Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
An alternative to Zulip is Twist - https://twistapp.com. (I'm not affiliated with them at all; just a fan.)

They have a proper native (as in not Electron-based) Mac OS X app (probably other platforms, too, but I haven't checked), which launches almost instantly and consumes a very reasonable amount of RAM. It's definitely worth a look.

Comment · 8 years ago
And a toy light bar whose brightness and duration cannot be controlled (which sucks precious battery life) and is an insult to the "Pro" name. Are there any serious options available?
Comment · 8 years ago
I see you have nearly 30 different third-party frameworks in your iOS app, some of which are purely for user-tracking and analytics purposes. Furthermore, it looks like you’re using AWS (AWS Rekognition) and Azure (Microsoft Face API) AI/Image/Face recognition services. Although your Privacy Policy mostly covers what you’re doing, a more prominent permission request screen and more explicit warnings about this is warranted. Your iOS app is basically just a shell really. All of its functionality is provided by cloud services. Although this is the norm nowadays, I think the burden of informing the users falls primarily on you, the developer, especially considering the main subject of your app is infants and children. All of this is further alarming since your app isn’t free so even the Facebook excuse of “it’s free!” doesn’t really apply here.
Comment · 9 years ago
Atlassian have become (probably always were) a horrible, customer-hostile company. This is terrible.
Comment · 9 years ago
Honestly, they’ve been pulling the same crap on the Mac version, too. It’s like they purposely went about crippling their own app and making it worse in every way. Every version that comes out is uglier and has less functionality than before. And of course Atlassian could care less. They completely stopped responding on Twitter and started deleting all negative comments on their SourceTree blog. I have an older version for Mac OS X that I use, which I could never upgrade because all the newer versions are demonstrably worse. I hope it continues to work because there are no other native and non-hybrid/electron GUI clients let. (Tower has less than 50% of SourceTree’s features and the developers seem focused on creating a Windows version instead of adding the missing features to the already existing Mac version).
Comment · 9 years ago
I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah for 11 years. Needless to say, I got out five years ago the first chance I got. If you’re not into winter sports, the weather is shit. You get 10 months of bitter cold and snow every day. You have to dig your car out of the snow all winter and drive on horrible conditions with clueless drivers who seem to forget how to drive in snow every year. Spring and fall are one or so week each and you get rain storms the whole time. Then you have 6 or so weeks of scorching hot summer where it’s unbearable to be outside.

I never ventured outside of the metro area and no one was ever overtly racist but boy if you are not a white Mormon you will stick out, you will be judged and questioned. Most Utah Mormons are conditioned to be nice so on the surface they appear so but they do judge and single out people who don’t belong.

I visited SF over a weekend and was instantly surprised about how accepting everyone was. It just seemed like I fit in and belonged. I’d tolerate much worse conditions than “low income in SF” than be “rich” in Utah.

Comment · 9 years ago
Getting device serial numbers through private APIs and transferring this information to their servers isn’t “extremely minor.” Any other lesser-known developer would’ve been rejected if not outright banned. Apple has something to answer here. Why is Uber still allowed in? How many offenses are companies allowed?
Comment · 9 years ago
Objective-C isn’t deprecated at all. There is more chance of current valid Swift code being deprecated in a year than Objective-C. In fact, all Swift code written in its first two years of public existence is completely deprecated now. The same code, had it been written in Objective-C would be perfectly valid today.
Comment · 9 years ago
Somewhat related:

In 2010 I implemented a UIView subclass for a simple stylized spinner. In the view controller that contained this spinner, I added two methods to start and stop the spinner. I called them `startSpinner` and `stopSpinner`. Our app was rejected for using “private APIs.” Finding it ridiculous that Apple would use such a common signature internally without any prefixes and actually would check for it in all third-party apps and reject them, we relented and changed our method names.

In 2015, at a new job, in a new city and working on an entirely different project, I had to implement another UI spinner. Since I’m a creature of habit, I again named the methods for starting and stopping the spinner: `startSpinner` and `stopSpinner` respectively. This time the project I was working on was an SDK so all of our clients were being rejected for using a private API, named... “startSpinner” and “stopSpinner”.

Software is hard.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
I have zero power now but have the potential to have it. If I don't know how to behave like a decent human around my female coworkers and peers right now, I would have no idea how to do this when I have more power (e.g. become a manager). But, then, I'd have the power to cause irreparable emotional and societal damage. If I don't know how to act like a rational reasonable human being who respects others no matter their background or gender, this won't change. All that will change is that I have the authority to cause great damage.

I don't know much and I certainly don't claim to know much. All I know is that if we (men) don't curb our own behavior, we're the one squarely at fault.

I'm so tired of this "not all men" attitude. As someone who gets paid to make fact-based decisions all day, I cannot possibly ignore this ridiculous argument that women are at fault. No, way. Yes, anything is possible but the scenario you're proposing is so rare that is an anomaly. Get off that horse, dude. Stop being on the wrong side of history.

Comment · 9 years ago
I honestly wonder how people here would react if a blog posts like this came out about a company that hasn’t necessarily been in the news for this many past bad behavior. Would we still condemn that company or would we blame the victim, as is the case usually?
Comment · 9 years ago
We should teach our sons to truly respect women. We should teach our sons to be respectful honest decent human beings. We should teach our sons to not be assholes who think they are entitled to a woman’s body. We should teach our sons to be humans with emotions and empathy for others. We should teach our sons to not be toxic despicable entitled pathetic beings. It’s on us (men). If we behave badly, it’s squarely on us. No external factor (law, regulation, social status, etc) would have any effect if we don’t know how (or don’t want) to be good.
Comment · 10 years ago
“Fake news” is an oxymoron. I think you mean “propaganda.”

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