Andrew Haglund

Having fun watching teardown videos of the new Mac mini. Some legit “back of the cabinets” vibes with its insanely tidy interior.

Still considering getting an M4 Pro variant but the upgrade prices quickly skyrocket to Mac Studio territory… which then has me questioning everything.

(It’s been a nice distraction this week, if I’m being honest.)

Dan Moren writing about the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro, writing at Six Colors:

… it’s basically a smaller version of the Mac Studio, which was itself a taller version of the Mac mini. Time, as they say, is a flat squircle.

Dan Moren cracks me up.¹

I’m certainly tempted by the new Mac mini. I have a great desktop setup — two displays, continuity camera, great speakers — but the brains are a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) in clamshell. It’s a great machine but you can always use faster when doing SwiftUI development.

I’d love a machine that’s always ready for me at the desk but my hangup is: do I really need two Macs? I feel like if I get the mini I need to trade in my laptop. There are times I want a Mac to-go though and Apple silicon MacBooks have almost zero compromises.

The correct decision is to not buy anything. We shall see.

After months of listening to Manton Reece on Core Intuition I’ve decided to move to Micro.blog. My domain name will carry on but I’m not 100% sure if my RSS feed will transition gracefully? 🤷 Worst case I’ll let all 12 of you know with a final post in this feed.¹

My current site is built with Eleventy and while I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning web development and entering the world of static site generators, I find there’s just too much friction with writing new posts — especially from my phone.² It’s enough friction where I tend to just post to Mastodon or sit on a pile of unused ideas for months.

In this process I’ve learned that I enjoy writing. I like even more that I’m writing at a domain and site I control — not some out-of-his-mind billionaire. What drew me to Eleventy was the idea that I could mooch indefinitely off of GitHub pages (free!) and only pay for my domain renewal fees. Unfortunately the convenience is just not there.

Enter Micro.blog which hosts your site, lets you blog, cross-post to Threads and Mastodon (and others), and podcast hosting (you never know!) for $5/mo. I always have this fear of thinking of monthly costs for my website, which often goes like this:

If I want to have a website my whole life that’s… hmm let me do the math… $5 × 12 months per year × 90 years. Shit.

But the reality is that $5/mo is, at least for most people, nothing. This is “cup of coffee” territory.

Micro.blog also has a social aspect, but without all the algorithms and engagement bait that makes using Threads or certain unnamed sites such a hellscape at times. I want to take this as an opportunity to rethink my relationship with social media more broadly.

I’m pumped to try Micro.blog and I can already tell I’m going to be a happy paying customer. We need more people like Manton building platforms based on the open web and I’m happy to support their work over there. Write on!

I heard Nvidia overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world today. Their insane growth has been driven by the need for GPUs to build data centers and models for companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

What I find interesting is that the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay where he stated that the next generation of AI will take somewhere around $100 billion to create. That’s a lot of money and it’s difficult to see the path from iterating on LLMs to get to “intelligence”. One very likely possibility is that companies like OpenAI run themselves into the ground chasing this fantasy.

All along the way, Nvidia will happily take their cash today selling GPUs who may go out in a burning blaze of glory burning the cash and energy to make the AI of tomorrow¹. Regardless on your feelings of AI², you gotta hand it to Nvidia for leaning into this and being a critical ingredient for all these companies: they’ll be the one left holding the bag.

The past few months have flown by. Our kiddo is almost 5 months old now and I was lucky enough to spend September home with the family. We went to a wedding, a close friend’s wedding shower, the World Dairy Expo (grilled cheese and milkshakes, yes please) and snuck in a number of family visits.

I feel so fortunate to have a job that offers paid time-off. John Deere went through layoffs and I was lucky enough to be spared. It reminds me that no job is 100% secure, even at big companies. I don’t take it for granted.

Other things of note:

• My grandma and her sister made a day trip to visit us back in July.
• We visited Columbia, MO, for our niece’s birthday.
• Traveled home for my brother’s 30th birthday party.
• Took so many pictures of our kid. It’s not even funny. (Thank goodness for iCloud Shared Photo Library.)
• Listened to many hours of Roderick on the Line on our several road trips.
• Went axe throwing at a work event. Fun!
• Replaced the power lift gate on our RAV4 that was stuck shut. Not fun!

During the evenings when everyone went to bed:

• Worked on a big update to MapKeep and a few smaller updates. It was great having some spare brain power to refactor the app after a year of stumbling through re-learning app development.
• Played Zelda Twilight Princess on my newly arrived Odin 2 mini as I waited for Zelda Echoes of Wisdom to arrive.
• Finished Pokémon Crystal.
• Added a now page to this site where you can see what I’m up to outside of blog posts. I also upgraded this site to Eleventy version 3.
• Listened to new albums by Maggie Rogers, Charly Bliss, Clairo and discovered American Football after learning their house is near me.

TV shows watched:

• The Acolyte (Star Wars) had so much potential. Interesting themes but strange pacing and seemingly low-budget at times (despite having a massive budget).
• 30 Rock seasons 4 and 5.
• Penelope was slow to start but we loved it. Reminds me to savor nature. I heard about the show in an episode of The Town with Mark Duplass who self-funded the show.
• Sunny had a great hook, fantastic style, Rashida Jones, Japan… but it felt a bit all over the place like it was confused about who was doing what and why.

Started watching The Penguin, Rings of Power season 2, English Teacher (Stephanie Koenig is a treasure), and Hacks is outstanding.

Despite Coldplay’s new album Moon Music not coming out until Friday, I found a way to listen to it.

In a world where many people tune into endless playlists and mindless lo-fi music on YouTube, I’m an old school album guy. I love discovering new music but I can’t latch onto an artist without sinking my teeth into an album or an EP. The album is a work of art: What is its mood? What does this collection of songs in this particular order say about the people who made it and the time in which it’s made?

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Coldplay is their dedication to the album. It’s certain to be a commercially-driven strategy: the duration between albums, time spent on tour, and how long they drip and hype a new release is like clockwork. Each album is an era which its own unique art style, show, and through line.

That brings me to Moon Music (which is Coldplay’s second collaboration with Max Martin and billed as a follow-up to Music of the Spheres) which has a semblance of continuity, hung together loosely with what I would call spacey sounds and (like 99% of pop music) simple ideas about love.

Here are my thoughts after a first listen.

(Listen to this album with some good headphones, you’ll thank me later.)

It begins with a gorgeous intro, the titular Moon Music, from Jon Hopkins. To my knowledge it’s the first time he’s been credited as a “featuring…” on a Coldplay track (as opposed to being relegated to liner notes) but he’s worked with Coldplay as far back as 2008’s opening track on Viva La Vida. The opener here too is absolutely brilliant and I was completely lost in it.

Feelslikeimfallinginlove has a strange combination of having energy — especially in the chorus — while being a slow, low-key rhythmic vibe. It was a solid choice for a lead single.

We Pray is a more successful version of Princess of China with Rihanna, or Hymn for the Weekend with Beyoncé. I don’t know the artists featured but I enjoy how different this song feels and it has definitely grown on me.

Jupiter is an absolute joy that fills your heart with an upbeat message. Ya gotta love the acoustic guitar and cello.

Good Feelings with Arya Starr is a funky good time with a stellar guitar riff halfway in. It sounds like it could have been on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories or on a Passion Pit record.

Rainbow is filled with dreamy synths, ripping guitar, a beautiful piano interlude, and spoken audio from Maya Angelou reminds me of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming.

Iaam (“I Am a Mountain”) is like a throwback to Glass of Water from 2009 but without the heart. The mix itself is hollow: tonally, lyrically, and energy. It stays at one level the whole time.

Aeterna is a groovy tune my brother. I’m looking forward to hearing many remixes that take this jam to full-on EDM music. Nice vocal outro too. (I think they played this live at Glastonbury and it looked like a rockin’ time.)

All My Love is a classic, piano-centric Coldplay love song with a great string ensemble. It feels like this song has been in the air forever yet is somehow new. (Reminds me of their demo of Wedding Bells many moons ago.) I wanna sit down at the piano and learn it.

One World has vamping synths, piano, guitar which fall away to a hundred humming voices then trails to another breathtaking string piece. Some Pink Floyd vibes at the very beginning then goes straight to M83 for its crescendo.

(The outro had me wondering if they forgot to come back and record the words — but there’s also something charming in its rawness.)

There’s a lot of variety in Moon Music and a lot to like. Musically there are some incredible moments, especially in the more complex instrumental compositions. Lyrically it left me wanting with two too many songs rely on “la la la” as a chorus.

As a continuous listening experience, it moves nicely throughout but there’s an unevenness. (The incongruity from We Pray to Jupiter is a bit of whiplash.)

To be sure, there is some beautiful music here (if you like Coldplay) but time will tell if this is a good album that stands out in the annals of time like Viva la Vida. Maybe by my tenth listen I can check back in.

My first listen was laying in bed with headphones and I’m looking forward to hearing it on my speakers tomorrow for a totally different listening experience.

Seth Godin’s 20 Questions post has some good considerations for starting a new project. I think it’s mostly in the context of consulting but I’ve been thinking about this as a solo app developer.¹

I have an idea for a simple (in theory) app but I’ve been having a hard time deciding if I should even start it or not. I haven’t yet had the time or skills to make MapKeep fully featured and I feel like I’d be leaving it unfinished. At best my time would now be split between two apps (and all my other interests, such as my child and gaming).

The upside of starting this new idea? It could have a broader appeal than MapKeep and I think more likely to made some coin. (That’s not my main goal but it’s always in the back of my capitalistic mind.)

Big picture is I often wonder how others seem to juggle so many projects and I feel like I can’t measure up to them. Erving Goffman would say something like don’t compare someone else’s frontstage to your backstage.

M.G. Siegler tosses out a few interesting ideas for how Apple Vision Pro could be re-envisioned as accessory to the iPhone. Let the iPhone be the brains and the battery for headset and have that be the tethered thing (instead of that jumbo battery).

The hole there is that ultra low-latency for passthrough mode is essential so people don’t get motion sick (and so you could play ping pong) while wearing it. Maybe that could have been solved to some degree, but I assume the physical proximity from silicon to display is a key factor.

Overall I like spitballing on “what if” scenarios for Apple Vision Pro successors and Siegler has some good points. I am intrigued by products like the XREAL glasses for projecting my Switch or iPhone and less keen on an entire new computing platform.

Version 1.3.5 of MapKeep will hit the App Store shortly and adds support for dark and tinted app icons for iOS 18.

Thanks to Louie Mantia for his dark mode app icons blog post. He inspired me to use a sunset in the background (as opposed to Apple’s default gradient) which strikes a nice balance between fitting in and standing out.

I hadn’t touched the artwork for the app icon since 1.0 last summer so it was fun to get back in there and experiment with color and transparency for these new variants.

I’ve been busy with making a few substantial updates to MapKeep this summer so I avoided touching the betas. The main item on my todo list is supporting the new app icon tinting and I’m glad I waited. It’s great seeing what many apps have done, courtesy of the App Icon chapter in Federico Viticci’s iOS 18 review. Now I have some fresh ideas and hope to release something in the next week or so.

Update September 20, 2024: After using iOS 18 more I’ve noticed how glaring apps look that don’t support the new icon styles. It’s not for me, at least not yet, but it shines a big light on apps that don’t update. Some will translate just fine but more colorful icons like NetNewsWire and my own just get lazily darkened by 20%. iOS 13, when Dark Mode was introduced, was not this noticeable: now without even opening apps you can see which apps have done the work and which haven’t.

I don’t begrudge Apple with how they rolled this out, just an observation.

Myke Hurley in Upgrade 528 commenting on the densely packed iPhone event:

We built these phones from the ground up for these new features and none are them are there on the day they go on sale. Really weird.

I think this exactly captures how strange and vague this whole presentation was. They didn’t even bother announcing when 18.0 will release!

I added a now page to my site after seeing a few bloggers talking about it. I requested to be added to Derek Sivers’ nownownow.com and we had a nice exchange over email.

It’s a great way to highlight the media I’m enjoying and projects I’m working on outside of my quarterly updates. It’s fun. If you have a site, I recommend trying it yourself.

Best part? Now I can link people to my now page and avoid entire classes of human conversations. Efficient! ;-)

I bought the GameBaby immediately. I’ve been wanting something like this for a while: I knew USB-C + Delta on iPhone would lead to this inevitability.

I usually go case-less but it’s sacrifice I’m willing to make to turn my phone into a Pokémon machine.

(I wish it had 4 face buttons for SNES but hey, it’s $20.)

Via Brendon Bigley.

While the majority of complaints in Michael Tsai’s post go way over my head, I kinda regret adopting SwiftData in MapKeep. I felt adopting the latest technology was best for the longterm health of the app and I’d kick myself in 5 years when I feel burdened by a “legacy” technology like CoreData.

There have been upsides:

• I enjoy that the data model is expressed in Swift (as opposed to the strange PLIST-esque CoreData thing).
• It gave me iCloud Sync with almost no work.

Here’s my pain points:

• Adding dynamic filtering to MapKeep in 1.3 was a huge pain and added a lot of complexity. Without Apple’s DataCache sample project, there is zero chance I would have figured this out. iOS 18 appears to improve predicates, but I’ve yet to jump on the latest here to see if it would have made things smoother.
• iCloud Sharing is not supported. I was disappointed to learn this last summer but I figured: hey SwiftData is brand-new, I’m sure they’ll get to it next year. Well here we are a year later and they did not add iCloud Sharing in iOS 18. Now we wait for WWDC 2025?

By contrast, going all-in with SwiftUI last year worked out great. There were a few headaches and a couple things that were impossible to customize, but altogether I feel like it’s a mature UI system (at least on iOS and watchOS).

I’m sitting here feeling I might have been better off sticking with tried-and-true CoreData and eventually migrating to SwiftData when it felt more fully-baked.

I launched an update to MapKeep this weekend which brings an all-new design. It has a list and map that stay in sync: selecting something on the map shows it in the list. Date filters are also improved.

The previous design was all-map which made it nice to view your collection but difficult to explore your locations chronologically. The app has been out for almost a year now so I wanted to make sure it could handle large collections.

I debated calling this “Version 2.0” because it was effectively a full rewrite of the iPhone app and brought a substantially new experience. However, from a user’s standpoint: this basically just adds a list! So I’ll hold onto that for a bit longer.

I’m sure there’s something in your life that you’d like to track easily. So check out MapKeep. (It’s free!)

For inspiration: here’s a couple real world examples of how it’s used:

• A friend of mine moved to a new city and they capture spots in town (parks, neighborhoods, restaurants) to come back to later.
• A family member wants to use it anytime they get a birdie on the golf course to mark the occasion.
• Tracking where your dog does a number 2 on walks ;-)

I don’t have a fully formed opinion on how much of what Suno’s tools are just traditional “remixing” or sampling but this sentiment expressed in their blog post as a response to their RIAA lawsuit is ridiculous:

… like the kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre … learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now.

It’s obvious what the difference is, right? One is a computer absorbing millions of songs and one is a human. Computers don’t have rights.

They also justify their actions by saying:

We train our models on … music we can find on the open internet – just as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and even Apple’s new Apple Intelligence train their models on the open internet.

Which is akin to a toddler saying, “the other kids are doing it, why am I in trouble?”

I am not pro- Big Record Label. I want people to make music and I bet Suno’s tools are neat but these are kid-level logical arguments that don’t hold water. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

Via The Verge.

I learned about Wix’s new blog-writing tools thanks to a post by Jess Weatherbed at The Verge.¹ This will enable slop at massive scale. Heaps of garbage written by a machine to hopefully appease Google’s algorithms and trick people into thinking this site is written by another human. Wix’s large presence in the webhosting world means this has the potential to be an all-out assault on a human-led internet. I hope they reconsider this endeavor.

On a similar note:

My wife, who’s far less tuned-in to the AI-hype world than me, was equally grossed-out by Google’s ad during the Olympics² where a father encourages his child to use Gemini to write a letter to their hero.

How would you feel if you found out a disingenuous robot wrote a “heartfelt” letter to you?

Luckily we weren’t the only people who picked up on this detail and it went viral (in a bad way). Similar to the Apple’s Crush ad, I struggle to understand how this ad made it into the world. Did no one at these companies raise their hand to say, “Isn’t this gross?”

Upon seeing Apple’s Image Playgrounds at WWDC the same word came to mind: gross.

• Oh it looks like you made a lovely hand drawn sketch of a building? Let’s turn it to a super-fake, oversaturated, clearly-made-by-a-computer-abomination with one easy tap!
• Want a hyper-ugly-Pixar knockoff of your mom? Bon appétit.

I worry, as others do, that if we let machines create for us we’ll never learn how to create for ourselves. I write to become a better writer and to share my thoughts.

To clarify: I’m not against AI in its entirety. I’m not happy that every LLM-maker decided they could violate copyright and scrape the whole web. I’m concerned that more companies like Reddit will withdraw from searched indexes unless paid.

But I do think AI can be uniquely talented at editing. Someone who’s over my shoulder and can suggest ways to elevate my work, connect it to other things, and make me more efficient. Apple’s Writing Tools (if they work) skate the razor-thin line between creating and editing. The litmus test, I feel, is that they only ever make your text shorter, never longer.

To all the companies out there working on half-assed AI integrations: please redirect your focus to editing. Empower humans to be creative. Don’t fill the world with slop. I’m open to applauding and adopting AI but they have to help me. Not try to be me.

I’m a longtime “small phone proponent” and always chose the smallest iPhone available. I went from the iPhone 12 mini then to 13 mini¹ and swore I’d hold onto it as long as possible. Of course, capitalist consumerism had plans of its own.

When the iPhone 15 Max Pro was announced with a 5× telephoto lens I knew I had to upgrade². Going from mini to Max was an adjustment but every time I punch-in and get the shot I’m reminded that I made the right choice. Today I got a picture of the baby with grandma, and I simply could not have captured it with my previous phone.

Here’s to you, iPhone 15 Pro Max. Here’s to you.

I’m looking forward to Apple’s dedicated Passwords app. I rely on the current system extensively but having it trapped in System Settings was never a great experience (especially its modal design for editing, which blocks you from accessing other areas of the app).

They still need to add a “secure documents” area for scans of legal things like driver’s licenses and passports. I could throw these into a secure note but it’s much nicer having a single place for all “secrets”.

Hopefully this is the year I’ll finally say goodbye to 1Password 7. (You heard right. I have not and will not touch 1Password 8, which dropped support for free iCloud-based vaults.) You may surprised to hear but it’s no fun juggling two password managers.

Shoutout to Michael Tsai’s link collection. He’s a great follow.

It’s days like these that remind you how fortunate you are to use a Mac at a Fortune 500 company. ⌘

Godspeed. Be safe out there. 🪟