-ish cocktail hour at home. I’ve heard that the Great Pause has brought the idea back, after a fashion…

    → 9:06 PM, May 12
  • I think what I’m learning from much more cooking is: I need new pans. I’ve ordered a new non-stick skillet, and my yet replace my seemingly season-resistant hipster “new vintage” cast iron skillet with cheaper and generally better-reviewed Lodge cast iron.

    → 12:04 PM, May 11
  • I’m pretty sure I’m spending way more supporting Bay Area microbreweries during quarantine: before I would go to one a week and have a couple pints; now I’m going to one every 1–2 weeks and buying eight pints at a time.

    → 1:53 PM, May 9
  • Feeling a bit of strain using the trackpad today, so going very old school. (If you’re a longtime Mac user, you probably recognize both of these.) 8E2CCE01-8D78-4C61-B9E1-19A70A5C0AF4.jpg

    → 1:11 PM, May 8
  • Despite the fact that I’m not remotely a baker, I’ve ended up ordering 10 pounds of artisan flour because it was easier than finding Gold Medal at the store—and cheaper than ordering Gold Medal from crooked resellers on Amazon.

    → 11:50 AM, May 6
  • Shuffling as much from Dropbox to iCloud Drive as I can, so I can uninstall the Mac Dropbox app. When I absolutely need to use it from the Mac, I’ll just use the web site or Transmit.

    → 6:23 PM, May 1
  • There are times I wish I had the money to fund reboots/reincarnations of once-beloved web sites that either shuttered or had their soul slowly crushed by short-sighted new owners. Today’s candidate: The AV Club.

    → 6:45 PM, Apr 30
  • A new lens I ordered for my woefully underused Pen-F camera came in—and it makes the camera too big for the little camera bag I have for it. Uh oh.

    → 6:45 PM, Apr 29
  • I have rediscovered the charming pointlessness of the iTunes Visualizer. Remember when that was a thing? Did you know it’s still a thing, even in Catalina?

    → 4:25 PM, Apr 23
  • Making a little “shelter-at-home diary” showing where I’ve been for shopping and takeout since April 1, and wondering if I am really bad at shelter-at-home.

    → 12:21 PM, Apr 20
  • I’m poking again at PHP, and seeing how “modern” I can get without feeling like I’m writing Java. Considering the radical notion of whether you can (gasp) use a global variable or two without the world ending.

    → 9:45 PM, Apr 18
  • Just discovering the Starz show “Counterpart” now that it’s finished—after only two seasons, although I’m told it has an actual ending—and on Amazon Prime. And wow, so far it’s so good. 📺

    → 9:43 PM, Apr 16
  • Starting to suspect Blue Apron is secretly funded by the Kale Growers of America.

    → 11:22 PM, Apr 14
  • No, YOU drove an irrational distance to a Sonic Drive-In when it occurred to you they were basically designed for social distancing compliant fast food meals

    → 4:49 PM, Apr 11
  • (1) It took me just a few hours to realize how much I like the iPad mini form factor for this “lean back” role. (2) It took me just a few hours to remember how damn frustrating Touch ID is for me compared to Face ID.

    → 12:02 AM, Apr 10
  • A laptop that I really want to carry around with me upends assumptions I’ve had about Correct Computing Devices™ the last few years. If this is my lightweight writing/editing machine now and the iPad falls to primarily a “lean back” device, then… iPad mini > iPad Pro?

    → 12:38 AM, Apr 8
  • Since I’m finding myself on video conference calls a lot more during this period, I was considering getting a headset–but my Airpods are working out surprisingly well.

    → 1:43 PM, Apr 7
  • Just before the shelter-in-place order, the office gave me a new MacBook Pro, but since it wasn’t fully set up I had to bring both home. Now I have my new Air, but haven’t got the kit to send back the Pro it’s replacing. 4 laptops. I feel like I’m sheltering in an Apple Store.

    → 1:22 PM, Apr 4
  • And soon to face my increasingly common daily mental battle between “make another sandwich at home” vs. “brave the plague-filled wasteland to get any takeout that is not a sandwich”

    → 1:58 PM, Apr 3
  • First ~30 minutes with the Air: yes, this is good.

    → 1:41 AM, Apr 3
  • I may break down and start wearing a scarf, bandana, or shemagh as a face mask when I go out shopping. None of them are medical-grade choices, to be sure, but there’s mounting evidence they all fall into the “better than nothing” camp.

    → 4:09 PM, Apr 2
  • CARROT Weather users: in preparation for the eventual removal of the Dark Sky API (thanks, Tim Apple), what’s the best other weather source in your experience?

    → 1:18 PM, Apr 2
  • My new MacBook Air will arrive today! I can’t wait to take it out to a café and… uh…

    → 12:21 PM, Apr 2
  • Font nerd confessions: I’ve never thought Avenir was good for body text. It’s distinctive, but in a way that works against it. Source Sans, by contrast, is really underrated.

    → 6:18 PM, Mar 29
  • Tonight, I attempt a beef stew with beer in the Instant Pot, which will be the first time I have ever attempted anything in the Instant Pot. This will be an adventure! 🥘

    → 8:23 PM, Mar 27
  • Using PHP for a little web project I might do makes sense in terms of its ease of deployment, but I’m dismayed at how much modern PHP resembles Java.

    → 11:07 AM, Mar 25
  • Ordering a fairly big batch of food from Wingstop. I am not sure this whole sheltering-at-home thing is going to actually improve my diet. (To be fair to myself, many of my other meals have been reasonably healthy…)

    → 9:15 PM, Mar 24
  • As I read posts from people in other areas talking about how they’re just now moving to required work-from-home, it’s shocking to remember we were “early” here in Silicon Valley. But two weeks ago was at least a year ago.

    → 12:20 PM, Mar 24
  • Well, I’m getting better at making semi-real lattes with my Nespresso machine by just heating up milk and frothing it with a whisk. (I am a super snob about drip coffee, but think Nespresso espresso is pretty decent.)

    → 5:28 PM, Mar 23
  • Me: I should really find a silver lining to having to get back to home cooking, and get more serious about cutting out added sugar. Also me: shut up, I am buying this giant bag of fun-sized Twix

    → 3:22 PM, Mar 23
  • Signs of the old Apple

    For a long time, there’s been two competing narratives about Apple’s pricing:

    1. They’re “premium”: sure, they’re expensive, and yes, you pay for the brand name. But when you compare them with products of equal quality, counting not just feature specs but design, materials, and build quality—so an iPhone with a Galaxy S, a MacBook with a Dell XPS—they’re rarely unreasonably higher, and the user experience of macOS and iOS is arguably1 worth it.

    2. They’re “luxury”: there’s nothing about a Mac, an iPhone, or an iPad that truly makes it better than its competition; the only reason anyone buys Apple products is for the supposed status of owning them and showing them off.

    For most of my Apple-using life, I’ve unsurprisingly been in the first camp. But for the past, oh, let’s call it five years, Apple has been making this…difficult.

    • Phone prices have climbed faster than their sizes, especially at the high end;
    • Their vaunted hardware engineering and design teams have become tethered to form over function, leading most infamously to the “butterfly” keyboard that prioritized thinness at the expense of not only typing feel but reliability;2
    • Laptop prices have also climbed fast, possibly because prioritizing form over function turns out to be expensive;
    • While iOS 7 made significant UX changes, those changes sometimes came at the expense of clarity (e.g., little to no visual cues as to where tap targets are), and later development seems fairly stagnant, other than a few changes for the iPad;3
    • While Apple has always had a “we know what’s best for our users” attitude and has never been super chatty about their decisions, they’ve just made themselves look arrogant and unresponsive a few times, most infamously over battery management.4

    But the two products announced this week show off two old-school Apple moves we haven’t seen in, well, a while.

    First, the new MacBook Air. They’re bringing the Magic Keyboard to it, as we all assumed (hoped?) they would, fixing the biggest problem with their laptops of the last few years. They’ve upped the starting SSD from 128G to a more respectable 256G, and upgraded to a modern Intel processor that can turboboost up to twice as fast as last year’s Air—and that’s just the base processor: you can get up to a quad-core i7.

    And they lowered the price.

    For the last few years Apple’s been far more likely (especially with Macs but arguably with the iPhone, too) to improve a product some ways while making it worse in others and raising the price, playing right into that “luxury” narrative. But this wasn’t always Apple’s modus operandi. For many years, their classic move was upgrading a product while keeping the same price point: you still paid $1499, but now the CPU was faster, you had more RAM, you had a bigger hard drive, and so on. But the new Air is back down to the semi-magic $999 point (and Apple loudly trumpets that it’s $899 with the education discount). To be fair, we’ve been seeing more of this from Apple in the last couple of years—there was a modest price drop moving from the iPhone 8 to the XR, and while high-end iPads climb to nosebleed pricing territory, the low-end model has gained power while dropping in price—but there was a multiyear stretch when “get more for the same money” became “get mildly aggrieved for another couple hundred.”

    Second, the new iPad Pro—but especially the new iPad Magic Keyboard, which has a trackpad, a USB pass-through port, an amazing cantilever design like no other tablet keyboard case I’ve ever seen, and a wheeze-inducing price point of $299–349 depending on size. This is also a classic Apple move: the damn thing is so expensive you can’t help but think of it as overpriced, but there’s literally no competition for it. You are not going to be able to get a keyboard case that nice from anyone else. (Amazon will fill up with knockoff versions for $99 or less, and they will all be pretty bad by comparison, because that’s the way of things.)

    Personally, I’ve grown frustrated with the iPad’s software limitations at both the OS and app level. I wrote about that in “The iPad needs more focus on the little things” last August, which concluded with,

    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving up my iPad. Who knows what iPadOS 14 will bring? But in the meantime, I confess I’m watching what happens with the next MacBook Air revision pretty closely.

    Well, that update is here, and frankly, they knocked it out of the park. It’s pretty much everything I was waiting for.

    And yet, if the iPad Magic Keyboard lives up to its promise, it’s the keyboard case for the iPad that I’ve always wanted. I still do love the iPad, and the Magic Keyboard might make it the best portable computing device for me ever—in terms of hardware. Unfortunately, hardware won’t fix the frustrations I have with the platform. So now, I suppose I’m watching what happens with the next major iPadOS revision pretty closely.

    For the time being, though? The portable computer for me—and, I think, for anyone who wants the best laptop—sure seems like it’s the new Air.


    1. I’m using the term literally here: many of the Linux-using folks that I know don’t like the macOS user experience at all, and long-time Windows users often find the small differences frustrating, just like I do when trying to use Windows (or a Linux desktop environment). ↩︎

    2. Other things I’d put in that camp are the Touch Bar, a clever idea that, five years on, remains a solution in search of a problem; the change to make the bottom row of the keyboard the same size as the other rows and the left and right arrow keys full-height, just so everything is perfectly symmetrical; the spartan set of ports on modern Mac laptops, even the biggest ones that could surely spare space for a micro SD card slot; the now discontinued 12″ MacBook. ↩︎

    3. I know that undersells some of the changes for the iPad, and I’m not throwing in with the “iPad multitasking is a fiasco that ruined everything” camp. The biggest problem isn’t features being unintuitive—as many people point out, little about any modern GUI is intuitive, strictly speaking—but being undiscoverable. For a quick example, you can display folder contents in both macOS Finder and iOS Files by icon, list view, or column view. Finder controls those through little buttons; you can find that feature for yourself. In Files, though, you swipe down to reveal the iOS equivalents, and there is no visual indicator or other affordance that suggests swiping down is a meaningful action. There are more of these hidden gestures in iPadOS with each major release, and even the ones I know about get frustrating. (Swipe up from the bottom edge to pull up the dock or go back to the home screen or pull up the multitasking space navigator? This is bad UX design, okay? It’s bad.) ↩︎

    4. The narrative to this day is still “Apple secretly slowed down your old phone to get you to buy a new one.” That’s wrong on multiple levels, but the secretly part isn’t. If Apple had treated battery management like a public-facing feature from the start, they’d have saved themselves a massive PR fiasco and multiple lawsuits. ↩︎

    → 12:07 PM, Mar 20
  • I have ordered a new Air, with my existing MacBook Pro 13" (the two-port, no Touch Bar model) as a presumed trade-in. It’s a significant drop in base processing speed, but I suspect a better CPU overall. And definitely a better keyboard.

    → 3:24 PM, Mar 18
  • Man, I was all set to pretty much instabuy the new MacBook Air if one was announced with a decent CPU upgrade and the new keyboard, and they’ve done it…and then they went and confused my plans by announcing serious iPad OS and compatible accessory upgrades. So, hmm.

    → 2:01 PM, Mar 18
  • You know, making a deal for one of the best QBs in football history just as sports is cancelled indefinitely by an unprecedented global pandemic is somehow absolutely peak Bucs 🏈

    → 10:04 PM, Mar 17
  • Switching my Yes Plz coffee subscription from one bag every three weeks to weekly for a while. Time to batten down the hatches (and hope the coffee I have right now lasts the week, which is not a given).

    → 4:52 PM, Mar 16
  • At Safeway an hour ago to pick up a pretty normal grocery basket; the place is overrun by people seemingly stockpiling at random. Three boxes of Lucky Charms. A five-pack of seaweed snacks. Eight identical loaves of bread.

    → 4:51 PM, Mar 13
  • I made the mistake of checking my investments, which are mostly retirement accounts. Yikes.

    → 10:25 PM, Mar 12
  • Downtown San Jose isn’t a ghost town, but it’s quieter than normal, and I suspect going to get more so over the next month. My office has already been told to work from home over the next two weeks; I’m back to pick up equipment.

    → 3:25 PM, Mar 11
  • It took me a moment 14670BC2-AFCA-4B00-BBF8-BFF429080C36.jpg

    → 6:42 PM, Mar 7
  • AV Club review: “The new Amazing Stories doesn’t live up to its title.” So, it’s successfully captured the vibe of the old Amazing Stories, then.

    → 10:41 PM, Mar 6
  • Both of the third-party Microblog clients I’ve tried (Icro and Gluon) seem to have no way to load “missing” posts, so my timeline might jump from 6 hours ago to 22 and I have no way to see what’s in between. Is this a limitation in the API, or just the clients?

    → 3:50 PM, Mar 5
  • Ah, so looking forward to rage-filled theories offering every possible explanation for how Sanders did worse than predicted today, except “turns out he didn’t get quite as many votes.” (Not from you folks, who are of course all reasonable.)

    → 2:16 AM, Mar 4
  • Is there a way to tell Homebrew “if an application was installed from a bottle, then don’t upgrade it to a from-source install?” It’s just bananas to come back and discover it’s installed Haskell and a bunch of dependencies because somebody forgot to bottle pandoc.

    → 5:23 PM, Mar 3
  • I’m debating whether reading Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, an epic about an apocalyptic pandemic and the rise of a right-wing populist president playing on racist fears, will be unduly depressing or gratifyingly cathartic. 📚

    → 4:19 PM, Feb 28
  • The problem with iPadOS’s windowing/switching features isn’t that they’re not intuitive, it’s that they’re not discoverable. Visual affordances in other GUIs—icons, buttons, visible menus—are important functional cues that gesture-based UIs offer no replacement for yet.

    → 2:16 PM, Feb 28
  • The trailer for each Wes Anderson movie leaves one thinking, upon watching, that there cannot be a more Wes Anderson movie than the one just advertised. Now, surely, we have reached peak Wes Anderson. But then, there is a new film, a new trailer, and we see: no. We had not.

    → 11:09 PM, Feb 26
  • Finally managed to get new earpads for my Viso HP50 headphones, and reminded that they’re my favorite “closed back” cans, despite their somewhat weird looks.

    → 8:38 PM, Feb 26
  • Dieter Bohn makes a disquietingly good point in his newsletter: while Apple’s managed processor transitions gracefully in the past, doing so requires excellent system software quality—and “excellent quality” isn’t a phrase often used for Apple’s recent releases.

    → 2:50 PM, Feb 25
  • Axios AM newsletter today:

    • lead article explictly making the case that moderate Democrats should stop panicking over Bernie Sanders’s rise because he might well be the most electable candidate…
    • …followed by ad from Mike Bloomberg’s campaign
    → 2:11 PM, Feb 24
  • I’m sure there are more nerve-wracking things than getting a text from your mom saying “I’ll call you later to tell you what the doctor said,” but at the moment none come to mind.

    → 6:51 PM, Feb 21
  • If the DNC letting Bloomberg in the debate was really the conspiracy Twitter tells me it was, Sanders and Warren supporters should petition for a few more plots like that.

    → 12:20 AM, Feb 20
  • Ezra Klein’s critique of the underlying oligarchy of Bloomberg’s campaign is smart, calm, and devastating. www.vox.com/policy-an…

    → 7:33 PM, Feb 19
  • There are an increasing number of reasons to dislike Amazon, but a prosaic one is that their own delivery service is just so bad. Today’s package is marked as “delivered—handed directly to resident.” I hope whoever they handed it to enjoys their USB cable.

    → 10:25 PM, Feb 16
  • It’s strange how transgressive it feels to carry a modern, all-glass smartphone around without a case.

    → 11:18 PM, Feb 14
  • Every time I make the mistake of reading my twitter timeline recently, I’ve come away thinking, “Why, yes, that was a mistake.”

    → 6:06 PM, Feb 13
  • While I’m hopeful iPadOS is on track to get better text and external keyboard handling, I’m finding myself unreasonably excited about the prospect of an updated MacBook Air.

    → 2:48 PM, Feb 13
  • I’m kind of tempted to buy tickets for the Monkees concert coming up in April, even knowing they’re down to a duo.

    → 9:36 PM, Feb 11
  • Going back to trying the “fitBAG,” a tight sleeve for my iPhone rather than a case. It makes it relatively inconvenient to just take your phone out of your pocket and fiddle with it, which I’ve been treating as a minus, but maybe it’s actually a plus. 🤔

    → 4:52 PM, Feb 10
  • As I reevaluate what I want to be using the iPad for, I’m starting to reconsider whether the 12.9” size is really right for me.

    → 10:15 PM, Feb 7
  • I’ve known Twitter has been bad for my mental health for a while, but it’s gotten to the point I need to be more serious about cutting it out. Trying to not check my timelines in every spare moment is going to take getting used to, though.

    → 2:22 PM, Feb 7
  • I’m not sure exactly when hardware Kindles started letting you add your own custom fonts, but Charter is an excellent, excellent ebook typeface—and free (and open source). practicaltypography.com/charter.h…

    → 4:20 PM, Feb 6
  • I’m not sure why “monospaced coding fonts with language-specific ligatures” became a fad, e.g., turning “=>” into “⇒”. It’s clever, but it strikes me as the epitome of “solution in search of a problem.”

    → 3:33 PM, Jan 26
  • For various reasons, I’m noodling around with web site UX/design again and contemplating tools for it. As much as I feel like I “should” be using a mockup tool, doing mockups right in HTML/SCSS seems… easier, somehow?

    → 2:41 PM, Jan 22
  • I have been given access to the beta version of a new text editor and it is hard to describe to most people why this should be remotely exciting.

    → 10:27 PM, Jan 21
  • Just bought something from the Samsung online store with an Apple Card and feeling irrationally amused by it

    → 5:58 PM, Jan 21
  • “iOS is great for writers,” I say, stabbing my finger repeatedly at a text field hoping it will eventually trigger either “paste” or “select” as they both share the same gesture

    → 3:12 PM, Jan 17
  • Zeno’s pastry: when any pie or cake is left in an office breakroom, people start taking ever-smaller pieces so as to avoid taking the last one

    → 7:34 PM, Jan 13
  • As part of new year “cleaning,” I’m ruthlessly clearing out years of accumulated Homebrew packages: down from 62 installed to 30. I’m not sure how ultimately valuable this is, but it feels meaningful.

    → 2:30 PM, Jan 11
  • Hm. Speaking of Panic’s upcoming Nova code editor, I just noticed that they removed the link to Coda (their previous code editor) from their front page. Hopefully that means they’re close to an actual public release.

    → 8:42 PM, Jan 10
  • Canceled my subscription to The Economist. I rarely have time to read it, and as good as much of the writing is, there’s a particular strain of “just asking questions” British transphobia in some editorial corners there.

    → 12:34 PM, Jan 10
  • I admit the screenshots of Panic’s upcoming Nova code editor make me kind of excited to try it, despite my long-standing love for BBEdit (and newly re-energized love for Vim).

    → 12:17 PM, Jan 10
  • Finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal a few days ago, and it’s a great alternate history space race story – with the caveat that it feels incomplete without the second book, which I haven’t read yet. 📚

    → 10:49 PM, Jan 3
  • I think I may have finally had a galaxy-brain moment of how to use BBEdit as a Scrivener replacement. We’ll see.

    → 12:38 PM, Jan 3
  • Switching back to Castro as a podcast player, after switching back to Overcast for the last few months. Overcast has generally been more stable with CarPlay, which may yet send me back, but Castro’s inbox/queue system seems to fit my listening habits better.

    → 2:11 PM, Jan 1
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