(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.
I released Unread 4.3 with:
- Article actions for Anybox, Flyleaf, Matter, and wallabag
- Ability to set a custom keyboard shortcut for each article action
- Ability to perform shortcuts on articles and links
Detailed release notes are available.
This weekend is Indie Charity Weekend, an opportunity for you to discover some great apps while supporting charity at the same time. Thank you to Will Bishop for organizing this.
Check it out at: indiecharityweekend.com
CocoaHeads Boston will meet in person tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 7:00 PM. We will be in room 325 of the E-51 Building at MIT. After the meeting we will walk to MEX for dinner and socializing. The classroom portion of the meeting will also be available via Zoom.
Our political leaders need to acknowledge that Trump won and facilitate a peaceful transfer of power. Perhaps business leaders need to say they will work with the incoming administration.
But I do not understand why anyone needs to say “congratulations”.
This Is What Half the Country Wants
#Some believe that the election results indicate a severe weakness in the Democratic party or of Kamala Harris’ Presidential campaign. I wish I agreed, but the problem is bigger than that.
The danger of Trump seemed clear in 2016, but that danger has become much more apparent since that time. We had the Russia scandal, the Comey firing, the extortion of Ukraine, the COVID response, the insurrection, the stolen classified documents, and the Madison Square Garden hate rally. I could go on.
Despite all of that, this is the third Presidential election in which Trump got over 45% of the popular vote. Against three very different candidates. No primary challenger came close to defeating Trump either.
Voters know what they are getting with Trump. Roughly half the country wants an illiterate hate-mongering insurrectionist dictator as President.
Let’s do this, America.
I canceled my Washington Post subscription and my Amazon Prime subscription.
Today is the first day of early voting here in Massachusetts. It feels good to get that done.
Weird Bug Around Sharing to Reminders on macOS and iOS
#On both iOS and macOS, if you share an item via the share sheet or share popover to Reminders, Unread will offer to create a reminder. Interestingly, if the window or view offering the item has a current NSUserActivity, the default reminder title will be the title of that current NSUserActivity.
You can see this from Safari:
- Open https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com
- Find the link to Feedly.
- Long press that link on iOS, or right click that link on macOS.
- Choose “Share…” from the resulting context menu.
- Choose “Reminders” from the share sheet or share popover.
Expected result: If the reminder has a default title, it would be “New Reminder”, “Feedly”, or “Feedly: Track the topics and trends that matter to you” (the title of the linked page).
Actual result: The default title is “Unread: An RSS Reader” – the title of the page with the link.
I filed this as FB15271013, along with a sample project demonstrating that the title is coming from the NSUserActivity. The sample project has a UIActivityItemSource that offers better titles in its subjectForActivityType function and its activityViewControllerLinkMetadata function.
On iOS 18, saving an article to Safari Reading List (via the SSReadingList API) sometimes just does nothing. The user does not even get the alert prompting for permission to add a URL to Safari Reading List. The API call returns without throwing an exception. I filed FB15190050 with more info.
I released Unread 4.2 with iOS 18 features, and with new optional toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts on Mac.
www.goldenhillsoftware.com/2024/09/u…
Unread is an RSS reader with beautiful typography and a variety of color themes.
Tuesday is election day here in Massachusetts. An added benefit to voting now is the assurance that your voter registration is in good order for the November election.