Am I about to spend all night adding #PWA tabs to Web Notes? What a silly question.

So I've given up my fight against natural scrolling and turned it on everywhere and I feel like I have to rewire my entire brain.

For my weekend project, I'm trying to build a peer-to-peer file transfer web app, like Apple's airdrop. (Yes, I know several already exist. I just wanna learn.)

Anyway, I want to show a little phone icon on mobile devices an a little laptop icon on desktops and I realized I kinda have no idea how to detect if a user's on a mobile device outside of user agent queries and crude window width guesses. I've gotta be missing something, right?

Is ketchup on spaghetti a thing? Because I just saw a Heinz commercial for it and I...I have strong feelings.

So if you're anything like me, you've been watching the #Mastodon user counter the past few weeks. The admin, @zoltan was nice enough to share the historical data with me and it's behind my latest for @nbcnews: Elon Musk's chaotic Twitter ownership is driving growth on Mastodon

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/twitter-owner-elon-musk-driving-user-growth-mastodon-rcna62832

If today's policy change raises your eyebrows, did you know that apps in the iPhone app store couldn't link to their own websites for like 13 years? It only ended this year. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23003503/apple-reader-app-developer-external-link-guidelines-announced-entitlements

I kinda hope we're getting to the end of the hot-take era. I've missed nuance, layers, complexity, and people acknowledging that many problems are really complicated with multiple possible solutions, none of which are the obvious right one.

And I bet you a LOT of companies are gonna suddenly rediscover how cool the open web is when web push notifications come to iOS next year.

Especially web standards. The idea that I can write a web site, have it sync data in the background, send me a push alert when it's done, work offline and show a nice install UI is 🤯.

Every time someone says they're sad that they have to use "the web version" I die a little on the inside. Wordle and Mastodon have shown this year that you don't need an app in a app store to do cool stuff. We just need to care.

As someone who has said "I miss blogs" about a million times the past decade, I am digging the rise in talk of RSS, interoperability and standards. Going to be interesting to see what tools people I haven't even heard of yet are going to build. Can't wait to see how I can plug into them.

Today's the 10 year anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting. What happened there was never supposed to happen again. Instead, @joemurph shows it's happened dozens and dozens of times since.

This is a gut-wrenching read. https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/10-years-of-school-shootings/index.html

Whoa https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe

It's my first vacation in half a year! I am either going to sit on a beach or build an app 😂

Playing around with the Mastodon api and I'm seeing how simple it is to request an instance's public timeline. It seems to me like it shouldn't be super hard to build something that funnels a post from another instance's public timeline to your own for following or favoriting (provided you're not blocked by that instance)
I can't be the first person to want this feature in a Masto client.

So in the spirit of being a person:

Hi, I'm Nigel! I'm a journalist in New York City. My focus is #dataviz, data analysis and dynamic storytelling.

When I'm not working, I like to keep busy with side projects. I wrote a note taking PWA called Web Notes, and I'm on a neverending quest to have a computer balance my checkbook for me.

This instance is for me and my wife. It's named after our interests: fashion and data viz. #introduction

Anyway, I'll be here. I already paid for my instance! It's gonna be fascinating.

TLDR: We're gonna have to be people, and not just "Journalists on (insert social media name)."

That's both exciting (I do better with deep relationships) and kinda scary (harassment on social media made me pull back from sharing about myself the last 5+ years)

That's not a bad thing either. The more people that know me as "Nigel the person who has a dog named Pan and who can't sit still without giving themselves a side project," the fewer that will think of me as another cog in "The Media"

That is to say, I think we're all going to have to become neighborhood reporters. We'll have to show up on the regular, really get to know people and show we're people too.

It feels to me like the key is going to be building longer, deeper relationships with other people that may never lead to them being sources in stories. Especially with the deeply-held norms around consent, exposure and content warnings.