Skimming Steve Troughton-Smith’s thread and commentary on the EU’s requirements for Apple. Even though I’ve been frustrated by the App Store and calling for sideloading longer than most developers, I’m feeling burned out on the drama. Huge computing platforms need to be more open. We’ll get there.

Added the snow falling plug-in to micro.christmas. ❄️

New plug-in! Snow fall adds falling snow to your blog. Check it out on manton.org. Looks best in dark mode or with a darker default blog background. One-click install for Micro.blog folks. ❄️

Right before bed last night, I had an insight for how to optimize the Micro.blog timeline for a certain segment of follower sizes. I wrote it down and then crashed. Would’ve been lost otherwise, probably for days until I hit the same part of the codebase again.

We just posted episode 622 of Core Intuition. We talk about my work on the recent photo collections in Micro.blog (before I shipped it), Daniel using Swift concurrency, and our general optimism about AI for programming.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Pretty often I see Micro.blog people explore other blogging platforms, or just post more to Mastodon, but it almost always leads to blogging less often. This is both discouraging and also sort of a testament that the Micro.blog way works.

I may have Osborne effect-ed myself a little with the blog post teasing Micro.one. Current customers: do not worry. The first phase of the plan for Micro.one is limited. If you’re already subscribed to Micro.blog, you’re in the right place.

Don’t miss the sneak peek screenshot link in Sam Grover’s update post about Mimi Uploader. I think photo collections could be a really good fit for the app.

I’ve been rolling this idea around in my head for a couple years, in various forms, and think I’m finally ready to do something with it. Updated placeholder website: micro.one

Mike McCue from Flipboard announcing Surf:

Built from the ground up on ActivityPub, AT Proto and RSS, you can create and surf amazing custom feeds that organize people, videos, articles, images and podcasts around the things you care about.

I don’t have access to the beta yet, so not entirely sure what it is, but sounds promising! Maybe a little like Flipboard merged with Tapestry.

The weather’s changing. Rain and wind, leaves falling down at Cherrywood. ☕️

Didn’t expect how much I’d like the new full-screen photos view that is built into the Micro.blog photo collections plug-in. To see it in action, scroll through my blog home page and click on a photo.

We had tickets to the Peter Pan musical last week and somehow with work and looking for a house we forgot to go. Calendars are hard. Very disappointed, both to miss the musical and also because I’m still not at the point in my life where I can just throw away money for no reason.

I sort of want to increase the border radius of every button by 1px every few days until they are perfectly rounded and see if anyone notices.

Very interested that Delta is trying Apple’s external link entitlement. There are so many gotchas, but hopefully it works for them. From MacStories:

After tapping through a full-screen warning from Apple that you’re about to embark on a dangerous adventure to the World Wide Web…

🙂

This sounds great! A New Social: “We believe in an open social web centered around people, not platforms. We build bridges, not walls.” The non-profit organization will be the new home for Bridgy Fed.

I like Apple Intelligence notification summaries enough to keep them enabled. They’re not perfect. I think the summaries get into trouble when they attempt to distill several notifications into a list of just a few words each.

This post on the news blog might seem minor, but it’s already making a huge difference. My brain had not come to terms with how bogged down the background timeline updating could get. I’m not even sure how larger platforms with millions of followers handle fan-out quickly.

Good recap at WP Tavern of State of the Word from Tokyo. Matt Mullenweg:

Some people might see 2024 as a year of distractions or attacks from bad actors in the community. But it was really a year of growth and focus where we were able to accelerate so many things that we’re doing.

Cosmic sticker. ☕️

We went to see War of the Rohirrim a few days ago. It has the feel of the battle scenes of Return of the King, but stretched to the entire 2-hour film. Worth seeing for LotR and anime fans. There is no chance to catch your breath, though. The quiet scenes are taken up with voice-over narration.

Acorn 8 is a really big update. Congrats Gus Mueller!

I usually post one photo at a time, so my last post was mostly an excuse to test the new layout for photo collections in the Micro.blog mobile app. Here’s a screenshot. Photos scroll horizontally, tap to go full-screen. This currently only works for collections, not any set of photos… yet.

A couple photos today as I was walking along Riverside.

It’s amazing how many things we worry about that don’t actually matter.

I recorded a new demo of Micro.blog photo collections on YouTube here. This video shows the Mac app’s interface for photo search and collections.

Worked on a few things over the weekend, including Mastodon posts and photos import. Micro.blog and Mastodon have had moving followers for a while, but you couldn’t actually move your Mastodon posts. Now you can import a Mastodon archive and Micro.blog will copy the posts and photos to your blog.

On the highway, passing small towns, I sometimes question why we pay so much to be in the city when there is nearly unlimited affordable property everywhere else. Of course the more central, the closer to things, the less time getting anywhere. We aren’t really buying a location. We are buying time.

While driving to Dallas yesterday, I had what I thought was a good idea. I almost pulled over to the side of the road to register a domain name. By the time I got there a few hours later, I had talked myself out of it. Realized it was the equivalent of Trader Joe’s buying 7-11 so they could run it.

I’ve been more curious about Claude lately because it has been getting so much new attention. Tried it for an HTML thing and it was great, love being able to iterate with Artifacts. But tried it again for something similar and it just error-ed out, over and over. ChatGPT still seems the most solid.