Linked List: February 2, 2025

Sunday, 2 February 2025

Cabel Sasser: ‘The Snacks & Cereals of 2024’ 

A delight, as usual.

(My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones. Chef’s kiss. Distribution seems mostly limited to the northeast for now.)

WorkOS Radar 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.

Swift Playground Gets an Update and Loses Its Plural 

Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.

Where Are the Bluesky Clients? 

Parker Ortolani:

Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress seems to be starting to be made with apps like PinkSky that replicate the Instagram experience but using Bluesky as the backend. There are also a handful of clients like Skeets and GraySky, but nothing that approaches the quality of some Mastodon clients or the legendary Twitter clients of old. They’re okay, but they’re not worth dropping the official client. Other apps like OpenVibe and Reeder are designed to combine feeds from multiple services and they do work with Bluesky. But they’re not dedicated clients. I want Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but for Bluesky. I’m not seeing that yet. The opportunity is clearly there, it has tens of millions of users making it three times the size of Mastodon.

One thing all the existing nascent Bluesky clients lack is timeline position saving/sync — so when you leave the app and come back later (with sync, even on a different device) you can pick up reading exactly where you left off. I find it hard to imagine paying for a Bluesky client that didn’t do this.

Update: About a month ago, Skeets developer Sebastian Vogelsang posted a thread about running into API limitations trying to implement position-saving, a feature that’s in beta, and available to Skeets Pro users. I’m giving it a shot.