Archive for October 14, 2024

Monday, October 14, 2024

PolyCapture 1.5

App ahead (Reddit):

PolyCapture for Mac lets you to record webcams, microphones, screens, and apps — individually or simultaneously.

[…]

Filter apps from your recordings on the fly, ensuring nothing gets in your way.

[…]

Capture voiceovers, podcasts, interviews, music, or commentary. If a microphone can pick it up, PolyCapture can record it.

[…]

Use macOS’s Voice Isolation to enhance speech quality and reduce background noise. Apply video effects like Portrait Mode, Studio Light, and Center Stage to level-up your recordings.

This looks well done, and it’s only $3.99.

Previously:

Fake Safari Link Sharing Text

Joshua Long:

For nearly six years, Apple has neglected to fix a bug that enables anyone to effectively create false or misleading news headlines that appear to come from credible sources.

[…]

Apple’s Safari browser includes a feature related to link sharing. If you select (highlight) text within a Web page and then tap on the Share button, you can “quote” the selected portion of the page for the recipient when you share the link via Apple’s Messages app. The feature is intended to allow users to include a direct quote from an article, embedded within the iMessage link preview.

However, Apple does not limit the preview text selection to the contents of the page as received from the Web server—and therein lies the flaw.

Users can type something into a page’s search bar (or any other text field), select the text they just typed, tap Safari’s Share button, and then tap the green-and-white Messages icon to send it to any iMessage recipient—either an individual or a group.

Swift Foundation Unification

Ben Cohen:

The keynote from Tony [Parker] and me at ServerSideSwift2024 is up. Hear about how Swift interoperability allowed Foundation to make the switch to Swift, and about the latest direction for interoperability: from Swift to Java.

Apple has rewritten Foundation in Swift, and the Objective-C Foundation and Core Foundation now call into the Swift implementation. This improves performance from Swift, as there are fewer conversions, and also generally, as the Swift code has in some cases been optimized to reduce allocations.

The actual Foundation running on Apple’s platforms is now open source! They are working on a simpler review process for minor API proposals and encouraging more proposals from new contributors.

Quinn:

This seems to be a good time to remind folks that…

Those who live by the swizzle will die by the swizzle!

When I was getting started with Cocoa, Apple had just written an Objective-C to Java bridge. Apple emphasized that you could write native apps in Java This was seemingly rarely done, and I opted to use Objective-C even though I had been a Java programmer. I did use the Java bridge to call into a Java library that didn’t have an Objective-C equivalent. It worked well.

Anyway, there’s now a prototype bridge between Swift and Java. There are code generation tools to make it easier to call in both directions.

See also: The Success Story of Server-Side Swift at Cultured Code.

Previously:

Greppability Is an Underrated Code Metric

Moriz Büsing (via Hacker News):

It turns out that splitting up, or dynamically constructing identifiers is a bad idea.

[…]

Don’t rename fields at application boundaries to match naming schemes. An obvious example is then importing postgres-style snake_case identifiers into javascript, then converting them to camelCase.

[…]

Taking inspiration from the Zen of Python, when dealing with namespaces, flattening your folders/object structures is mostly better than nesting.

Sarah Reichelt:

I applauded Swift’s plan to eliminate all the NS prefixes but searching for Data or String is impossible. NSData & NSString were much more searchable.

No matter how smart the IDE is, there will be times when you need to search the raw source. And, of course, Google and Stack Overflow and your issue tracker don’t understand what the symbols refer to.

Copyright © 2000–2024 Michael Tsai.