Can a good social network do away with usernames? I think it could, given thought. Contacts should me more like your address book. Make it invisible. No more “@“s. Bring back the human part like “Hey Vincent” and not “Hey @“. I’m not an @.

Saying all that, just now, I think the Apple Watch is the perfect answer. It has utility and function and you can be connected when you need to be. I look forward what the future brings here... unless they screw that up somehow (bigger screens).

Things I didn’t like about the Apple Keynote:

• When they mention how the iPhone changed the way we live in ways no one ever imagined. (47 min mark on the video).

They should trademark that. Robot humans. People clinging onto their phones like their life depends on it. Car crashes and deaths because of FOMO. Friends talking to each other whilst messaging or checking a feed of some sort… not actually interacting with each other. Parents more obsessed with their phone than their children. All that great stuff you know… feeling empowered to do great things like checking your email or that blue social network… great use of energy and resources of the A13 Bionic processor. So wasteful. Oh and countless selfies… hence we’re getting an upgrade.

Oh I could go on.

Things I loved during the Apple Keynote (Live stream):

• The animated Apple logo when the stream started - make it a screensaver please Apple!!!! You need some new ones in Catalina!
• The intro video. They’re always very creative.

That’s it.

Predictive text on iOS is getting so bad that I just want to revert to typing on my laptop for anything more than a couple of sentences.

Seeing bugs on the iOS13 simulator, on the Xcode 11 GM, that aren’t there on the real device 🤔

Currently digging the black theme with the yellow accent in Gluon. Any Gluon users have their favourite? Any accent colours you want adding?

Time Machine backups pretty much stopped working after beta 2 or 3 of Catalina. Let’s see if it works now...

Last night I tidied up a few things on Gluon. Simpler screens and logic, moved search to “Discover More” as an experiment, ultimately getting rid of clutter on the tab bar. Also managed to reduce the app size by 100KB. And added push! Coming soon 😊

Mail on iOS13 is still broken in the latest 13.1 beta… Why fix something that certainly wasn’t broken in iOS12? It’s so frustrating that Apple are doing this.

No mention of software during the Apple keynote. Must be a bad year… oh... wait.

Productive keynote. Worked on a basic push notification screen for Gluon.

Always nice to start something on Rails.

My daughter always brings a smile to my face, and my inner self, no matter how bad the day.

Continuing my “good social network” topic. A good social network should never allow ads from advertisers. Advertising the social network itself is OK. A featured post, something like the Discover section on Micro.blog, should be encouraged.

Just pushed out build 8 (2019.1) for Gluon. This fixes an outstanding, and longterm, issue with swiping back out from a conversation or somewhere where feed items are showing.

Thank you to Matthew for bearing with me on this one! It still requires some tweaking but I hope this is an improvement already.

I’m about push out and update for Gluon, on iOS, that will tweak a few things especially the swipe actions on a cell. Also worked on speeding up the navigation to a conversation. It used to wait until the screen opened before fetching any data, but now it goes ahead and does it as you tap the post or conversation button.

As a test, I removed the “see who they’re following” on profiles. Is it important? Does the Discovery section not allow you to make your own decision whom to follow? Should I create a special screen that will load random profiles? Feedback welcome. Personally I’d like to just randomly find people that pop up on Discover. It gives a better feeling of “chance encounters”. The profile data you get back from the following count isn’t enough to give you a sense of whom they are anyway… just a name and username.

Anyway, here are the new swipe actions:

For any Gluon users… would it break your heart if I removed the multi account functionality? Does anyone use it? I’d like to rewrite all of it as it’s super buggy and I found a better way.