Last night I got to hear Justice Breyer speak in person.
It is hard to see in the dark, but I ran across this deer while out for a late night walk.
CocoaHeads Boston will meet at MEX Taqueria | Bar this Thursday at 7:00 PM. There will be no classroom portion this time, but we will be back at the NERD Center in June. New participants are always welcome.
Details are available on Meetup.
Good crowd on the Boston Common for the May Day protest.
Now we are at City Hall.
At the anti-Trump protest on the Boston Common. This is huge. I think there are tens of thousands of people here.
CocoaHeads Boston will meet on Thursday, April 10 at the Microsoft NERD Center. Brian Cardarella will present Server-Driven UI with SwiftUI.
Details are available on Meetup. RSVPing via Meetup before April 2 is required; we have to give a list of attendees to building security.
FYI for local friends: Senator Warren is holding a town hall in Lowell tomorrow (Tuesday) evening.
Big crowd protesting on the Boston Common.
On the Boston Common
A press release for an audience of one: www.apple.com/newsroom/…
😡
(Not My) Presidents’ Day
#These are photos from today’s protest in Boston.
Photos From Today’s Protest at the Massachusetts State House
#I participated in a protest today at the state house. These are some photos.
Coup
#I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.
Calling this anything less than a coup at this point is sane-washing. This has to be stopped immediately.
Calling Representatives
#I called the office of my congresswoman, my senators, my state governor, and my state attorney general. I talked to staffers where I could, and left voice messages elsewhere.
This is roughly the script I used:
The reason I am calling is that I am deeply concerned about Trump’s moves over the past few weeks. What is most alarming to me is that Elon Musk is literally tearing apart the federal government. Reports are that government employees are getting locked out of their computer systems, and Elon Musk is getting access. He is taking entire government websites offline. He seems to have access to a boatload of information about government employees and about Americans who are getting social security or some kind of government assistance. I don’t know specifically what he’s doing with that, but it can’t be good.
This needs to stop right away, and I am pleading with you to do everything in your power to stop this.
Thank you.
Whenever I hear Tim Cook state that privacy is a fundamental human right, I am going to remember that he attended and donated a million dollars to the Presidential inauguration of someone who cares nothing about human rights.
I released Unread 4.4. This update makes it easier to subscribe to feeds offered by Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, and YouTube.
Scoop: Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration www.axios.com/2025/01/0…
🤮
Yesterday I wrote a blog post looking back at the past year in Unread improvements, and talking about what I am planning for the new year.
Rest in peace, Jimmy Carter. www.nytimes.com/live/2024…
Daniel Kennett describes the difficult process of getting Cascable Studio 7 approved for the Mac App Store. App Review made it a month-long ordeal.
CocoaHeads Boston will meet this Thursday evening at 7:00 PM at MIT. Join us in-person or via Zoom. Details (including important notes about parking and building access) at:
A random piece of train track.
Keyboard Shortcut Recorder for UIKit
#Keyboard Shortcut Recorder for UIKit is a custom control for letting a user specify a hardware keyboard shortcut in an iPhone/iPad app. I built this control when implementing Unread’s ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts for certain actions.
This control is inspired by KeyboardShortcuts by Sindre Sorhus, which I used in Unread for Mac.
Keyboard Shortcut Recorder for UIKit is available as an open source Swift package on GitHub.