I’ve forked Icro, an open source iOS Micro.blog client, and have begun implementing accessibility features. It’s a work in progress. So far, I’ve got all the custom gestures working in the VO Actions rotor and fixed/improved some .accessibilityLabels.

Electron apps are a scourge upon the Earth.

There have been quite a few good pieces written about the growing discontent toward Twitter, FaceBook, and other centralized social networks of late. The best of these, in my opinion, is this one by Brent Simmons. I agree with a lot of the points being made; they are a lot of why I’m spend less time on Twitter these days and more time on Micro.blog. But I think a few things are getting lost in the shuffle—or at least, not adequately being discussed or considered.

Many people are talking about how the open web is the solution to the toxicity of social networks. If we own our own content on our own websites and take the power away from the centralized networks like Twitter and FaceBook, the argument goes, things will right themselves. On an Infinite Time Scale™, (apologies to John Siracusa), that may be true, but not in the foreseeable future, and certainly not if we convince ourselves that the open web is a silver bullet. It isn’t.

• The web still requires a bar of technical expertise that is too high for many non-tech-savvy people. Centralized networks lower this bar. Something like Micro.blog has taken a middle-ground approach; M.B’s social features are largely centralized (e.g. your M.B timeline/mentions/etc), but you maintain control of your content, hosted yourself and disseminated by M.B, or hosted directly by M.B.
• The web has always been terrible at fluid/real-time conversation. This is an enormous technical challenge on the open web—perhaps not insurmountable, but nowhere near being solved.
• Has everyone forgotten just how toxic the comment sections of blogs have always been? Sure, those comments have a much more limited reach, but the abuse is as bad or worse than something like Twitter. The open web will not solve harassment or abuse—it never has. Those things existed online long before FAceBook or Twitter and will go on after they are footnotes in history books. IRC is/was a non-centralized chat system that was the 90s equivalent to Twitter in many ways. Abuse there happened every bit as often as it does on social networks today. I remember; I was there.

Ultimately, I think it is unrealistic to think that an open web solves the worst abuses we see on the big social networks. If Twitter and/or FaceBook vanished tomorrow, it would, at least in the foreseeable future, have an unintended consequence of amplifying the voices of the more tech savvy over those who are less so. If we, as a society, fail to recognize that abuse, harassment, and spread of toxic/hateful/false information have, do, and will continue to exist on the open web just as they do on social networks, we are setting ourselves up for a rude awakening. If we do acknowledge this, we can protect against it and build a better and more rewardingly social Internet.

I think that many of those taking a stand and abandoning FaceBook, Twitter, et al, actually do understand this, but are focusing too much on the networks themselves. It is not just important but crucial that we put the risk of finding ourselves in the same quagmire on the open web at the forefront of the discussion.

The open web is the tool with which we can begin to solve these problems; it is not, itself, the solution. We need to remember that.

It feels like the years between roughly 1970 and 1990 are just a big blackhole for publishing. Books I want to read or reread from that era just do not seem to exist digitally or in audio the vast majority of the time. Some eventually surface—but so many never do. 😕📚

Nothing quite like being woken at 4 in the morning by a flood warning alert going off on your phone. I’m definitely over all this rain. 🌧😣

It’s quite a remarkable feeling to come across an old external hard drive, plug it in, and find long lost gems amidst its ancient contents—also, a great many more files that I haven’t the foggiest notion why I bothered to back up.

I wish apps would just all settle on either Cmd-R or Cmd-Shift-R for the Refresh/Reload actions. I invariably press the wrong one for whichever one I happen to be in. 😒

I think I might be falling in love with KeyboardMaestro. 😃

If you say “By the power of Grayskull!” to the Amazon Echo, Alexa will respond with “I have the power!” This fills me with irrepressible joy. 🤓⚔️

Someone needs to make an Apple iiGS or iiE replica keyboard—or at least one with the same key layout—that works as a BlueTooth keyboard for modern machines. 🤓 I can’t be the first person to wish for such a thing.

My reading agenda has been a bit derailed by WWDC podcasts and the realization that there is only a month until the final Super Powereds novel by Drew Hayes is out on audio, so I’m trying to reread the first three installments in anticipation. Such a fun series! 📚

I’ve spent the last few days exploring and playing with Pinboard, and I really like it. It’s a nice bookmark syncing and “read later” service, with a number of useful features. I think it’s going to replace Instapaper for me, among other things.

🔖 This is a fantastic discussion and overview of accessibility for software developers. As a VoiceOver user, I appreciate mainstream devs raising awareness. – Under the Radar 132: Accessibility

Apple Pay on the web is magical. Can we get this everywhere? … On second thought, that’s probably a bad idea. 😨💸

🔖 A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter, by Jean MacDonald

🔖 Tesla was a fascinating fellow. – Nikola Tesla predicted the smartphone in 1926

🔖 This is extremely cool. FicDown is a Markdown based syntax for writing interactive fiction stories.

This is a quick guide for using Micro.blog as a visually impaired user in its current state. The service has some accessibility issues which the official What’s Next page lists as upcoming improvements. The web, macOS app, and iOS apps all have various accessibility shortfalls to greater or lesser degrees, with the web UI being the least problematic.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself falling in love with this new service, and I wanted to provided a quick guide of the tools I’m using to workaround the current accessibility problems. None of these are particularly earth shattering, but I hope they’ll help prospective visually impaired users get up and running more quickly.

As a macOS/iOS user, the solutions below focus on those OSs, but you can probably easily adapt these strategies to your platforms of choice.

Reading Your Timeline

The Micro.blog web interface works reasonably well for reading your timelines, but it is a bit clunky compared to using a native app. Still, for now, this is the primary method I use for reading my timeline.

There is an alternative that I’ve tried and which you may find works better for you. Using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your timeline and/or mentions as described in this help article. I’m using FeedWrangler as my RSS manager. It can be nice to have a quick look at your timeline this way, but the inability to quickly reply or view conversations is a definite drawback. If links were available in the feed text to perform those tasks, this method might be more useful.

Posting

Update: Less than 24 hours after publishing this blog, things have changed. See below for an even better posting method.

You can post using the Micro.blog web interface, although it behaves a bit strangely on both macOS and iOS. This is the method I use when replying to other users on the system.

For a better posting experience, I’ve been using MarsEdit for macOS, which is every bit as awesome and accessible as it has ever been, and Drafts for iOS, in conjunction with its Micro.blog action and the official Micro.blog iOS app. Essentially, you can compose a post in Drafts, send it to the Micro.blog official client, and just hit the Post button to post. Although the Micro.blog iOS app does have a lot of accessibility issues, you can get signed in using VoiceOver.

Update

Just a few hours after publishing the above, Drafts 5 was released. That version of the app has a new Drafts 5 action for Micro.blog which allows you to post without need of the Micro.blog iOS app. This is much better for now, but it does require upgrading to use Drafts 5. I have left the earlier method intact in this post for existing Drafts 4 users.

Conclusion

As I continue working with Micro.blog, I expect to update this post with other solutions. The flexibility and openness of the platform is what initially sold me on it; I used my Micro.blog’s JSONFeed to show only relevant posts on my official site, while my blog shows all my posts, just as one very simple example. I also wrote a script which archives both HTML and MarkDown versions of all the posts on my own web server.

Ultimately, though, it is the awesome community that keeps me coming back.

To type a truly tidy tweet,

Is something quite divine;

One-hundred forty characters,

Upon a single line.

But though these songs can sound so sweet,

We hear some sour notes;

The call of shady characters,

Awaiting billygoats.

They fled the dead discussion board,

And YouTube comment thread;

To shout with little character,

On Twitter now instead.

Beware their calloused countenance,

And puppets sewn of sock;

Remember that these characters,

Are less trouble when their blocked.

Over the years, an individual’s choice of which operating system to use for their computing needs has become increasingly personal. In general, most modern platforms are extremely capable, and with the ubiquity of the Internet and standardized file formats, it is far easier to share data between otherwise wholly different systems. Mac versus Windows, either versus Ubuntu, and so on, are battles that have lost much of their relevance, and as a result, I’ve somewhat lost interest in the debate. I still believe Mac OS X, and by extension iOS, are superior platforms for my needs, and I still encourage people to try them for themselves, but ultimately, each individual user’s personal preference for a computing solution is their own, and that is how it should be.

Comparing platforms, too, has become increasingly difficult, both because the number of tasks that we all perform on our computers has continued to grow, and because the ways that the various systems, particularly OS X and Windows, handle these tasks have diverged in fundamental ways. And that, of course, does not even begin to address the inevitable human differences in the way we all think, respond, or retain information. An artist may be especially talented at producing beautiful masterpieces with oil paints, while another may be hopeless with paints but is adept with charcoal. The difference in tools between them does not make either more or less of an artist; nor does it inherently devalue either’s work. Each is using their talents with the tools that suit them best as unique human beings.

Objective comparisons between operating systems are virtually meaningless, because while the systems themselves behave in primarily predictable and consistent ways, human beings do not. To even begin to make a perfectly objective comparison, a single individual would have to be equally proficient and accustomed to working in the platforms being compared. This is a problem right out of the gate, since platforms themselves will vary, to some degree, in order to appeal to different sorts of people, and whether or not someone is equally competent and comfortable in two significantly different systems cannot be objectively measured for tools as complex as computing platforms.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that one could find such a person. What then? How do you objectively compare systems with such differing feature sets? You might be able to compare a small number of specific features common to both, but would that truly be helpful? The answer is that of course it isn’t, at least not in terms of the bigger picture of comparing the platforms to one another.

For a simplistic example, you could compare the length of time it takes to open a web browser and access a particular website. Let’s say that this task takes ten seconds to perform on platform A, and only five seconds to perform on platform B, assuming that the network connection speed variable is constant. One could extrapolate from this that, if our imaginary user opens twelve sites in an hour, they will save themselves one minute of time on platform B over platform A, and thus be more productive.

But what if, completely unrelated to this task, platform B has a bug that causes the system to hang and need to be rebooted once an hour? And what if the total time spent restarting the machine and logging in takes one minute? Now, with this new piece of the puzzle added to the equation, the results of our test, as far as productivity goes, are a wash.

Operating systems have thousands of these tiny variables. The example above is simple and extreme in order to illustrate the basic point. Even if one could objectively account for every, or even most, of the countless variables and make an objective, measurable comparison, the results would only apply to the single individual and those who are most like them.

This is, too, why Mac survived at all during Apple’s dark years. Windows, by many technical measures, surpassed Mac OS during that time, and yet many users still chose to use it, because for them, the system was more intuitive or a better fit for their own specific way of working.

Someone recently made the point to me that it was an unassailable conclusion that the number of keystrokes to perform a task with a screen reader was the only, or at least the primary, measure of productivity for a visually impaired computer user. This is, to most critical eyes I believe, an absurd statement. What if the user isn’t using keystrokes at all to perform a task and is instead relying on something like VoiceOver’s Trackpad Commander? What if one user has written scripts on one system but not the other? What if those scripts have been developed to behave differently? What if a user of one system is better at memorizing and recalling key commands than is the user of the other? What if one is a better or faster typist? The number of variables and their combinations is significant and virtually limitless.

My advice to users is to try out different platforms, if they can, and decide which is best for them and the way in which they work. OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, and some other platforms are all modern operating systems with unique strengths and characteristics to offer. They are all legitimate choices, regardless of how strongly you feel about your own.

Most people, at least I like to think it is most, don’t go around belittling or harassing others for their religious beliefs, or lack thereof. Those who do, are frequently looked down upon by those of us who are more enlightened and/or tolerant. Why should it be any different for our computing choices?

I’ve documented my experiences switching away from Google services over the last few years. I couldn’t be happier with the results, and I feel like the combination of services from a variety of companies that I am now using are, on the whole, superior to what I had with Google.

Recently, two tech bloggers/podcast personalities that I greatly admire have written about their experiences switching to DuckDuckGo for web search. The first of these was Casey Liss. Casey is best known for co-hosting the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analogue (spelled the correct way.) The second was Marco Arment, Casey’s co-host on ATP and developer of Overcast, my podcast client of choice. (Marco also wrote the blogging engine that powers this site.)

These are two of the highest profile tech voices that I’ve seen talk about making the switch away from Google for search. Undoubtedly, part of why this is just happening now is that until Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8.0, making the switch required a bit of fiddling and too much thought by the end user. I wonder if, now that Apple is including DuckDuckGo as a default search option, we will see more users, high profile or otherwise, making the leap. I hope so. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for a couple of years now, and have never looked back.

So here’s to seeing more folks start to migrate with the ducks.

“You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel ducky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”“”

(I offer no apology for the terrible joke above. Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.)

I do not want this new iPhone,

My Razr’s fine; it’s what I own.

“But you can browse the Internet,

And play games you haven’t heard of yet!”

My Dell’s all right for the Internet,

My Gameboy’s fine for the games I get.

I don’t want to play with Angry Birds,

I won’t annoy my friends with words.

I do not want a new iPhone,

My Razr’s fine;; it’s what I own.

“But it will guide you down the street,

And suggest great places to stop and eat!”

I can just use my Thomas Guide,

And look for signs inside my ride.

My Dell’s all right for the Internet,

My Gameboy’s fine for the games I get.

I don’t want to play with Angry Birds,

I won’t annoy my friends with words.

I don’t want the new iPhone,

My Razr’s fine; it’s what I own.

“The Music app plays MP3s,

Be they Bach’s, the Beatles’, or Kenny G’s!”

Who needs that? I have CD’s,

And on the air’s good old Rick Dees.

A Thomas Guide to tell me left or right,

A Mickey D’s at every light.

My Dell’s all right for the Internet,

My Gameboy’s fine for the games I get.

I don’t want to play with Angry Birds,

I won’t annoy my friends with words.

I don’t want the new iPhone,

My Razr’s fine; it’s what I own.

“It’s a camera everywhere you go,

For shots of kids or dogs or snow!”

I can get my pics taken at the mall,

No selfies on my Facebook wall.

I have my Carpenters LPs,

And a strange soft spot for old Rick Dees.

An atlas to the interstate,

All night diners when it’s late.

My Dell’s all I need for the Internet,

My Gameboy’s fine for the games I get.

I don’t want to play with Angry Birds,

I won’t annoy my friends with words.

I do not want the new iPhone,

My Razr’s fine; it’s what I own.

“But now with a contract, the iPhone’s free!

Try it! Try it! Please? For me?”

My Razr at last gave up the ghost,

So sad; it was the phone I’d loved the most.

I guess I’ll get the free 5C,

But it will only be a phone to me.

Oh, but I suppose I’ll take pictures of my dog,

Just to post on my Tumblr blog.

That’s it. No more … oh, wait … but damn …

I kinda like this Instagram.

iTunes has the Best of Gladys Knight and the Pips?!

You know, my vinyl copy always skips.

Siri will talk me down the street?

Huh … you know … that’s kind of neat.

My iPhone helped me win that bet,

When I looked up Rick Dees’s age on the Internet.

Now I have a plushy of a disgruntled yellow bird,

And four days left to play a word.

It’s been two days, and with a groan,

I must admit, I love iPhone.

But wait, what’s that I hear you say?

Another gadget’s on the way?

I do not want an Apple Watch,

I’m quite contented with my Swatch …