When Twitter Blue was first launched in 2021 I was interested — not because of verification because that wasn’t part of the deal back then and I was (legacy) verified in 2016 anyway.

What interested me most was some of the other features like editing tweets, undoing tweets, bookmark folders and reader mode.

I’m one of those people that type and send and tend to either not proof read well OR mis-read words. Maybe it’s a form of undiagnosed dyslexia but I’ve always had odd situations where I can see a completely different word, hit send then realise my mistake.

So Twitter Blue sounded awesome but of course was only released in certain regions.

Fast forward to March this year and the “new” Twitter Blue has been launched (a couple of times) and now includes up to 4000 character tweets (also nice) and of course the much debated verification badge that isn’t really a verification.

If you pay the monthly fee you get all these features and the badge.

Up until today, “legacy” accounts have been differentiated — not by a badge colour or style (that would be TOO easy) but by a label that appears when clicking the badge.

But apparently from April 1st (a joke either way), legacy accounts will no longer be shown and anyone with one will lose their badge if they don’t have a Blue subscription, and they’ll appear just like everyone else that subscribed.

Of course this has upset a load of people that had legacy badges, partly because they are notable (celebs etc) and want to avoid impersonation, and partly ego.

The thing to note is that it’s VERY easy to create a Twitter account with a name that looks almost identical to the real account. For example, EIonmusk was a twitter account created at http://www.twitter.com/EIonmusk, now suspened of course but very easy to swap a capital i with an l and impersonate an account.

I do think Elon has made a massive mistake here, and that what he should be doing is making Twittter blue verification badges blue (of course) and then having his government and corporate / company colours etc, then simply have a white badge that is for legacy verified users.

If you look at the API data that comes back there’s two flags for verified with legacy and verified with blue. It would be a simple thing to solve this, and he could even add back in the “Official” flag under the name to show that this IS the real person.

Very simple to implement and solves the impersonation problem instantly.

So, I’ll be continuing my subscription and if this all goes ahead I’ll show as a Blue subscriber from the 1st and if that means people unfollow or block me then fine — you do what you want, and I’ll do what I want and good luck to you.

Just don’t be too Blue about it.

Why did I sign up for Twitter Blue? was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been a buyer of domain names for the last 20 or so years — here are a few:

The Classics:

workbetter.com
workeasier.com
workharder.com
workfaster.com

Pocket domains:

pocketdomains.co.uk
pocketsalesman.com
pocketsalesman.net
pocketsalesman.co.uk
pocketdomains.com
pocketdomains.net
pocket-domains.com
pocket-domains.net
pocketmessages.com
pocketmessages.net
pocketmessaging.com
pocketmessaging.net
pocketlife.net
pocketsql.co.uk
pocketlife.co.uk
pocketwebsites.co.uk
pocketfreeware.co.uk
pocketwebsite.co.uk
pockethardware.com
pocketwebsites.com
pocketword.com
pocketdatabases.com
pocketwebsite.com
pocketwords.com
pocketstickies.com
pocketcontacts.com
pocketdatabase.com
pocketsql.com
pocketapplications.com
pocketgames.net

Tech domains:

roadwarrioressentials.com
roadwarrioressentials.net
roadwarrioressentials.co.uk
easyroaming.co.uk
happyroaming.co.uk
digitalfreak.co.uk

Randoms:

updateanywhere.co.uk
ftpanywhere.co.uk
editanywhere.co.uk
rocksolidsoftware.co.uk
rocksolidsoftware.org
thinkingoffice.co.uk
thinkingoffice.com
editanywhere.net
easyroaming.net
easyroaming.com
ftpanywhere.net
ftpanywhere.com
skippingfish.com

Inspired by movies:

shakeandbakeapps.com
shakeandbakeapps.net
shakeandbakeapps.co.uk

Ideas:

dayoneprinciple.com
thedayoneprinciple.com

Dating sites:

justbisexualsingles.com
justkinkysingles.com
justairforcesingles.com

Bit of fun:

ready4rishitopaytaxes.com
ready4rishiswifetopaytaxes.com
readyforrishiswifetopaytaxes.com

Don’t ask:

tossmysalad.com
shakeitandseewhatfallsoff.com

My Domains was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have had this question a few times — it’s a good one:

Rusty Nail on Twitter: "why did you simultaneously qrt and comment / Twitter"

why did you simultaneously qrt and comment

OK, so here’s how Twitter works:

1. If you post a tweet, your followers see it in their timeline; others can search and find it too.
2. If you mention someone, and that mention is NOT at the start of the tweet then your followers will see it — this is why some people including me do “hey @” or “.@” because it means everyone or follows you will see it.
3. When it comes to REPLIES, it works so that if your followers follow the SAME account you’re replying to they will see the tweet in their timeline, but if they don’t then they won’t see it.

So, sometimes if I want to quote a tweet; share it with followers AND provide context I’ll quote the tweet in the reply — it looks odd absolutely, but by doing that AND then retweeting it myself, I a) let my followers see the response and b) give them IMMEDIATE context.

If I just retweeted my reply to show my followers then they’d have to click the tweet; scroll back and look for the original thread (if they cared about it — many don’t!).

So that’s why!

Why do I quote a tweet when replying? was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Been a while since I posted on any tech — but I did upgrade to the 14" M1 Max.

It was an expensive machine — always hard with Apple as you can’t post upgrade so I went for the the maxed out model but with 4TB drive.

I wanted to do a kind of “pure upgrade” in that I’d basically just run Apple Silicon apps but it turned out to be pretty impossible (for me).

I did a migration from my old machine, started up the new one and had a million (I kid you not) dialogs pop up about things not being able to run.

So I had to enable / install Rosetta 2, and reboot into recovery mode to turn off the sandboxing that Apple enable by default (think iPhone / iPad).

Once I did that I could startup and work as normal, and have to say despite not being a pure Apple Silicon setup, battery life and performance is INCREDIBLE.

Yes as a developer I had a LOT of things to sort out in terms of SDKs etc but the thing I don’t miss anymore is the fans.

I could launch Safari or an email client or ANYTHING and the fans would go nuts and CPU % would be high all the time. For the first time using a Mac I’ve seen CPU idling of 2% etc.

Funniest thing was how I spent a day working away and not realising that some app had gone nuts in the background. It was using 80% CPU (I have the maxed out model except for a 4TB drive) and I didn’t know. No fan noise, no compiling or running issues etc.

I literally had a process using 80% of a core etc. and had no idea — with the old Intel machine it would be running slow, fans going nuts etc.

Also battery life — ridiculously good — even with apps using Rosetta!

Honestly, Intel / AMD etc. have a BIG problem on their hands as currently they are YEARS behind Apple and their chips.

Amazing machine, amazing Silicon.

Believe me the Mac Pro will be INSANE.

After Several Months with the Macbook Pro 14" M1 Max was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The new iPad Mini is here, with a stunning new shape echoing the design of the iPad Air and latest iPad Pro models, Apple Pencil 2 support and Touch ID.

What’s good:

• The screen is gorgeous with more space available due to smaller bezels and no home button.
• It’s fast. The A15 chip is blazing and games and general usage is very smooth.
• Pencil clicks onto the side, charges and is responsive despite the 60Hz screen.
• You can hold the mini in one hand comfortably, and easily remove it from the smart folio so it feels like one of those tablets on Star Trek: TNG.

What’s not so good:

• The UI especially on the Home Screen is messed up. The four columns of icons look lost with huge margins on the left and right. Landscape mode looks better. You can increase the size of the home icons and to *some* degree the text but layout and margins remain the same.
• The dock in portrait mode looks ridiculous with more than a handful or so of icons. There’s also no way to improve this other than removing apps. No zoom option for the dock and changing dynamic text size does nothing to home icon labels etc.
• Maximum storage is 256gb. Personally I would have preferred a 512gb option. I have about 10gb and that’s with optimise photos on. (xxxOS will store full photos if it can and only offload to iCloud when necessary.

What’s missing and doesn’t matter:

• No ProMotion. Still maintain 99% of users won’t care. Yes scrolling is at 60Hz compared to 120Hz but I don’t find it jarring going from a ProMotion devices to this and don’t believe the average user would either.
• No faceID – It’s nice and convenient but I get why it’s not there and the use of TouchID on the power button is a very nice “touch”.

Overall it’s a great device and I’m sure some OS tweaks will improve much of the issues with the home screen UI.

Like I said above there are *some* solutions to this as mentioned by Luke here:

Luke Miani on Twitter: "Before / After pic.twitter.com/EzCM5evw5u / Twitter"

Before / After pic.twitter.com/EzCM5evw5u

But you ideally need to a) only specify the font increase on the home screen (you can do this by adding text control to control center) and b) establish the right size to allow the fonts to be bigger whilst not making notification center and widget text massive. For me, 120% seems to be OK with large icons switched on

A side issue I have still is that we still don’t have multi-user capability in iPadOS and more importantly, syncing of apps, widgets and settings across iPads. For example, I’d love to be able to pick up either the 12.9” or the Mini and everything is there. Not just apps and iCloud, but icon and widget positioning and settings etc. I’d like either device to just be a window into a setup that remains consistent (with the option to turn it off) across all iPads I might use.

Despite all this I’d highly recommend it if you want a small handheld tablet that’s part of the Apple OS ecosystem.

Mini iPad Mini 2021 Review was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Following on from my previous post on why I was returning the 16" MacBook pro, I thought I’d drop a quick post with my feelings about the new 13" version just released.

(I realise that this is not the most important thing to be talking about when people are dying, losing their jobs and work because of this horrific pandemic — it’s just a bit of “normality” in an abnormal time as watching the news all day is just too depressing.)

In my last post I talked about returning the 16" — this was for a number of reasons but mainly it was its size — the thing was gorgeous; had a lovely screen and keyboard but I was struggling to handle it physically — every case and bag I had wouldn’t take it and when typing on it my Apple Watch metal strap kept clipping the left corner.

I just wasn’t prepared to buy new bags and not wear my watch when using it!

This all changed in the last few weeks when Apple released the anticipated (but unexpected) 13" MacBook “refresh”. This new model doesn’t follow the 16" and add a new, bigger 14" screen but it does add the latest generation of Intel chips AND the magic keyboard.

More importantly (as I never had a problem with the butterfly), this new model adds the ability to upgrade to 32gb of faster RAM. One thing I loved about the 16" was having 64gb of RAM and would have loved that on this model but 32gb is (seemingly) just fine and usually operating with around 10gb free.

This is a lovely machine — it’s small, still portable despite being a tiny bit thicker, and having 10th gen processors, faster ram and 32gb makes it just fly.

It feels snappy, responsive and everything just works faster.

The keyboard is great; inverted arrow keys are back and it’s got double the travel which is noticeable when looking at it (and obviously when typing on it).

This new machine supports larger storage so I went for 2TB SSD up from a 1TB SSD which to be fair I was fine with but since it’s something that’s a PITA to upgrade later, I felt it was time to do it.

I’d have loved to see a 14" version more space but this is a great upgrade and was £1,500 cheaper than the 16" model I’d bought.

Overall, very happy; keeping it and have sent my old 13" for “repair” to hand down to my wife :)

Why I’m keeping the new 13" MacBook Pro was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it was announced, the new 16” MacBook Pro looked like a beast of a machine – 64gb of RAM, 8TB option, 8 cores, an impressive screen and the apparent Apple-saving, doom-averting keyboard.

I ordered one because I was really interested in the spec – the 64gb was incredibly attractive despite me having survived on 16gb for years and not really knowing why I wanted more — and that’s the issue with this machine for me at least – what problem was it actually solving for me?

Firstly, I’ve had no real issues with the butterfly keyboard – it has less travel yes, but I spend 90% of my time with the MBP docked and using a Magic Keyboard 2 so the time I spend in laptop mode doesn’t bother me that much.

What *did* bother me was the palm rest of the 16" — if you’re wearing a watch, especially one with a metal bracelet, the palm rest will seriously piss you off as you’re either raising your hands above it OR removing your watch.

If you don’t remove it you’ll absolutely end up scuffing the aluminium edge of the palm rest. I did every so slightly on the FIRST DAY OF OWNING IT – it was subtle and in most cases unnoticeable but in that “right” light, you could see it.

And the touch bar? Again I hardly need it as 90% docked and I don’t need a physical ESC key as I remapped that to the top left key on the keyboard (and capslock) so no issues there.

(I’m also not a “real” developer so I don’t use VIM, 😂 )

The typical YouTubers and click-batiers will be bang on about the keyboard and how it’s going to solve everything but ironically I didn’t get on with it – I found I mistyped more on the new keyboard than the butterfly keyboard — it felt more spongy to me and not as crisp as the butterfly.

Ultimately my biggest issue was how this thing was SO damn big on my desk; in my bag; to carry etc.

The screen is impressive and makes it a pleasure to use when not hooked up to a monitor compared to the 13" which feels cramped and hard to read.

Ultimately though I’d bought this thing as a punt, having only used 13” devices and thinking this would actually help me in my work. The reality is that build times were faster yes but not THAT much faster, and I was lugging around a bigger machine that had cost me close to £4.7k once I included AppleCare+ and carry cases etc.

The reality is that we’re probably less than 6 months away from an Intel chipset refresh of the Mac lineup and specifically of the 16” which could include WiFi 6 amongst other things and I believe we could easily see a 14” MacBook Pro with 6-core 32gb, WiFi 6 etc. I felt like spending this much money (despite the fact I use PayPal credit) was just too much of a risk.

Really I think my perfect machine is a 13" refresh that makes it a “little” bigger and with a 14" inch screen and adds at *least* 32gb RAM option and hopefully 6 cores at least.

That’s a machine that would seriously appeal to me.

Why I returned the MacBook Pro 16” was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the cool new features of iOS 13 is the ability to switch to “dark mode” where your app can take on a dark UI appearance. Some of this is handled by adding additional color settings for dark mode and some elements are handled by iOS.

This means if you don’t implement settings for dark mode you may see issues in your Titanium apps where labels on white have white text etc. especially if you haven’t set specific colors — as the OS will try to do this automatically by changing the defaults.

The workaround is to either a) specify colors for all elements and not use default colors OR b) add the following to the iOS section in your Ti.App.xml file:

<key>UIUserInterfaceStyle</key>
<string>Light</string>

Doing this will lock your app into pre iOS13 UI settings and give you time to work out dark mode without users freaking out that they can’t see elements of your app!

Forcing Titanium apps to use light mode in iOS 13 was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I took the plunge and updated to Catalina last week (and the final release yesterday) and also Xcode 11, which has some breaking changes around simulators and builds that doesn't affect most developers unless you’re working with old versions of Xcode.

If you’re working with the Titanium SDK, you’ll no doubt be working on projects that could be using a 7.5.X SDK and others that use the latest 8.2.0.GA SDK.

Trying to support clients on multiple SDKs can be hard, especially when for some reason you can’t update them to the latest versions.

My situation is that I’m working on new apps and projects using Titanium 8.2.0.GA but I still need to support projects running 7.5.x.GA so have to be able to work with both. I also want to be able to test on iOS 13 SDK of course.

So after some messing around, I’ve got a setup that’s working so here’s how to run Xcode 10 and 11 side-by-side and support 7.5.X and 8.2.X Titanium apps.

Firstly, all of this is non-official and non-supported but it’s all easily reversable.

So assuming you only have XCode 10 installed, here’s what you do:

1. rename your Xcode.app in /Applications to Xcode10.app
2. Download and install Xcode 11 from the AppStore
3. Launch Xcode 11 and let it install the components it needs
4. At this point you can work with Xcode 11 using the 8.2.0.GA SDK and install to the iOS 13 Simulators without any issue.
5. Now, go to your 8.2.0.GA folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/8.2.0.GA and copy the ioslib in node_modules.
6. Next, go to your 7.5.x.GA folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/7.5.x.GA and paste the ioslib folder you copied into node_modules, replacing the one there. You can of course rename the existing one as a backup. (You could of course just update the package.json file in the root of the SDK folder and do an npm update but that didn’t work for me.)
7. Now go back to Xcode 11 and into preferences > components and install the 12.2 simulator. Note you can’t do this in Xcode 10 on Catalina due to system read-only partitions.
8. Once you’ve done all you should have simulators setup for 12.2, 12.4 and 13.1.

Using the CLI you can now build an app for iOS 13 SDK (with 7.5.x or 8.2.x) using:

ti build — platform ios — device-id 1

(and select the device from the list)

To build with the iOS 12 SDK you’d use:

ti build — platform ios — device-id 1 — ios-version 12.4

(and select a device from the list of 12.2 devices)

If you want to be able to use the 12.4 list of simulators, you can but you need to do one more little “hack”.

Go back to the SDK folder and open 7.5.1.GA/node_modules/ioslib/lib/simulator.js

then comment out line 475:

// return callback(new Error(__(‘The specified iOS Simulator with the UDID “%s” is not available.’, simHandle.udid)));

Save it and then you can now select 12.2, 12.4 or 13.1 simulators!

It’s not ideal — ideally we want this patched in the 7.5.X SDK but it’ll enable you to move forward with iOS 13 SDK testing, SwiftUI etc. while still supporting apps that are written for pre Titanium 8.2.0.GA SDKs.

(If you want to revert everything, just delete the 7.5.1.GA folder and re-install the SDK.)

Working with Catalina, Xcode 10, Xcode 11 and multiple Titanium SDKs was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ben Sandofsky on Twitter

At this point everyone know that apps built with cross platform frameworks only ship if you compromise quality. But nobody has measured whether they save time over just half-assing two native apps.

This was in response to an article by Dropbox discussing the hidden cost and issue with sharing code between two platforms:

The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

Ben again:

Ben Sandofsky on Twitter

Every "How We Build a Cross Platform App" talk should end with an American Graffiti style epilogue. Freeze frame on the speaker. Title card: "One year later the app was rewritten from scratch. Terry Fields no longer works at the company.

It’s fun to take a pop at cross-platform apps not being as “pure” and “proper” as “native” apps – why not when there’s SO many bad examples of apps out there – Slack on Mac or pretty much anything that’s based on Electron, PhoneGap/Cordova or any hybrid framework.

That’s the real problem with cross-platform – there’s a perception that cross-platform means hybrid and web-based apps in a “native wrapper”.

They’re wrong of course – I write cross-platform apps – they’re not hybrid – I write with the Titanium SDK which creates fully native UI apps written from a JavaScript codebase.

Of course you can argue that it’s not *really* native – it’s not using Swift or Objective-C or Java – the business logic of your app IS JavaScript – the interface is native.

Despite this, I can write apps that are indistinguishable from “native” apps as far as quality and performance is concerned.

Just yesterday an app written with the Titanium SDK was featured on the UK AppStore – featured – by Apple.

Anyone can write a high-quality app and anyone can write a “half-assed” app.

There *are* good examples of hybrid apps, that mix native components like Tab Groups and navigation components with HTML rendered content – and to most users they don’t know the difference (the iOS AppStore is a good example).

I’ve seen plenty of examples of code written for the Titanium SDK that’s absolutely appalling, creating overly complex user interfaces, slowing down the app and trying to replicate the same UI across iOS and Android, all of which absolutely has compromised quality.

That’s nothing to do with Titanium. With many of these apps I’ve spent some time (typically a day or two) rewriting parts, simplifying the underlying code and *significantly* improving performance.

(With one example the client was ready to redevelop their app using Objective-C and Java because the performance was so bad on Android specifically they just figured they’d rebuild them both. I was able to take the code, unify their four brands into a single codebase, removed simulated components and replace with native, and improve performance to the point that I ended up working for them for nearly two years working on the same apps. I was able to have eight different apps for four brands built from a single codebase, simplifying development and ongoing maintenance).

I’ve been developing cross-platform since 2010; been full-time freelance since the end of 2012 and have a very successful business building apps with Titanium.

The fact is, you CAN write awesome cross-plartform apps, you DON’T have to compromise quality and you can ship apps faster and cheaper than writing pure native apps.

But apps don’t write themselves – there’s the developer factor and their experience of a) the language they use, b) the framework they use and c) the approach they use.

There’s far more to this than just the framework.

“Everyone” is assuming cross-platform tools result in poor quality apps.

“Everyone” is wrong.

“Everyone” is wrong when it comes to cross-platform apps was originally published in Jasonified on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.