Archive for April 18, 2023

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Creating a Company Contact on iOS

I’ve long wanted to be able to create new business contacts in the iOS Contacts app. On macOS, there’s a checkbox to control whether the contact displays as a person or as a company. The value syncs to iOS, which respects it, but there’s no switch on iOS to mark contacts created there. However, Manfred Linzner-Scherf has a great tip for how the value can be set implicitly. You create the contact on iOS but fill in only the Company field. Then click Done. This gets iOS to remember that it’s a company contact. You can then go back and add the First name and Last name, and it will remain marked as a company.

Parler Shuts Down

Jon Brodkin (Hacker News):

Parler, the self-described “uncancelable free speech platform,” has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a “strategic assessment.” The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says.

Mike Masnick:

You may recall there were stories last fall of Kanye West buying the site, which we noted appeared to be the failed site (with around 50,000 daily active users) trying to take advantage of a troubled rich guy. That deal quickly fell apart.

[…]

It’s not at all clear why one would buy the site just to shut it down, but the CEO of Starboard claimed he still hoped to “retain the platform’s audience.” But… elsewhere he admitted that there’s no real market for a Trumpist social media network.

Certainly not with Trump himself on Truth Social and Instagram, and also restored on Twitter. Gab is still out there, too, for the crowd who wants even less moderation. I guess Starboard just wanted a good deal on a bunch of customer data.

Interestingly, while Parler was intially removed from the App Store for not being sufficiently moderated, Mastodon apps don’t seem to have faced that problem, even though anyone can start up an instance so there’s no guarantee that any particular moderation policy will be followed.

Previously:

Angry Birds Company to Be Sold to Sega

Umar Shakir (via Hacker News):

Sega is reportedly close to buying Rovio Entertainment — the company that owns the Angry Birds mobile game franchise — for a whopping $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

[…]

The original game was a smash success in 2009, but the franchise has seemingly fallen off since its 2014 peak, when Rovio reported falling profits and layoffs.

[…]

Rovio watched as competitors like Candy Crush grew more and more, eating away interest in Angry Birds.

[…]

Recently, Rovio removed its original Angry Birds game from the Google Play Store, and it renamed the iOS version to Red’s First Flight. The move was done seemingly to move players over to its lucrative freemium sequels and obscure the buy once and play forever business model of the original game.

“Duplicate” Safari Downloads Replacing Files

jmhbpc:

Not sure when the feature started in Safari wherein duplicate downloads, within close proximity in time, would be replaced by the latest download…

But I have noticed a bit of a flaw in that feature.

Example: When downloading zipped music files at Bandcamp a zip archive of the same name can replace a previous version of the same name: even though its contents are different.

For my example the following can occur: A zip file with my preferred aiff files was deleted when accidentally downloading the same album in a different file format not preferred (mp3)

I’ve been seeing this happen for years when testing downloads of my apps and sometimes when downloading photos. Coalescing identical files makes some sense, but it’s confusing and could delete important data if the files are not actually the same.

Marc Z:

This has definitely been a problem for a long time. I see it frequently. For instance, every year about this time I go to download all my past year’s bank statements to go through for my tax preparation. At least one of my banks names the downloaded file “stmt.txt” with no indication of which month it is. If I click on several months to download each statement, I will only end up with the most recent one as the others get downloaded and then overwritten. So instead of clicking 12 times (once for each month) I have to click, go to the Downloads folder, rename the file with the appropriate month number, go back to Safari, and click on the next month. It’s annoying.

[…]

That’s just one example: I’ve had the problem with downloads on other sites, too. (Like a clipart/stock photo site where I painstakingly went through to find and download thumbnails of a dozen possible graphics I might want to use, and when I went to the Finder there was only a single file saved, called preview.jpg – the site named all the thumbnails the same. 🤦‍♂️

Safari also checks for “duplicates” when asked to open links from other apps. If you click a link and there’s already a tab open for that URL, it will activate that tab instead of opening a new one.

Update (2023-04-21): This tab coalescing can lead to data loss, e.g. if you have typed into a form and then click a link that has the same URL as the form it will reload the page and discard what you entered.