John Gruber:
Company-wide memo from nominal X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino, sent this morning[…]
Sarah Perez (via John Gruber):
The owner of the @x Twitter handle confirmed that the company, now known as X, took over his account without warning or financial compensation, telling him the handle is property of X. The handle had previously belonged to Gene X Hwang of the corporate photography and videography studio Orange Photography. In a letter, the company formerly known as Twitter thanked Hwang for his loyalty and offered him a selection of X merchandise and a tour of X’s HQ, as a “reflection of our appreciation.”
Tim Hardwick:
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has updated its official app on Apple’s App Store to conform with the new branding that was announced last weekend by billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Instead of “Let’s talk” – Twitter’s original tagline – “Blaze your glory!” is the curious subtitle on X’s iOS App Store listing, which describes the app as “the trusted digital town square for everyone.”
The new logo and name are meant to reflect Musk’s longstanding intention to transform the social media network into an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat.
Dave Mark:
Apple blinked.
X breaks App Store rule, becomes the very first single character listing.
Wonder when the Twitter URLs will switch over to X dot com. 🤔
Craig Hockenberry:
“We treat all developers the same.”
I'm fine with that not being true, and there are good reasons for it not being true, but I wish Apple would stop saying it.
Falls into the Google-not-being-evil category.
See also: Netflix.
Esther Crawford (tweet, via Jay Peters):
[Elon Musk’s] focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building.
I learned a ton from watching Elon up close — the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.
Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence.
Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers.
The bundle ID of X for iOS is still com.atebits.Tweetie2.
The Mac Twitter client has no mention of X (see pic).
- Still called Twitter
- The copyright is 2022, Twitter Inc.
Given all the things drawing focus for the Twitter rebrand, think Musk will ever reskin Twitter for Mac? Or will it eventually just die, as tweets make their way to x dot com and the old client can no longer find them? 🤔
So if you don’t know that Twitter changed its name to X, and search for “Twitter”, the top result is a paid ad from a competitor (Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and the result for X doesn’t look anything like Twitter. It doesn’t have the name, doesn’t say “formerly Twitter”, and isn’t even blue. It’s just the ugly X icon and the insipid slogan “Blaze your glory!”
So it’s no surprise that downloads are dropping.
App Store Elon Musk iOS iOS 16 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 13 Ventura Netflix Twitter
Howard Oakley:
By rights, settings in an app should only control the behaviour of that app. Settings for macOS behaviours should be controlled in System Settings, after all that’s what the name says. However, over the years Apple has hidden some away in its bundled apps, leaving users confused as to how these settings get changed without their control. Here’s a list of useful and important system settings you might otherwise struggle to find.
[…]
To change the destination and other details for screenshots, press Command-Shift-5 for its floating panel with the Options menu.
There are, of course, several third-party apps that give more coherent and extensive access to these and other controls, but it’s frustrating that instead of rationalising them, System Settings doesn’t centralise them any better than System Preferences did.
Previously:
Update (2023-08-09): Thomas Clement:
The default web browser setting is under “Desktop & Dock” 😐
Apple Mail AppleScript Calendar FaceTime Mac macOS 13 Ventura Screenshots System Preferences
Natalia Panferova:
In this post we are going to explore how we can provide more precise conditions for pattern matching when working with enums in Swift. The most common use case is using switch statements with the where clause to get more control over case conditions. But we'll also look into using the where clause in for-in loops to avoid unnecessary extra iterations. And finally, we'll see how to add extra conditions in while loops and if-case statements when the where clause is not available.
I’ve always found Swift’s if case syntax confusing, because you have to put the constant first, and then you use =, which looks like an assignment, instead of ==. It makes more sense if you think about the variant Panferova shows, where there are associated values. Then it becomes if case let, and the order and operator are what you’d expect for a let. I generally write if anEnum == .aCase if I don’t need to bind any variables, but my recollection is that this either wasn’t supported or had issues in earlier versions of Swift.
Christian Tietze:
I believe there’s tremendous value in summaries like these to learn the Swift programming language and its syntax: these short summaries show a slice of different aspects of the language in close proximity.
[…]
It’s zooming in on where-clauses, and so the reader gets to know a different “view” into the syntax as a whole that is different from the book’s presentation.
Previously:
Language Design Programming Swift Programming Language
Colin Lecher:
Meta and major tax preparation companies inappropriately shared millions of taxpayers’ financial data for years, according to a congressional report released today that was spurred by a Markup article.
Our investigation, which was published in November, revealed how tax filing services including H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer were transmitting data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, through a tool called the Meta Pixel. The data was sent as taxpayers filed their taxes and included personal information like first and last names, income, filing status, and refund amounts. Some data was also sent to Google through its analytics tools, and Google was also a subject of the congressional investigation.
Via Nick Heer:
For example, while everyone involved acknowledged the inadvertent collection of tax-related information by ad tech companies, they waved away any concern because, they said, the data was de-identified. We all know how comforting a statement like that really is. Two of the three tax software providers enabled the collection of additional data — one of them blamed it on advice given to them by a Meta representative — and none knew exactly what had been transmitted to Meta. Nobody seems to be able to say exactly how this information was used after transmission, but the investigation concluded it was likely it was used for targeted advertising, because that is the main reason for this data collection in the first place.
I previously filed tax returns through H&R Block; in 2022, I used Wealthsimple. The tax prep areas for both sites appear to still be using tracking products from Google and Meta. It looks to me like less information is being collected; however, it is still strange to me that I would find any third-party trackers in tax prep software.
I’ve been using the TurboTax app, which should be better as it seems to use Mono rather than Web technologies. However, Little Snitch still detected some questionable connections to domains like akstat.io, glance.net, and go-mpulse.net.
Previously:
Google Meta Privacy Taxes TurboTax Web
