June 2019

I can’t help but picture the 15-year-old — or 45-year-old — who’s never programmed before, and who reads a little bit about Ruby on some website and is intrigued and wants to try learning it.

Maybe they have a thing they want to do, or maybe they’ve always just been curious about programming and this seemed like a nice way to start.

Are we going to ask that person to figure out how to install Ruby? If there are one-click installers out there, are we going to ask them to figure out which one is actually reputable and safe?

Curiosity like this is one of the ways new developers are made. I worry that the less the Mac is tinkerable out-of-the-box, the fewer developers we’ll get.

Or: we’ll only get certain kinds of developers — the ones of the right age and background who can go get a CS degree.

The iPhone is the first — and only? — direct interface that is both great and hugely successful. It’s direct in the sense that you touch things directly on the screen.

The first time I used an interface even remotely like that was the first time I ever sat in front of a computer, sometime in the ’70s — it was a PLATO system at the University of Delaware. (Elementary school field trip FTW.)

But it took a long time before the technology advanced to the point where direct interfaces could be a mass-market thing.

Indirect Interfaces

Even though we have this wonderful thing of touching directly on the screen, indirect interfaces are still everywhere. If you have a hardware keyboard connected to your iPad, you’re using an indirect interface with iOS.

And of course there’s the digital crown on the Apple Watch, the remote you use with your Apple TV — and the keyboard and mouse or trackpad you use with your Mac.

Indirect interfaces are part of the future of computing. The future is diverse and complex, and indirect interfaces are a necessary part of the future — because I’m not going to get up and touch my TV screen.

I remember when potato chips were potato chips. Then one day barbecue-flavored chips came along. Then sour cream and onion. Now you can get potato chips of all kinds! It’s crazy, but people have their favorites. The future is like potato chips.

The Mac

The thing about the Mac is that it’s always used via indirect interface. When you have a hardware keyboard and a precision pointer that takes very little energy to move, then you can do things that would be non-ergonomic for a direct interface.

You can have giant monitors — and even multiple monitors — and whip that pointer from place to far-away place with little effort. You can make targets smaller, due to the precision, which means you can make information and controls quite a bit denser. You can put features in menubars, because menus are much easier to get to and navigate using an indirect pointer.

Though this kind of interface is roughly as old as those early touch-screen PLATO systems — and therefore mature, and therefore boring to a lot of people — there’s still so much to be said for the efficiency that it provides. You can see more, and do more, with less physical energy. For eight hours a day, five days a week — if not more, for some people — it matters.

There’s a cognitive cost, I think, but it’s paid up-front and then ingrained, and most of us have forgotten how we learned to use a Mac in the first place. (I was almost certainly older than you when I first started using a Mac, and I only kind-of remember.) (You also have to learn iOS, too.)

And many iPad users see the benefit of indirect interfaces — plenty of people ask their iPad app-makers to provide full control via keyboard. They want to be able to navigate everything without having to touch the screen. I get it! It totally makes sense. I want that too.

But here’s what I think: the future does include machines that are built, like the Mac, entirely around the idea of indirect interfaces. There will be enough people that value efficiency that this isn’t going to go away.

There are, of course, plenty of tasks that are truly best-suited for an iPhone or an iPad. Absolutely. But for many productivity tasks, the force-multiplication that an indirect interface provides makes a big difference to many people.

You may value other things. You may move between both worlds pretty easily. Different people like different kinds of potato chips — but sour cream and onion doesn’t have to disappear so that barbecue may thrive.

Brett Terpstra writes about how scripting runtimes are being removed from the Mac in the next OS release.

This is actually distressing, and not that much attention has been paid to this.

I’m one of those people who just use whatever’s on the system. I don’t think I’ve ever installed a different version of Ruby, and I don’t even know how.

But the ability to run Ruby scripts is hugely important to me — for one thing, this blog is generated by a set of Ruby scripts running on my Mac.

In the introductory episode of the Xcoders podcast last night, Liz and Jared talked a little bit about impostor syndrome.

I don’t have anything profound to say about it — just a few random notes…

There’s no developer bit in anyone’s DNA. I don’t have that bit — nobody does. There’s no such thing, and there’s no collection of genes that make you a real developer, either.

You don’t have to have a CS degree. (I didn’t even own a computer when I was in college. And I didn’t graduate.)

If you’re working on an app, you’re a developer. Period. Even if it’s not a stand-alone app; even if it’s some scripts. You’re solving a problem on a computer with logic and code — that makes you a developer. That’s all it takes!

Impostor syndrome goes away eventually. You just forget about it. The fastest way to get past it is probably to help other people.

It’s okay to admit that you have it. It’s been many years, but I had it too. :)

Liz Marley and Jared Sorge are the hosts of the brand-new Xcoders Community Podcast.

Last night they published the first episode, an introduction. Future posts will include interviews and discussions of interest to our community of developers, designers, testers, support people, and writers.

The podcast isn’t on iTunes yet, but there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to: https://xcoders.org/podcast.xml

Special thanks go to Micro.blog! We’re using their podcasting support, which makes it super-easy to publish a podcast. Write a title and description, upload the audio file, and there you go. Keen. 🐣

Person on Slack: “Public betas are up”

Me: “Bummer”

We go through this every summer. Public betas are a moving target, and they have bugs — and people think that app developers can fix any issue immediately.

If you need to get your work done — or, heck, even if you just expect your AirPods to work — you should install public betas on devices and machines that are not your main machine.

Even if you get extremely lucky and everything works with one release, the next public beta could change all that.

Also

Right now I don’t know of any bugs with NetNewsWire 5.0 alpha on the Mac public beta. But it’s so early, and I haven’t personally tested it.

The Omni Group just put up a blog post that recommends caution with public betas.

Our friends at Rogue Amoeba have tweeted about their apps not being compatible yet. (They’re working on it, of course.)

There’s a classic Merlin Mann tweet on the subject.

And… shouldiinstallios13publicbeta.com

One of my favorite moments of all The Omni Show episodes is in the episode with Lanette Creamer, whose cat Navani has been featured on the Omni microblog a couple times. (Here and here.)

From the transcript:

Brent: Nice. So does Navani have any hobbies, obsessions?

Lanette: I would say her top interest is murder, and it’s really a huge thing with her. She loves it so much that she will literally be purring while she is trying to kill and destroy things.

That’s kitties for ya. :)

The fact that DisposeBag is not a name in Apple’s Combine framework sparks joy. I was never, ever going to write code where that was a thing I had to read.

Thing you should know: Mark Boszko — my friend, co-worker, and producer of the The Omni Show — did a podcast called The Optical that dives into movie special effects, and it has some amazing guests such as Douglas Trumbull.

If you like movies, you should listen to these.

The Xcoders meeting tonight should be pretty great — we’ve got a bunch of lightning talks on new stuff from WWDC.

It’s the Woodstock of today. In later years, more people will claim to have been at this meeting than could have fit in the room. :)

In the Sweet Setup’s review of iOS RSS readers from last May, there’s this sentence that I love: “It’s perhaps ironic that Google Reader helped popularize RSS, considering the sheer horror of its interface design.”

We now have continuous integration set up for NetNewsWire. I didn’t need it for a long time, when it was just me — but now that we have multiple contributors, it’s important.

We’re doing the app and the separate frameworks (RSCore, RSParser, etc.) the app uses.

Thanks to circleci for the service and to Joe Heck for setting it all up!

* * *

Most of my work, between now and shipping, is writing. Here’s a new technote: Why Reruns Happen.

* * *

We have had not one single crash report since 5.0a3 shipped. :)

(Yes, the app does have a crash catcher: no, we’re not relying on people finding the crash logs on disk and sending them in.)

I finally got around to two things NetNewsWire needed: 1) a page describing how to contribute, and 2) a code of conduct.

They’re both on the same CONTRIBUTING.md page.

If you’d like to contribute, the process is pretty straightforward. File a ticket, talk it over, write the code, do a pull request.

I don’t like too much process. This seems just right. That said, I’m still learning about how to manage an open source project, and any feedback on this (and anything else) is definitely welcome.

We just released NetNewsWire 5.0a3.

Almost all the current remaining work in the Beta milestone is writing — some tech notes and, most importantly, the Help book.

What will probably happen is that we’ll run out of coding to do while I’m still writing. Which is fine — it just means Maurice can go see how much we can use of SwiftUI in the iOS app. We want to go as all-in as possible (while still making a great app).

We’ll use SF Symbol too, of course. Probably Combine. All the things!

(Yes, we’ll be requiring iOS 13 for the iOS app.)

At any rate — the Mac app (minus documentation) is damn close to what’s going to ship. It’s just a matter of finding and fixing the last few bugs.

Maybe shipping in July? Fingers crossed. :)

Catalina compatibility tip: don’t use NSFont as a key in a Swift dictionary. I’m getting crashes from 10.15 users that include this message:

Fatal error: Duplicate keys of type ‘NSFont’ were found in a Dictionary. This usually means either that the type violates Hashable’s requirements, or that members of such a dictionary were mutated after insertion.

It’s quite possible this was always a bad idea, of course, and it’s just that in 10.15 it crashes. I don’t know.

My job with NetNewsWire, more and more, is product manager. Which I don’t mind. :)

Anyway: I just combed through the issues list and picked out features for 5.1. I had a general idea of what I wanted going in, but it’s good to look at everything.

Here’s the list for 5.1:

• Feedly syncing
• Theme-able article view
• Localization — probably just French
• Text size settings for timeline and sidebar
• Catch up command (an easy way to mark-read before a chosen cutoff date)

Feedback is welcome, of course. Your ideas of what to do next might be different from mine.

Best place for feedback is on the Slack group, but Micro.blog, Twitter, and email are good too.

You may remember the early days of Blogger. Posts didn’t have titles, and they were often quite short — sometimes just a sentence and maybe a link. And these posts appeared on a person’s own blog, which could be hosted anywhere.

It was well-understood that blogging is provisional, is thinking-out-loud. It was the flow of life-on-the-web. Not everything was an essay.

When Twitter came along we collectively decided that this kind of thing was Twitter’s jurisdiction — that these are just tweets.

But why should we agree that Twitter, or any company, owns an entire form of writing for the web?

That’s why my short stuff appears here (and on my microblog) and then gets copied to Twitter. It belongs on the open web first.

Twitter is just another form of syndication. It’s not the home of my writing.

A friend of mine asked me about my blogging setup. I figured I’d blog about it. Definitely skip this post if it’s not the kind of thing you’re interested in.

inessential.com

This blog, inessential.com, lives on an inexpensive shared host. It’s all static files, generated by wildcat. The posts are stored in a Git repository.

Posts from inessential.com are also picked up by my Micro.blog account, where they appear to people who follow me there. Micro.blog also forwards my inessential.com posts to Twitter, to my @brentsimmons account.

Micro.blog

I have four additional blogs hosted on Micro.blog: micro.inessential.com, nnw.ranchero.com, xcoders.org, and microblog.omnigroup.com.

The Xcoders blog is owned by the Xcoders group; the Omni microblog is owned by Omni.

micro.inessential.com posts get forwarded to Twitter @brentsimmons. The NetNewsWire blog posts get forwarded to Twitter @netnewswire. The Xcoders blog posts get forwarded to Twitter @xcoders. The Omni microblog posts do not get forwarded.

Writing tools

I use MarsEdit for almost all of my blog writing. I use BBEdit + Marked for blog writing from time to time. (At work I also use iA Writer sometimes.)

I do all of my writing on a Mac. This is because I’m in front of a Mac when I’m working, whether it’s my day job or working on side projects.

(This is not a general comment on the suitability of iPad for work. It’s not there for me personally yet, but that’s fine. It’s making progress all the time, and I’m certainly encouraged by the news from WWDC on this front.)

How I decide what goes where

It’s pretty obvious, usually. Cat pictures go to the Omni microblog. :) Xcoders announcements go on the Xcoders blog; NetNewsWire announcements go on the NetNewsWire blog.

The one slightly tricky thing for my personal writing is deciding between my main blog and my microblog. Long things always go on my main blog. Very short things are also totally okay for my main blog — but they’re okay for my microblog too.

So, for short things, I just make a snap decision, go by feel, and try not to spend more than a second on the decision. Since I’m writing in MarsEdit, picking the destination blog is just a matter of selecting it from a pulldown menu in the compose window. (I can choose a destination, write the post, then change my mind about the destination before posting. Easy.)

I rarely just tweet something, unless it’s truly ephemeral (or a reply, obviously). I prefer to blog first and let Twitter get a copy. This is part of owning my own content.

Reading tools

I use NetNewsWire with Feedbin syncing. I use the Micro.blog Mac app and Icro on my iPhone. (The Micro.blog Mac app supports multiple accounts, which is very useful to me.)

For Twitter I use Twitterrific on my Mac — with five windows open at all times for my various accounts — and Tweetbot on iOS.

NetNewsWire 5.0a2 is up!

I have not watched WWDC videos so avidly, and with so much glee, in a decade. The last time was probably with the iPhone SDK.

And now I’m putting my world back together in my head, a little bit at a time. It’s going to take a while.

One thing you should not miss: the SwiftUI DSL is not some Apple-only magic. We can define our own DSLs in Swift 5.1. Imagine what more Apple can do with this, and imagine what you can do with this.

See the What’s New in Swift video. Also pay close attention to property wrappers.

One thing I keep wondering about — because my apps tend to be about databases — is the SwiftUI of Core Data. In my app I use value types for most things stored in the database, which Core Data doesn’t support. So this means a whole bunch of custom code.

I would love to have defined my model using a Swift DSL and used an engine that (like Core Data) stores my data in SQLite.

I’m surely not the only person to think, all week long, that this WWDC marks the end of Apple’s NeXT era and the beginning of the Swift era.

The NeXT era began, of course, when Apple acquired NeXT, with its Unix-based operating system, amazing developer tools and frameworks, and its CEO, Steve Jobs.

Cocoa was so much better for writing Mac apps than the Mac Toolbox was. The Mac Toolbox had been a revolution — but this was more than just incrementally better. (Cocoa is NeXT’s application frameworks that had been adapted and evolved for the Mac.)

A common refrain of Mac developers at the time was that Objective-C wasn’t nice at all to look at — but it was a wonderful language for the ways its underpinnings allowed for these powerful and easy-to-use frameworks.

It was mind-blowing. Don’t underestimate how much so.

And then, years later, Apple created UIKit, which was a modernized version of Cocoa for iPhone, with its small screen and touch interface. It was Cocoa for devices you carry around with you.

Also completely mind-blowing.

Fast-forward to now, and note that millions of apps have been written using this technology which was born at NeXT, then brought to Apple and pushed so very far forward.

Even if you’ve been writing mostly in Swift the last few years, you’re still writing in a NeXT context. Your apps still live in that world, whether you know it or not. Your apps are still Objective-C apps in a very real sense.

Then this week happened

Before WWDC there was plenty of talk about Catalyst (which we had been calling Marzipan) which is a way of bringing UIKit (iOS) apps to the Mac. And this was indeed part of the news of the week.

But the future was never about UIKit being a better version of what we already had for Macs. In some respects UIKit is better, in other ways not. It’s just that there are so many more iOS apps than Mac apps.

Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.

It’s early. It has bugs. It’s not nearly complete. Sure. But it’s also how we’re going to write apps in the future.

And it’s mind-blowing. Apple’s marketing for this year’s WWDC had it right.

It may be a while before you’re running apps that use SwiftUI and Combine (and who knows what else still to come). We’re in a transition, and transitions take years. But we’ve all just had a glimpse of the next 20 years.

SwiftUI is the future of app-making for our community.

UIKit for Mac (Catalyst) is a lateral move. I’m sure this will be super useful for a lot of developers, though not for me personally (since I don’t have an iOS app to move to the Mac).

But AppKit and UIKit both look like old news compared to SwiftUI and the Combine framework.

* * *

I’m not going to start using SwiftUI right away in NetNewsWire for Mac — NetNewsWire 5.0 is too close to shipping. We’re fixing bugs, and that’s it.

But we do plan to use it in NetNewsWire for iOS, since it’s not as far along as the Mac version. Obviously I’ll have more to say about SwiftUI as we learn more about it.

Could we eventually get to that place where the Mac and iOS version share UI code via SwiftUI? It looks promising! I would love that.

* * *

The future of app-making looks more and more like web development. Declarative. Semantic. Dynamic — adapting to context (interaction styles, accessibility settings, screen size, etc.). Runtime-editable.

SwiftUI and Combine can also be seen as an answer to Electron and React Native. The right answer for Apple, I think.

* * *

I’m way behind on videos. I’ve seen just a little bit so far. So much to learn! This was a big WWDC.

Maurice Parker writes Proposed NetNewsWire Branching Strategy. Discussion on the Slack group.