The year was 1985 and I stole my first Mac. Apple had just released the Mac and wanted companies to make things for it. They gave HESware (where I work before Lucas) a Mac. No one at the company was interested in it so I asked if I could take it home for the weekend. When I got back to work on Monday they laid everyone off. I filed to mention I had the Mac at home. I've used Macs ever since.
I've decided to take the old #Macintosh HIGs & merge them into one large collection of topics while modernizing them in the process.
The original #HIG would give actual examples w/ usable metrics & mention possible exceptions to the rule. The incredible level of detail gave developers the guidance to create delightful UI users have come to expect from their #Mac.
I am overjoyed that not one, but TWO #Mastodon clients are now available on the #Mac, running on #MacCatalyst.
I worked a TON on Mac Catalyst for over five years until I left #Apple last year, in the sincere hope that it would make it easier for authors to write great iOS apps that can also be polished into excellent apps for the Mac. It pleases me to no end that both @ivory and @MonaApp used Catalyst to port their fantastic #Mastodon clients to the Mac, allowing the Mac to become first-class peers of their iOS products.
Congratulations to both apps for achieving this! As an ex-Catalyst plumber, I’m grinning from ear to ear.
I remember when #Chrome was introduced as a fast, efficient browser. Just look at this screenshot from the Activity Monitor on my #Mac. #Safari is the browser I actually use. Chrome sits in the background for one specific use case. No plugins. Just idling, sucking 4 times the energy out of my machine compared to Safari … I repeat this over and over: If you own a Mac, use Safari. Use Chrome only if you have to. Close it after using.
The mass exodus from #Windows to #Linux (and #Mac) due to #Windows11 and #AI continues. More and more articles, more and more youtube videos about it, or posts on forums. People are switching. If it continues like that, Linux should have 10% desktop marketshare by the end of the decade (and yes, that's a lot).
Unlock the power of Mastodon with custom Shortcuts actions. Explore the in-app gallery of sample shortcuts to get started and let us know what shortcuts you come up with!
A Windows user, a Mac user, and a Linux user walk into a bar.
➡️ The #Windows user orders a beer and gets into a fight over how bloated the selection is.
➡️ The #Mac user orders the most expensive single-origin craft cocktail and smugly admires its minimalist design.
➡️ The #Linux user installs a whole brewery in the corner and declares free drinks for everyone, but then spends the rest of the night explaining why their homemade brew is objectively superior.
I have been building browsers for 30 years now. First Opera and now Vivaldi. My estimate is that more than 1 billion have used one of my browsers or both. Have you?
The most versatile and customisable app - Mona for Mastodon is FINALLY out of Beta and available to the general public on the #iOS, #iPadOS and #Mac App Stores. #MonaApp
So, I was thinking about this video on Chrome/Edge accessibility. Basically, it shows that the memory and CPU hog isn't the screen reader, it's the browser/accessibility pipeline. And honestly, it shows how, once again, being disabled is expensive. Not only are we told from a young age that we'll need to work twice as hard as abled people in order to get to the same level as the abled person, and then get a job that pays about $9 an hour for factory type work, or $20 per hour for highly specialized tech knowledge work, we have to buy expensive technology that can allow us to give that 200% of ourselves to our job and lives. Like, you see us buying an iPhone 15 or 14? That's not, for almost all circumstances, as a status symbol. That's because accessibility is so unoptomized that it slows our devices down. Because we have to have modern devices, a good 8 GB RAM (minimum) on a laptop, or a modern A-series chip, or, hell, probably an M-series Mac, just to keep up. I'm not sure about the M-series Mac part as I've not spent enough time with one to see how it compares to my 2019 Intel Mac.
We see this a lot with Android phones. A sighted person may be able to get by with a $250 Samsung phone. But when I worked with one, I felt the lag with TalkBack acutely. We may be able to blame the phones, or the PC's, or Intel Macs. But then why does an Intel PC run just fine with NVDA? No, digital accessibility is all about software. If it can run well for a sighted person, it should run well for a blind person. And that's why I always say that the OS is at the root of all digital accessibility, followed of course by whatever you run above that stack, like the browser. So we have to work 200% more, buy a good 200% more expensive, and we're still slowed down. Do not praise us for overcoming these things. Help us by eliminating the need to overcome them in the first place!!
I wrote about why #DX12 support and the #GamePortingToolkit is the biggest thing to happen to gaming on the #Mac in more than 30 years for Inverse! I stad by this -- even if it remains a niche/developer centric tool, the community has already proved that this is a big deal. I hope to see this integrated with Steam for Apple silicon Macs in the fall. https://www.inverse.com/tech/mac-directx-12-game-porting-toolkit-pc-games
This month it is 30 years since I started working on browsers. April 1994 is when Geir and I started working on the Opera browser. We founded the company a year later.
Initially I made the UI, while Geir did a lot of the core.
Since that time I have dedicated myself to making the Web live up to its potential. First at Opera and now at Vivaldi.
If you ever used Opera and you have not tried Vivaldi, I invite you to give us a try!
If you never used Opera or Vivaldi, you are invited as well!