For years I have been, secretly and sometime publicly, one of this people that thought the Apple was fine. It gave developers the reach they needed to potentially get to millions of customers, and the 30% that changed for the privilege was fine. That was until this week and my eyes were opened to the stress and hassle needed.
I’m not a developer by any means, I’m getting an app for micro.
I remember the first time we spoke to a specialist about my daughter Lucie’s mobility like it was yesterday. He was unbelievingly frank for a medical professional. In a world of maybes and possibilities, he gave us truth, and I really appreciated that. He spoke to us and explained in no uncertain terms that she may never walk.
What we came away with was a list of things for us to do.
I wasn’t aware of of Pika Pulse until the announcement of it shutting down recently. It sounds like a fantastic feature, and the developers of Pika seem like excellent people. For the past week or so I’ve been thinking about recommendations due to my work on Micro Social and including micro.blogs Discover feeds. There’s lots I want to do with it, but there’s always ethical things to consider.
Once you start to use the word recommended, or any simile, you get bogged down.
As you might already know, I’m developing an iOS app for Micro.blog. It happened quite accidentally, really. I initially created a basic app for myself, which I used for a while, gradually adding features until it became something I thought others would enjoy. Now, it’s at a stage where I could take action, but I feel so much like an imposter that I can’t bring myself to do it.
I believe we all experience imposter syndrome at some point in our lives, and right now, it’s really holding me back.
There are many people out there that don’t realise just how much micro.blog can do, and one of my favourite things is to use it for is reading. It is a great resource for finding recommendations through all reading posts tagged 📚 and tracking the books I read through the year.
So in Micro Social, you will find a toggle to turn on the Books Tab. This works with the standard three bookshelves that every user has on micro.
Along with ensuring you can follow a conversation with ease, one of the biggest things I wanted from Micro Social is the ability to be customisable. To be able to shape the way the timeline of posts can be consumed. To get exactly what you want at any point. Here’s the timeline on Micro Social.
With a range of filters available, you can limit and expand the posts you see depending on your mood.
Despite possibly picking the wrong time to work on micro.blog related things, I’m determined to push on a work in public to create something worthwhile. Anyway, my first target was threading, it’s one of my biggest frustrations on micro.blog and sometimes makes conversations challenging to follow, so getting this correct and intuitive is important to me.
When accessing a post that is a reply now, the post view displays the post you tapped on accented slightly.
There’s a lot going on that I want to be away from at the minute. Couple this with my desire to push my skills forward and make something I’m working on a micro.blog app built in Swift, and its placeholder name is micro social.
If you’ve been on micro.blog or any of my connected services the last few days, I’m probably muted from all the test posts I’m doing, but it’s all from a good place.
Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.
After the last few years using exclusively Fuji cameras, bar a short test with a Ricoh GRiiix, I am sorry to say I’ve switched back to Sony. There are a few reasons for this, but this is in no way a justification or a reason why I think they suck, merely my thoughts on the subject as a few people have asked. This won’t be a very elegant post, just a few points I feel are worth raising.