Straight from his sixth AMA on Reddit:

When I code I use tabs because you want the columns to line up. For some word documents I use tabs. You want things to adjust when you go back and edit them and tabs help.

🔥

Reddit Comment
Full Reddit AMA

Google have announced another top-level domain from Google Registry, specifically for apps:

Today we’re announcing .app, the newest top-level domain (TLD) from Google Registry.

A TLD is the last part of a domain name, like .com in “www.google.com” or .google in “blog.google” (the site you’re on right now). We created the .app TLD specifically for apps and app developers, with added security to help you showcase your apps to the world.

This just makes sense. It’s obvious that this had to happen one day, and I’m very glad it has. Especially when you mention apps on things like Twitter like “Mail.app”, so technically there’s a possibility that url may actually work.

One security benefit is that HTTPS is required for all .app domains:

Your security is our priority. The .app top-level domain is included on the HSTS preload list, making HTTPS required on all connections to .app websites — no individual HSTS registration or configuration required. The result is built-in web security for you and your users. – get.app

You can check if a .app domain is available on get.app right now, and the general availability will be on 8th May 2018. Although some domain registrars are selling “early access” to domains, which means that you will essentially reserve a name, so a registrar will try to purchase it as soon as it’s available. I’m not exactly a big fan of this, but what can I do. What’s worse is that GoDaddy are selling multiple levels of priority.

I would like to get Slate.app, but the cheapest I’ve seen it €145 per year. Not exactly what I wanted to spend.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Today at our F8 conference I’m going to discuss a new privacy control we’re building called “Clear History”.

In your web browser, you have a simple way to clear your cookies and history. The idea is a lot of sites need cookies to work, but you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. We’re building a version of this for Facebook too. It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook — what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on.

Seems pretty reasonable. Nothing amazing about it though, of course you should be able to clear your history.

However, just a few paragraphs below, his true lizard-self comes out:

To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back in to every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won’t be as good while it relearns your preferences.

Daniel Caffrey writing for Selected Intelligence:

I was recently trying to check a reference on an article I’d read on Medium about 2 years ago. It had been removed from Medium by its author. So I checked the link on The Wayback Machine and there were plenty of snapshots. However when I click on any of them I get immediately redirected to the Medium.com homepage.

I’m not exactly sure of the benefits for Medium with this, but it seems pretty aggressive to me.

(Image by LEGOLAND Japan)

Guiness World Records:

It’s springtime in Japan, and what better way is there to commemorate the season than by setting a Guinness World Records title for the Largest LEGO® brick cherry blossom tree (supported)?

This successful attempt was achieved at LEGOLAND® Japan – the Nagoya-based theme park wanted to celebrate its first anniversary with style by creating a Japanesque work using LEGO® blocks.

The resulting beautiful plastic sakura tree measured 4.38 metres tall, 5.42 metres long and 4.93 metres wide – over 800,000 LEGO® bricks were needed to pull this off!

Ethan Grant:

That might sound silly today, in an era of centralized services (e.g. Facebook, Google) bombarding our inboxes, phones, and “feeds”. As privacy and security breaches make headlines, we clamor for a decentralized internet. But less than twenty years ago, the internet was decentralized, when the human cycle of individualism versus collectivism was perfectly aligned with divergent expression. We’ve now spent the past decade attempting to build the perfect centralized web, only to realize its many faults. The cycle continues.

It’s just one big cycle.

I finally bit the (very small) bullet and did a minuscule amount of editing to my blog’s theme, to make publishing from Ulysses much simpler.

I used to specify source urls for linked articles with a custom field named “external_link”. Previously this was fine, because I’d publish via Workflow on iOS, so I could specify this perfectly fine. However, although Ulysses have a section to add a title link, it will add it to a custom field named “linked_list_url”.

For a while, I’ve just been using the action to open the Editor, pasting the link in the web interface, and hitting publish. But I’ve now slightly modified my the code to search for either value, and use whichever is there.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing. But it now means I can do all my blogging inside Ulysses. Of course not including editing posts, but I rarely do that anyway.

Brent Simmons:

Say you write an iOS app, and now you want to write the Mac version.

Assuming there’s a data model, maybe a database, some networking code, that kind of thing, then you can use that exact same code in your Mac app, quite likely without any changes whatsoever.

I agree with Brent here. I’ve never really understood the argument that AppKit is that difficult to understand, so that’s why people don’t port native apps over. Surely the underlying logic of the app is the hard part, and linking the functionality to the interface is the easier part?

I would say I’m more of an iOS developer, simply because I’ve spent more time on it. But I’ve also made a few Mac applications. Sure, a resizing window is a bit more complex than a relatively fixed screen size, and some the interface elements are names slightly differently.

It’s just different, for both sets of people. But not as difficult as it may seem.

Matt Gemmell:

Like most people, my main computer is a phone.

That’s a big realisation. The device that’s always at hand, and is the first port of call for communication and entertainment and convenience, is your main computer. With the apps available now, there’s no meaningful distinction in utility between a phone and any other kind of device. Some tasks are easier and some are harder due to the form factor, but most tasks are possible — and having it permanently within reach is the mother of all advantages.

A common fact most people don’t realise. Most people can, and do, more things on their phone than they realise. Forget “Big Phone”, it’s more like “Small Computer”.

Many people, including myself, are trying to move away from Facebook and their related apps/services. But before you delete any accounts, it’s obviously ideal if you can retrieve any data first.

With Instagram, you can request to download your data, and they’ll send a link where you can download all your images, videos, and stories.

You also get .json files for a lot of the associated data:

• Profile
• Comments
• Connections
• Likes
• Messages
• Searches
• Settings

So they really do give you everything!

To download your data:

• Go to the Instagram website.
• Click on the profile icon in the top right.
• Click on the Settings cog next to “Exit Profile”.
• Choose “Privacy and Security”.
• Scroll down to the “Data Download” section.
• Click “Request Download”.

Instagram will then package up all your data, and send you an email with a link to the .zip archive.