Social media recap for week ending May 3, 2025
Bluesky
Watched "Conclave" last night. Among my many positive takeaways: filming this must have been the GREATEST gig for background performers ever. Each of the 100+ non-speaking cardinals got to put on awesome, full "prince of the Church" regalia and spend all day sitting in a comfy chair.
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 27, 2025 at 12:18 PM
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Also: the costumes look super-comfy. Loose-fitting, good air circulation. And you're sitting at a table with a pen and paper, during proceedings in which it might even be correct to have your character writing things. I didn't think there'd be anything wrong with sneaking in a few crosswords.
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 27, 2025 at 12:18 PM
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I'm loving Google Gemini as a voice assistant. It's vastly exceeded the original Google Assistant in power and simplicity. (Apple benefits from strong, symmetric competition. The Siri team is looking at other AI assistants and thinking "Wow. Yeah: this, for sure. ...But ALSO with Apple privacy.")
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 10:07 AM
When open my MacBook in the AM and discover dozens of browser tabs I opened just before I went to sleep, it's like going through one's pockets after a night of blackout drinking (I imagine). "What the hell did I get INTO last night?!" (Dozens of research papers related to "the note-taking effect")
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 10:23 AM
Last night I finally wrote, debugged, and installed some scripts to automate a few weekly tasks that used to take me 30-40 minutes apiece. That kind of pleasure and pride never EVER gets old, does it?
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 9:57 AM
(I'd put it off for months. The scripts aren't complicated…they're just "intricate." If you don't work out the right order of operations before you start coding, or if you lose mental track of the status of key variables during code execution, you're cooked. I had to work slowly & meticulously.)
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 10:44 AM
(This is in sharp contrast with how I coded in college. I would lay down a fast sketch of the whole thing, and then let the debugger flag errors for my attention. Today, unless the project is so basic there's no scroll bar in the editing window, I plan and pre-test as much as I realistically can.)
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 10:44 AM
A preface to this next Bluesky thread:
I tried to build something very simple in Xcode and it kept fighting me. So, yeah, I was grumpy. If I'd been discussing this in an article or a blog post instead of a social media post, I would have acknowledged that app development environments are intended for soldiers, not weekend-warriors.
Still, I was surprised to discover (for example) that my app – which doesn't access any sort of network resource in any fashion whatsoever – wasn't working because it required network access permissions. Ah. Well! Live and lurch…
After another of my sporadic interludes with Xcode, I once again am left wondering why Xcode doesn't just come straight out and display a fullscreen window at startup that reads "Oh, **** you for even _trying_ to write a Mac app for fun. Seriously. I WILL BURY YOU, just on basic principle." (1/2)
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 5:37 PM
I know many people at Apple who make and support the tools and services that people use to build apps for Apple hardware. They're fine, fine people. They care about the people and communities on behalf of whom they work so very hard. The Beast sets enormous and irrational obstacles before them, too.
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 5:37 PM
(Another reason chatbots are a huge boon to developers. I can show Gemini what Xcode barfed into the log at build/run time and ask "Why? What? How?") ("Oh, App Sandbox refused to permit your webview display anything, not even the HTML file embedded in the app bundle. Here's how to make it happy:…")
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 6:00 PM
I got a bit of a jolt this morning. My phone trilled with a new notification: "You lost. Again. And you lost because YOU'RE WRONG. Accept it, admit it, and please finally stop acting like a ****ing CHILD." (1/2)
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) May 2, 2025 at 12:02 PM
It took me a moment to recognize this as a Google Keep reminder that I'd set yesterday. It's a note about a piece I intend to write about Apple today. But BEFORE I remembered, I panicked that I'd done something that somehow had finally gotten on the very last nerve of some friend or family member…
— Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko.bsky.social) May 2, 2025 at 12:02 PM