Month: June 2023

The NYT in Jan this year on a niche trend of using digital cameras from the 2000s instead of one’s phone:

“When I look back at my digital photos” — from his actual camera — “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Mr. Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”

“People are realizing it’s fun to have something not attached to their phone,” said Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as the Cobrasnake. “You’re getting a different result than you’re used to. There’s a bit of delay in gratification.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed this too. Clicking pictures with one’s phone takes a few seconds each. But right after, you spend minutes editing every one and sharing them with the right caption. Not to mention reading and responding to notifications on those photos. It’s easy to lose the moment.

I’ve never had a high end DSLR camera, but on a trip to a national bird sanctuary a few months ago I broke out my old Sony HX-9V digital camera after several years. It had a much better optical zoom than my iPhone and conserved my phone’s battery:

Digital cameras are probably a sane middle ground between the film cameras of old and the connected phone cameras of today. I hope they stay.

On the indecision of quitting one’s job:

That was the paralyzing thing for me, just like in the toxic romantic relationships I found myself stuck in years ago. It was the familiarity of that pain, stress, and sadness that I wanted to hold onto. There’s a certain kind of masochism when you stick around in a shitty job or a shitty relationship, there’s this belief that you don’t _deserve_ any better than what you’ve got.

Been here, more than once. If you identify with this, the right answer is to leave.

In our current era the term quit has been given a bad reputation, and it’s challenging but necessary to look past this.

Because if you spend enough time in an unsatisfying situation at work, and it bleeds into the rest of your life, you’ll find it difficult to even imagine a more fulfilling life even as you scroll and watch and read about people living those very lives. Your mind dissociates that kind of life from your current existence, as though they are two parallel realities with no possible connection between them.

And that is no way to live.

When I saw this photo from the 2023 WWDC it struck me that Apple now has a balanced Everyday and Professional Mac lineup, for the first time in a long time.

Regardless of the arrangement of the machines above,

Everyday Macs:

• 13” Macbook Air
• 15” Macbook Air
• Mac Mini
• iMac

Professional Macs:

• 14” Macbook Pro
• 16” Macbook Pro
• Mac Studio
• Mac Pro (with the Studio Display and Pro Display XDR)

I hope Apple keeps this balance going for a few years. This does seem like a good set of choices. In some ways it harks back to Steve Jobs’ simple 2 x 2 chart of ‘consumer’ and ‘pro’ Mac lines in the late 1990s:

I wrote this as a Twitter thread on the 1st of June 2023:

Reddit, like Twitter, is poised to become a one-app service. Great apps like Apollo will shut down at the end of the month. Here’s the tragedy of our online experiences, with Reddit as the current, ongoing example:

In 2023 ads remain the only way to mass-monetise online content. This means Reddit needs to own the entire customer experience even if apps are not core to its business.

1/

Because of this we’re seeing excellent apps like @tweetbot and, soon, @apolloreddit die because Twitter and Reddit can’t find a way to monetise users through these apps.

A vital part of the Internet is lost, and in small ways we go collectively backwards.

2/

This is not just a failure to find other ways to make money off people on the Internet. This is also an example of great being the enemy of good:

Reddit is rumoured to be going public, and needs to show they have maximised the monetisation potential of their user base

3/

It’s almost certain that the most engaged users of a service like Reddit will use third party apps that optimise for them.

Someone at Twitter recently claimed that 3rd party apps made up 17% of engagement.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-developers-fighting-twitter/

4/

It’s vital for Reddit to demonstrate that this user segment can be monetised. They must be forced to use the “main” app.

Twitter did this by simply turning off access to apps like Tweetbot. Reddit seems to be pricing this access prohibitively high. The result is the same.

5/

As the post by the Apollo creator says, Reddit could keep access open without denting revenue much.

One could argue it’s a net +ve because these users publish so much.

But it’s hard to directly link this content to added revenue from “regular” users & chart it in a deck.

6/

If ads are the only way to monetise & investors need to see every single user directly monetised, all social media will follow this path:

encourage 3rd party apps, attract power users to supercharge engagement, shut off access, corall all eyeballs into the standard app

7/

By shutting off differentiated experiences Reddit will now optimise for the mainstream.

Understandable for a social media co that’s going public because it’s, well, mainstream.

But like with Twitter, the most creative stuff came from those on the fringes. That’ll be lost.

8/

So there’s a good chance not only will we lose these delightful apps themselves, we’ll lose the essence of that social media itself.

Twitter doesn’t have interested automations, has limited parody accounts, no auto publishing from WordPress, no @IFTTT recipes – all gone.

9/

How do we prevent this from repeating?

I don’t think we can, not with today’s “centralised” social media model.

Facebook, Google+ RIP, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok.

They all either never had third party apps & automations or they did & severely limited/shut them.

10/

But consider RSS feeds. No one company controls it; it’s a format not a site.

In fact after becoming the most popular RSS app, Google Reader was shut down 10 years ago.

This is notable: Google didn’t shut down 3rd party apps, it shut down its own app and got out of RSS

11/

Many thought Reader shutting down would kill RSS, but instead there are several great RSS reader apps – it’s a fabulous ecosystem.

Reader shutting down is what allowed these apps to bloom.

The Best RSS Feed Readers (Because the Internet Is a Mess)

12/

Newsletters are similar. You can use any email app you like to read your newsletters.

You can change the email address at which you receive them.

You can use whatever service you like to publish a newsletter.

There’s no Newsletter, Inc like there is a Reddit/Twitter.

13/

But, you say, these aren’t a set of groups/forums. Where is the decentralised Reddit?

Well, IRC still exists!

Internet Relay Chat

No one owns it. There’s no official IRC app – in fact there are many great ones today.

We can use IRC again. Or enhance it. It’s up to us.

14/

Our online experiences today are fragile.

They can be diminished, shut down because of a company’s priorities.

This thread is to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Different, welcoming, resilient experiences exist even today. We should use them more often.

N/ ★

An interesting thought in the context of this year’s Apple WWDC:

I think it’s past time Apple rework its keynote strategy, building these videos around features and not OSes, but that’s a blog post for a different day. For now, users can move between their Apple devices more fluidly and quickly than ever.

This has been one of Apple’s goals for its ecosystems for a long time,1 but the company has become more clear about it in recent years.

This made sense the moment I read it. Most people who value these inter-device features will, by definition, have more than one Apple device. Developers that want to build such specific features in to their apps will also want a feature-oriented narrative, not an OS-oriented one. It’s not like Apple needs to entice people to update the OS on their devices – that’s almost never been a problem.

Apple Notes gets inter-note linking in iOS 17, among other features:

I’m also impressed by Notes’ addition of internal linking to other notes. The update should allow for vastly better organization of information in Notes. I’m envisioning it as a solution for our internal documentation needs at MacStories, along with project management and a lot more. I’ve used Notes for that sort of thing before, but once a note reached a certain length, it became hard to manage, especially on smaller devices. With internal linking, I expect that will be a thing of the past.

I use Notes to dump all sorts of data for later processing, the way I used to use Evernote for a decade. I also use it to store medium-term data, such as working notes for an ongoing project (anything longer term is open formats like plain text or MS Office). I expect to use inter-note linking for these project notes quite often.