Linked List: November 1, 2024

Friday, 1 November 2024

Fantastical for Windows — A Glass of Ice Water for Calendar Users in Hell 

Flexibits:

We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...]

The best news is that Fantastical for Windows is included in your Flexibits Premium subscription so there are NO extra purchases required!

All the main Fantastical features are there, including the Mini Window with which I pretty much live my calendaring life. On the Mac, the Mini Window lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray.

Flexibits took a lot of arrows in their back when they switched from traditional per-major-version purchasing to subscription-only, but they promised at the time that the predictable, steady revenue from subscriptions would enable them to continue adding value to a Flexibits subscription over time. That started when they added Cardhop, a terrific Mac and iOS contact management app. Now it includes a full-fledged native Windows version of Fantastical.

I’m not sure which is more surprising in this week’s news from first-rate indie Mac apps — Pixelmator getting acquired by Apple, or Fantastical shipping for Windows. I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows. Or maybe Instagram expanding to Android after a long initial stretch as iPhone-only.

But even iTunes was oft-criticized by Windows users for lack of adherence to Windows idioms. Especially as the years went on, it seemed like iTunes was used begrudgingly by Windows users (who needed to use it for syncing music, media, and data with their iPods, and later, iPhones), not happily. But the reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media:

Pixelmator Acquired by Apple; Future of Their Apps Uncertain 

The Pixelmator blog:

Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...]

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Pixelmator is their longstanding image editor — more or less, a Photoshop competitor. I first wrote about Pixelmator when it was pre-announced at the end of May 2007, and it looked so good I was dubious it would actually ship in a form resembling the amazing app they previewed. But ship it did, at the end of September that year. I have linked to and referenced Pixelmator dozens of times since. It’s a great app, part of the “Best Mac Apps in the World” firmament.

Photomator is more recent, and arguably more ambitious — if it’s possible to be more ambitious than directly competing with Adobe Photoshop. It’s more like a Lightroom competitor, specifically targeting photo editing and photo library management and batch editing. But unlike Lightroom, Photomator builds atop your iCloud photo library, not its own discrete library. That puts Photomator in competition with a few other excellent third-party apps, like Darkroom and Nitro Photo. These are apps for photographers who want the benefits of storing their photos in Apple’s system photo libraries (convenience, cross-app integration, secure and reliable iCloud sync) but with more powerful editing features than Apple Photos provides.

Both Pixelmator and Photomator are the sort of native third-party apps Apple loves to celebrate. Pixelmator won an Apple Design Award in 2011, and Photomator (at the time named Pixelmator Photo) won an ADA in 2019. A year ago Apple named Photomator the App Store’s Mac App of the Year. Pixelmator has also oft been demoed by Apple during event keynotes, as an exemplar of the functional and performance benefits of building atop native frameworks.

They don’t just happen to be exclusive to Apple’s platforms — they’re fundamentally architected around Apple’s frameworks. The way that a small engineering team (or in the case of Pixelmator rival Acorn, a one-person engineering team) can compete against the veritable army of engineers Adobe has working on Photoshop is by building atop the rich, deep frameworks Apple provides in AppKit and UIKit. And from a design perspective, Pixelmator and Photomator already look like Apple’s own “pro” apps. From the get-go, the Pixelmator team hasn’t just followed Apple’s own trends and guidelines for UI design, they’ve helped define those trends.

Does Apple want to fold these advanced features into Photos? Or do they once again see the need for separate consumer/professional first-party apps? Logic, for example, was an acquisition — but that was all the way back in 2002. If Apple keeps Photomator as an actively developed product, it would be a return to the same genre they walked away from when they discontinued Aperture in 2014. And if Apple keeps Pixelmator going, it would be the first time they go head-to-head against Photoshop itself.

Tucker Carlson Claims He Was Mauled by a Demon While He Slept 

Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was):

Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson answered “That’s what happened to me,” before recounting the story.

“I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

“In the milieu of journalism?” asked Heers.

“No, in my bed at night,” replied Carlson. “And I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

“In a spiritual attack by a demon?” inquired Heers.

“Yeah, by a demon,” affirmed Carlson. “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

Carlson, of course, was a headline speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden “lovefest” last weekend. As recently as last night, Carlson appeared alongside Trump on stage in Arizona — an event at which Trump suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.

Carlson was never hooked up right. And eventually when you’re not hooked up right and you don’t get help, the loose screws start falling out.