> I really wish more companies would go back to the old-style model where users can buy the current version of a software tool but would need to pay a discounted price to upgrade to a newer version of that tool
We can thank Apple for this! They refused to adopt upgrade pricing on the App Store (which developers have been asking for since the App Store launched!) and instead introduced Subscriptions.
I like Apple, overall, but they absolutely decimated their software market by forcing apps to either be free with ads or paid subscriptions.
It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook".
Facebook is/was two things:
1) a microblog (your personal page)
2) an interface for following other's microblog posts
This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all.
Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.
I still don't understand the pro-Beeper argument here. They have absolutely no right to unauthorized access to Apple's servers or network, this seems fairly cut-and-dry, despite whatever "moral" argument people seem to want to make.
My version of this involved a Wii remote: freshmen-level CompSci class, and the group had to build a simple game in Python to be displayed at a showcase among the class. We wrote a space invaders clone. I found a Bluetooth driver that allowed your Wiimote to connect to your Mac as a game controller, so I set up a basic left/right tilt control using a Wiimote for our space invaders clone.
The Wiimote connection was the star of the show by a long shot :P
iPhone 13 mini owner here. I love this phone. I've used large phones in the past, was a happy iPhone 7 Plus owner, and owned and used the 5.8-inch iPhones X and 11 Pro, but I'm just so much happier with a smaller phone that I can more easily hold. Part of this is due to my smaller hands, and a large part is the reduction in weight. I don't even care if I drain the battery scrolling TikTok, because the battery is so small I can fast charge back to 80% in no time.
It's weird. I spent my teenage years and early twenties as a yearly/bi-yearly iPhone upgrader, but it turns out that form factor, more so than display, cameras, or gimmicks is what wins me over today.
I proclaim in my everyday life that the phone that will replace my blue iPhone 1 mini will -- as of right now -- be a used/refurbished green iPhone 13 mini. :)
I did this back in 2016, with an iOS app I built/hacked away at while learning/self-teaching Swift and UIKit.
Easily over 1,000 hours (~2 hours ~5x day per week for ~2 years) invested in to the app. I learned so, so much, and fell in love with the Swift language, but that app never saw the light of day.
Instead, I developed skills that have made me a much better programmer. And, fast-forward to the current day, I could effectively re-write the entire app - from scratch - in a weekend, due to the evolution of Apple's platform dev tools and APIs over the last ~7 years + the mountains of Swift code and packages I've hacked and honed away at over the years.
This type of project should be celebrated. Programming is (can be) art. Art can be made just for you, as a creative outlet.
Any insight on how Whisper works on older Intel Macs? I have a 2012 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM doing nothing; if I could use it to (slowly) transcribe media in the background, this becomes a must-buy.
> Google is bringing in $160 Billion a year with their clean search result pages.
No, Google brings in $X billion a year with all the ads and garbage they stuff in between those clean search results.
The same is true for Microsoft. There's no money to be made to run the service (let alone justify an American company's lust for growth and profit) without stuffing it full of ads to hopefully sell you something.
Sure, put PWAs in some online "app" store, but personally, if I am going to an App Store (be it iOS or Android), I want actual real platform apps, not cross-platform web apps.