Linked List: December 12, 2022

Monday, 12 December 2022

Twitter Blue Relaunches With a Higher Price for App Store Users ★

Ashley Capoot, reporting for CNBC:

Twitter relaunched its updated Twitter Blue subscription service Monday after the company’s new owner Elon Musk pulled and delayed the launch in November.

The service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iOS users who purchase it through Apple’s App Store. The $3 iOS price difference reflects Musk’s recent gripes about Apple’s 30% cut of all digital sales made through apps.

If I recall correctly, in the early years of the App Store, Apple had a rule that developers couldn’t charge more through the App Store than they do via the web. That was a long time ago, though. This feels like the best and easiest way to deal with Apple’s App Store commission.

See also: Twitter’s updated product page describing the features of Twitter Blue. I’ve been happily paying for it ever since it launched for the Top Articles feature alone. Remember Nuzzel? Twitter Blue’s Top Articles feature is basically Nuzzel, but built into Twitter’s own app.

The Future of Foundation: A Rewrite in Swift ★

Tony Parker, writing for Apple on the Swift website:

Today, we are announcing a new open source Foundation project, written in Swift, for Swift. This achieves a number of technical goals:

No more wrapped C code. With a native Swift implementation of Foundation, the framework no longer pays conversion costs between C and Swift, resulting in faster performance. A Swift implementation, developed as a package, also makes it easier for Swift developers to inspect, understand, and contribute code.

Provide the option of smaller, more granular packages. Rewriting Foundation provides an opportunity to match its architecture to evolving use cases. Developers want to keep their binary sizes small, and a new FoundationEssentials package will provide the most important types in Foundation with no system dependencies to help accomplish this. [...]

Unify Foundation implementations. Multiple implementations of any API risks divergent behavior and ultimately bugs when moving code across platforms. This new Foundation package will serve as the core of a single, canonical implementation of Foundation, regardless of platform.

A new pure-Swift implementation of Foundation is nerdy news, to be sure, but it really is as important as the name “Foundation” implies.

Michael Tsai has a good post highlighting a few of the advantages this project should yield going forward.

Ken White: ‘Goodbye, Twitter’ ★

Ken White, writing at The Popehat Report:

I messed around on the internet in the days of screeching dial-up modems, but I didn’t really start to contribute regularly to online communities until 1995 or so. I met my wife on the Usenet back before that would inspire a gasp of horror; it’s been mostly unusable for decades. I participated in communities on AOL and Prodigy and a few of the other dinosaur provider/forums. I spent lots of time on an etiquette forum until they kicked me off for rudeness (best thing really; my tutoring was going nowhere). I spent lots of time on the Snopes forums, a gaming forum called Gone Gold that one day vanished, its successor gaming forum called Octopus Overlords. I participated in sites devoted to particular games, particular movies, particular hobbies.

Many of those forums are gone now, like the proverbial tears in rain. Usually whatever content I posted there — primitive lawsplainers, snark, banter, arguments — is gone as well. I still interact with many of the people I knew there, having connected with them at a series of successor locations, but many are lost to the decades — people I felt I knew, now only vaguely remembered.

Now it’s Twitter’s turn.

I’ve been reading White’s @Popehat Twitter account for as long as I can remember. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of one person shutting down their Twitter account, but it’s not just one person. It’s a real trend right now.