lajt

I would do a Mobile app. It has a lot of benefits:

- You control its release and marketing, so it's your show A to Z.

- You talk to users about new features and bugs, which is great experience learning how to deal with user requests.

- You can hook it up to a web API, or a free-tier AWS account, or Apple iCloud (if targeting iOS), which gives good experience for connecting to a web db.

- You can also store data locally in order to learn SQL syntax using SQLite, if you don't already know SQL.

- You create the icons, splash screen, screen captures for the appstore, etc, so it provides great UI design experience.

- It has a great developer community (at least iOS does, since I have experience there); people are very active and cool and fun.

You can develop a Mobile app on the side while keeping your current job. I did this and was able to pivot to a more interesting job space doing mobile. I learned a ton.

True re exploits, though I would think they would put more trust in the test proctors, since they have to by necessity anyway, and design with the priority on no data loss. The amount of stress on these kids and wasted time (5 hours for the test, per kid) is unbelievable. 31 kids at one school x maybe hundreds of schools going through the same across the country.

It makes me wonder how the vetting process occurred before? Did they ever have fake accounts sneak through in the past? I assume there was some contact with the real person/celebrity/company, but could a disgruntled ex-PR rep for some celeb have created the account, and had enough secret info/credentials/whatever to pass the vetting and then start tweeting nonsense? But the fact that the vetting process was completely halted is just nuts.

Yes! The way it is now, the blue check's symbolism morphed from "verified account" to "paying account". It's very misleading from a UI standpoint to change the significance of the symbol like that.

Another question: Why didn't Twitter just keep using whatever vetting process it used in the past on these Blue Check applications, but just charge for it now? From a semiotics standpoint, the signifier didn't change, but the signified changed from "verified account" to "paying account", which seems like a hugely confusing UI blunder.

Hey thanks for letting me know! That's great to hear. I'll keep an eye on it.

We're building an iPad reader app that uses Apple's PDFKit, but we encountered JPEG2000s in the PDFs of the client's library, and PDFKit doesn't render them correctly. The frustrating thing is we're stuck with the issue since it's such a niche case that I don't think Apple will ever fix it. There is a 3rd-party commercial library PSPDF for iOS that renders it right, but I don't think they want to pay for it.

Fascinating article. When I taught my 16-year-old to drive recently (in the US), it became quickly apparent which auto controls are intuitive, and which are arbitrary and require memorization and habit. For ex:

- Turning the steering wheel clockwise to go right, counterclockwise to go left: He got this immediately.

- Flicking the turn lever up to indicate a right turn, down to indicate a left turn: This confused him and he got it wrong for days.

- Pushing the turn lever forward to turn on the high beams, pulling for low beams: Also made no sense to him, and took days to get correct.

A small annoyance of Preview is that the PDFs it displays don't render JPEG2000 images correctly. I found this out due to the project we're on. Some of the PDFs were generated about 20 years ago with JPEG2000 images in them. Acrobat Reader does display them correctly. I can't stand Acrobat Reader, but in this one case it's a better PDF viewer than Mac Preview.

The book "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig does a good job easing that "what if" regret. It shows how each "ideal/better" life can come with its own major negative consequences.