Finder in macOS has a behaviour that when you switch to it from another application, and there are no other Finder windows open in your current space, it should automatically open a new window to the user’s chosen default location.

Unfortunately, this behaviour isn’t reliable – it will do it once, but then not do it the next time. The problem being that if it fails to spawn the new Finder window when you switch to Finder, pressing the dock icon a second time will transport you to a different space that does have an open finder window.

Thankfully, Keyboard Maestro is here to save the day. To be clear, what really saved the day, was the Keyboard Maestro user forums, whose helpful denizens supplied the solution to this. Here’s the workflow, with documenting commentary included within.

This macro activates when switching to Finder from either the Dock, or by clicking on the desktop, and ensures you always have a file browser window ready to go when you switch to Finder.

From now on, I’m only selling books direct.

I should have done this earlier, but procrastination won out. What turned things around now, was Apple’s insistence on the requirement that I sell via EU-specific stores to reach EU customers, and those stores were about to require me to publish my home address and phone number.

Also the whole “Apple takes 30% of the cover price” thing, and the “Apple publisher tools have become garbage” thing.

So, we out.

There are certain problems I have with software – problems that are not solved the way I want them solved, so I’ve finally bit the bullet, and started learning a bit of programming. The most difficult part about it, is trying to deal with the learning tools; in this case Swift Playgrounds.

It lacks tooltips for all its buttons. The function to stop the program while running doesn’t actually stop the program. The app itself is unstable and crash-prone. But, for all that, I’m having a lot of fun pushing my brain in a way I haven’t had to in a while, and learning new things.

Also, I have to admit being tickled pink at being able to name functions like this, for comedy value.

2024 was a year to pause, and take stock – a year to get things completed, and checked off the list of all the things I had to do.

I shaved off my beard. That was pretty momentous. I do a major visual evolution every seven years or so, and this let me become much more comfortable with going out and doing things, since my mask could now get a skin-seal against my face.

I sawed up and disposed of my old desk top that I’d carted all the way from Sydney. Another part of my old life jettisoned in the name of storage space, where I did more sorting.

Most of the year, I was on my own in the house, which was pleasant.

Art Projects:

I removed C45C4d3 from the local library, which took several weeks to organise, as it hadn’t been faring all that well with the way it was hung.

I kept going with the image per day on mastodon, which was a really rewarding project – it eventually went through all my Fish Noir and Japan images.

A big, final update to Surfing The Deathline was a huge part of this year, consuming about two months. Once I sorted everything out tech-wise, I was able to fix pretty much everything that had ever bugged me, or just not been perfect (to my eyes). I’m super-happy with the outcome, because I know it’s at a state where I couldn’t have made anything better than it is, given the artwork I produced, etc.

Tech Projects:

Virtualisation and Audio Workflows were the big theme for this year. Setting up VMWare virtual machines for MacOS Snow Leopard, so I could run old Adobe Creative Suite apps, and produce a Surfing The Deathline update took a huge amount of time – I was lucky enough to find a secondhand, unopened copy of Snow Leopard Server for less than a tenth the price I’ve seen it attracting. The setup of all this literally took weeks to work out all the kinks.

Audio workflows revolved around setting up a whole new podcasting setup, as well as migrating all my music from a decades old iTunes library to new, largely filesystem-based setups.

First week of December, I migrated all my web & email hosting  away from Hostcolor, where I had been for around twenty years, to a new, Australia-based host. Things just became too unreliable with the old host – there was a week-long outage in April, as a result of a hardware failure that didn’t have backups running. I procrastinated most of the year once they fixed it, but a huge slowdown and image serving issue in late November, combined with having to endure their general support person finally made the pain of moving less than the pain of staying.

A huge tech thing for this year, was finishing a redesign and new-from-scratch theme for mattgodden.com. This has been a project running off and on for a year or two, and the breakthrough came when I surrendered to a part of the problem being effectively insurmountable with the way I wanted to do things. The solution was a little more conservative, a little more old school, but frankly a better, less showoff solution to the problem. It also made creating responsive versions dead easy, and satisfyingly functional.

Gear:

I bought a secondhand Nikon D810 to try out some features my existing D800 lacked (highlight-weighted metering). I liked those features so much, I bought a new D850, on the basis that it’s the final generation of DSLR camera Nikon will produce. Along with that were new memory cards.

I bought another couple of camera accessories – a filter holder for my big 14-24 lens, and a special rotating collar setup for tripod mounting the camera.

I bought a panel dolly for moving the aforementioned sculpture from the library, but didn’t end up using it, because the movers were able to carry it to their van.

I bought a new iPhone – a 2023 model iPhone SE, which I literally spent months not using, just having it sitting on my desk, powered on as I slowly worked out new processes to replace the old ones I’d used for the previous phone. Once I migrated fully over to it, I’m pretty happy with it. While the extra screen is not as easy to reach, the extra space is VERY usable.

I bought a new PCI storage card for my Mac Pro, and a pair of Samsung NVME drives, so I could migrate to a new operating system install booting off that card, and migrate my photo library from a usb-attached spinning hard drive, to a PCI direct SSD.

Health:

Eighth and ninth Covid shots. Tried to get back into bike riding, but got hit pretty hard by a magpie, which kindof put me off. My shoulder & back developed some issues; the shoulder especially. The fear is a frozen shoulder, which is an inflammatory thing in the capsule containing the ball joint. It makes it hard to sleep on my right. My back on the left side also has issues when sleeping on my left – doesn’t really leave a lot of choices. I had X-ray & ultrasound scans on both, so the new year will see the results discussed.

Walking around Brisbane women’s hospital and medical school in Herston. Testing out the new camera, with an autofocus adjustment. Primarily shooting in highlight-weighted metering, which biases the images quite dark in order to protect the highlights from over-exposing.

The Apple Podcasts app on iOS has a setting:

What does this setting do?

That should seem like a obvious answer, right? Once an episode ends, the app stops playing, and remains so until the user interacts with it to manually play another episode.

That’s not the way the application behaves. What actually happens; if you have multiple episodes of a particular show on your device, stored locally within the Podcasts library, and you play one, all the remaining episodes will be put into the “Playing Next” queue. Each episode will be auto-played after the previous finishes.

So this is a setting to disable or enable Continuous Playback, that doesn’t have any effect on whether Continuous Playback happens, because Apple is a company that has no respect for the concept of Consent.

The user does not explicitly consent to Continuous Playback.

The user actively signals that they do not consent to Continuous Playback.

Yet, Apple goes ahead and does Continuous Playback to them, regardless.

Don’t ever leave your drink unattended with someone from Apple’s Podcasts.app team. Too harsh?

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The biggest company in the world, and the people who work there do not deserve the benefit of your doubt. They would fix this if they cared. They woud fix this if they found the idea of software ignoring user consent to be offensive in some way. They don’t, because they don’t.

Well, the crossing seems to have been successful. All my sites are now located at a new webhost, which seems to be significantly faster at loading pages etc. All the databases seem to be working, which was an area of concern. Clearly this stuff is designed to work with migrations.

Email appears to be working correctly as well.

I think the thing I’m most surprised by, is how fast the domain re-delegation has been – 2 hours. I recall it used to be a lot slower.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes, if any issues crop up etc.

Things might be a bit funky as the new theme beds in and has fixes made. There’s going to be a move to a new webhost soon, so disruptions should be expected. Also, the design isn’t small-screen responsive yet. That’s a longer-term goal.

That said, Woot! This has been a long time coming.

150km round trip, two and a half hours on the road, with two stops along the way, and a little under $150 in total cost, I secured a box of vacuum tubes, a wheel from a plough, and a whole bunch of stainless steel fixings.

According to the guy selling the stainless steel (for $100), it was about $2k-$3k worth of material, which I believe. It was, again according to him, surplus from a job.

So these materials should prove interesting, both for making things, but also simple stuff, like if I need to make concrete plinths and bolt things down, I can embed these.

Mona, Mona, Mona. *sigh*

Mona is a client application for Mastodon servers. It allows you to do all the things you can do on Mastodon, in a much better UI than a web browser can provide.

In intent, in its radically wide scope for user customisation, in its support for old devices back to iOS 12, in its single purchase / perpetual licence pricing structure, Mona is a fantastic application, especially as the result of a single developer. It is, quite simply, the best Mastodon client for someone in the Apple ecosystem.

Mona is better than vanilla Mastodon, in much the same way that Tweetbot was better than vanilla Twitter. It also furnishes capabilities the standard Mastodon experience lacks; quote-posts, for example. It doesn’t matter if mastodon.social doesn’t have an official quote-post format, if everyone uses a client that presents links to posts as if they were being quoted, your experience of Mastodon becomes one in which quote-posts exist.

Mona is what made Mastodon usable for me, in the same way that Twitter killing third party clients, like Tweetbot, made Twitter unusable for me.

What is it that makes a social media platform “usable”, in my eyes?

It comes down to this; a social media platform, which features chronologically delivered content, needs to have:

1. a native application on each of my devices, and
2. that application has to keep my reading location in my feed synchronised.

What do we mean by native application?

I’m not interested in using a web browser to view a social media platform, or a web page packaged in an application frame. I’m not interested in Electron “apps”; I want a Mac application for when I’m on my Mac, an iPad application when I’m on my iPad, and an iPhone application when I’m on my iPhone. As a side issue – I’m not interested in native apps for social media networks that are made by the social media network itself. Your social network is only as good as the third party apps it supports.

What I especially don’t want, is some “sortof works everywhere” compatibility technology second-class application on all three. Unfortunately, that’s what Mona is. Mona is a Catalyst app.

Catalyst is Apple’s version of Electron; only instead of allowing web pages to impersonate native software, it allows iPad apps to pretend they’re real Mac apps. Apple have supplied plenty of them on your Mac already, and it’s no surprise they’re the ones that feel off. They’re the janky apps that don’t have proper contextual menus with all the expected entries (like text transformation options), where spell checking doesn’t work the same, where the keyboard shortcuts don’t work right, where text selection of a single character with your mouse is difficult, where window resizing doesn’t look the way it does on your proper Mac apps. Apple’s Messages, Music, Podcasts, Books, Weather – all of these janky, brittle-feeling applications are so, because they’re iPad apps masquerading as Mac apps.

Mona is one of these, and shares all those characteristics. It’s better than using Mastodon in a web browser, but it’s worse than a proper Mac app. This is not because the developer is a bad person, or that the ideas behind Mona are bad ideas; it comes down to Catalyst being a badly implemented technology, which at its absolute best can only produce second-class applications on macOS.

For example, sometimes the main timeline in Mona will just stop accepting clicks. All the other tabs in the UI will be fine, however the main timeline will be scrollable, but inert. You can call up a second instance of the main timeline, it will be fine, but the only way to clear the problem, is to quit and relaunch the app. Sometimes, the app will return your timeline to where it was, sometimes it will return to the newest post in your feed. Then, you just have to try to remember how many hours ago you were at, and scroll back to that location. Unfortunately, there’s no feed location bookmarking, which would be really useful, because…

…feed synchronisation simply doesn’t work. Put it this way:

What these images are showing is that I was reading my Mastodon feed in Mona for Mac, and I had reached a point where I was 5 hours in the past, in terms of the posts I was reading. I moved over to my iPad, unlocked its screen, opened Mona for iPad, and after it did it’s “restoring iCloud Position” dance, it synced to a point that was 7 hours in the past.

Later in the evening, I tried again, this time going from my Mac to my iPhone:

This time I went from 1 hour in the past, to 6 hours in the past upon unlocking my iPhone, opening Mona, and waiting for it to “restore iCloud position”.

Or another attempt:

…you get the idea.

To be clear, what is happening here is that Mona is saying it’s syncing my reading position on my iOS devices, to match where my Mac is at, and getting it wildly wrong.

What’s really problematic about this is that there’s no way to get the correct timeline position from my Mac, with the iOS device. If I look in the settings on the iOS devices, I will see that the last upload of Mona sync data to iCloud from my Mac was after I stopped advancing the timeline, and yet, for no good reason I can figure, Mona is picking some random (and inconsistent) time as it’s sync timecode.

Where this becomes a data-loss class issue, is that any interaction with Mona on the iOS device at this point overwrites my Mac’s timeline location. If I do any scrolling on the iOS device, it will push that timeline to iCloud, and my Mac will then jump to that location, if it is still awake with Mona on the screen.

I lose the correct data, by interacting with the incorrect data in any way.

If I swipe quit Mona on the iOS devices, and relaunch it at this point, it will load with its timeline set to the current moment, and then overwrite my Mac’s timeline location.

The only way to get consistent timeline sync is to have both devices open in Mona next to each other, and then advance the timeline on the source device, until the destination device reflects those changes. At this point the timelines will do the party trick of moving their timelines in unison.

Obviously, this isn’t a tenable situation – the whole point of iCloud Sync is that you can do something on one device, switch to another device any amount of time later, even if the original device is asleep or shut down, and just pick up where you left off. As far as I can recall, Mona is the only application I use which makes use of iCloud Sync, and consistently fails to correctly sync.

Whatever the reason, the point is that the Sync function doesn’t work in the real world. As a gimmick, making the timeline on one device move in realtime sync with another device is fine, but that doesn’t solve the problem of maintaining continuity of reading location as you switch between devices.

The other thing that bugs me about Mona, is the timeline compression that occurs after not using the application overnight. You sit down to Mona in the morning, to catch up on what’s happened in your feed overnight, and some inconsistent way on from your current location, is a Load More Posts label; after which, your feed continues from only 4 hours ago.

What inevitably happens as I sit there scrolling un-caffeinated, is I find myself suddenly wondering why I’m already at only 2 hours, and realise somewhere in my scrollback is a clickable link to load between 6 and 8 hours worth of posts. So I have to manually scroll back, until I find an image I recognise from last night, and then carefully find the single line Load More Posts link.

This wasn’t the behaviour of the app when I purchased it. For whatever reason, no matter how many times I’ve made this suggestion, the developer won’t do anything to either make this a behaviour that can be disabled, or make the Load More Posts label more obvious; like giving it a bright contrasting background colour, or a skeuomorphic broken, saw-toothed edge, which contrasts against the dominant horizontals and verticals.

It’s maddening, and a great example of how self-sabotaging people can be with their own work.

So that’s Mona (as of 24, October, 2024), an app that showed great promise in its early days for its massive, industry-leading customisability, which really pointed to a better direction for software which every part of the UI being user-modifiable, but which is now drowning under its basic technology not being up to the task, and its core feature – the literal reason you would use it, and not a browser; feed syncing, no longer actually working with any reliability.

It really does seem that no one is capable of making truly great software any more. Whether it’s building on janky non-native libraries, or image editor apps that are restricted to a single window with no tear-off palettes, or photo library apps that can’t have the thumbnails in one window, and the viewer in another, or full-screen preview software that can’t cope with having more than one display, everything seems to be collapsing to a world premised on no one using anything other than a single-screen laptop.

What has gone wrong with the culture of software development?