Darius

Anytime I get a chance, I tell people they should be using a password manager. I don’t want to rattle on about a bunch of technical details that most people don’t care about.  If you are interested in an excellent and concise explanation of why your old approach for passwords does not work and how password managers improve your security, check out this video on one of my favorite tech YouTube…

If you’re interested in understanding Apple Vision Pro,  I recommend the review by Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), who says, “Just as interesting as this individual product is the possible future that this implies” Apple Vision Pro Review: Tomorrow’s Ideas… Today’s Tech! As usual the production is superb, but more important is the insight Marques brings. Watch the whole thing.  Marques also did an…

I’ve had my hands in Unix/Linux system administration for most of my life. I first touched Unix at University, but didn’t really get into it until a couple years later when I was working in Manufacturing and Technical Support in my first job. Later, at Silicon Graphics, I was deep in it – at one point being the go-to person in our backline support center for obscure topics like troublshooting a…

The Social Internet today is a mess. Users are tracked across the internet and manipulated for more engagement to drive advertising revenue. However, big social media sites are faltering. There is a better future coming. Much better in fact. ActivityPub is a protocol that allows for sharing and social connection across the internet in a connected network of different systems. People talk about…

A key element of the success of visionOS and the Apple Vision Pro will be how they handle Developer support over the next several months. And it’s not enough to let those developers get their hands on the hardware with some access to support from Apple. It’s critical that the Apple staff that supporting these developers be very active in their code-level and design and interaction support, with a…

The WWDC23 session “Design for spatial user interfaces” gives an excellent overview of how some of the interactions work in visionOS. It’s impressive, and very Apple-like, the care that’s gone into designing these interactions and the supporting elements. https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076

The folks at Micro.blog are running a fantastic promotion, Summer of Blogging. You get their standard plan for just $1/month for four months (and after that it’s just $5/month). It’s an easy way to get started with blogging. As the Marco.blog folks say: Personal blogging is making a comeback. Post short thoughts or long essays, share photos, all on your own blog. Micro.blog makes it easy, and…

Dave and Gina Pell were among the very first to encourage and support our dreams for Square Peg Foundation. They were there when we were just a couple people with a few horses and a dream. Their support and the support of so many others over the years has kept this dream alive through some difficult times, and made possible all we do today. One of my favorite daily reads is Dave’s NextDraft, but…

Take control of your online life

There are so many ways to get started, the choices available can feel like their own barrier. But these days it is easier than even just a few years ago. In the IndieWeb community, we still recommend you Get Started with your own domain and website. But I admit that’s a big lift for folks who are just beginning to think this through. Several choices to be made and so many options for each. Tantek…

The Timeline is often the wrong paradigm

It’s great to see folks stepping away from assumptions brought over from other social media systems. The river of posts may serve the attention merchants’ engagement goals when they can keep you endlessly scrolling, but it’s not the way we naturally think. So we have filters and other methods of tightening our focus down to the “important stuff”. Or maybe the important people. Better yet, rethink…

Moving from Dark Sky to Apple Weather

Apple Support has posted a helpful guide to Apple Weather especially for people coming from Dark Sky: Dark Sky’s features have been integrated into Apple Weather. Apple Weather offers hyperlocal forecasts for your current location, including next-hour precipitation, hourly forecasts for the next 10 days, high-resolution radar, and notifications. Apple Weather is available on devices running iOS…

Watch WWDC for Technology Futures

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference is this morning, and so I’m annoyed by all the people who are wrong on the internet. 😉 The mainstream press, and even some of the tech press (and certainly the financial press) never seem to know what to think of the news from WWDC. The tendency is to think of it as a product announcement event, even though product announcements at WWDC happen only…

Apple Design Awards 2022

Every year, Apple celebrates brilliant app and game design with the Apple Design Awards. It’s a huge honor to be a finalist or selected as an Apple Design Award winner. I love this event because it celebrates the best of the independent software world. Many of the recipients of the awards are small teams or even individual developers. It’s so fun to see the creativity and beauty of these apps.…

Hacking with Swift – a great learning resource

I’ve been following Paul Hudson’s work for a few years now, and I’m also a very happy subscriber to his Hacking with Swift+ program. Paul provides great learning resources, many of them for free. If you want to get started learning Swift (and SwiftUI), I recommend 100 Days of SwiftUI, his free learning program. He also has a UIKit version, at 100 Days of Swift. But right now, around WWDC2022,…