Watts Martin's Blog

A year back in Florida

About a year ago, I moved away from the San Francisco Bay Area, back to Tampa Bay, Florida, where I’d lived for (mostly) all my previous life.

Florida is not the same place it was when I left. The metros feel more urban, more alive, than I remember. Some of that is undoubtedly on me, on my failure to explore them adequately back in the 1990s. But a lot of what I’ve been finding now simply wasn’t there two decades ago. St. Petersburg now has blocks of walkable downtown, starting from the waterfr...

Thoughts on Leaving California

I.

I wasn’t born in California. I wasn’t born in Florida, either, even though it was, until 2002, the only place I ever remembered living, the place I would say I was from. I was born in Dallas, but only lived there maybe six months. I think the next place we moved was Albany, New York; I know that’s where we were living a few years later when my parents divorced. When I was around kindergarten age, we moved to the east coast of Florida, and in little more than a year moved to the west coast, t...

BBEdit 14, and why you should care

When TextMate burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, it didn’t take aim at Emacs and Vim as much as BBEdit, a Mac-only editor around more than a decade at that point. TextMate offered radically easy ways to create sophisticated new language modules and plugins compared to most editors of the day. Mostly, though, TextMate had Ruby on Rails: David Heinemeier Hansson developed the framework with early versions of the editor, making it almost custom-built for Rails. That gave TextMate a boost workin...

Panic���s Nova, ten months in

TL;DR: I’m not using it much.

I’m sure my review of Nova made it clear that I wanted to like this editor a lot. In practice, though, it’s felt more like its predecessor Coda and a similar competitor of Coda’s era, Espresso, than like Visual Studio Code or BBEdit: targeted chiefly at web developers mucking about with static websites. (Which, to be fair, is a sizable audience; my website is static, and Nova’s pretty good with it.)

Nova’s built-in smart autocompletion hasn’t proved particularly s...

A quick unofficial Apple Music Spatial Audio FAQ

So, what is it?

Music mixed in Dolby Atmos.

So, like, surround sound?

Yes, with an asterisk we’ll come back to. Most surround systems use multiple channels: the original Dolby Surround used four (left, right, center, and rear), then moved to five (splitting the rear into left rear and right rear), and a few Even More Channels variants. Dolby Atmos, though, doesn’t have channels. Instead, it assigns audio tracks to “audio objects,” which have three-axis positions in virtual space. Each object ...

A quick unofficial Apple Music Lossless FAQ

So what’s the deal?

Apple Music can now stream files as “lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 48 KHz sampling rate (which is better than CD quality), or “hi-res lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 192 KHz sampling rate.

Does that really make music sound better?

Depends on who you ask and what your equipment is. I feel like I can often hear a difference between CD quality and “lossy” encoding, but not reliably. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a difference between hi-res and CD quality t...

The Peril of ���No Politics���

Basecamp is both the name of a small tech company and their primary product, a web-based project management tool that includes forum-like message boards and a Slack-like chat component. It’s pretty good. (So I’ve heard.) In some ways, Basecamp is actually more famous for Ruby on Rails, the web framework they created for Basecamp. And, they’re famous for having capital-O Opinionated leaders, who recently banned “societal and political discussions” on the company Basecamp—essentially the equivalen...

The Mac and the iPad aren���t meeting in the middle yet

At the end of 2010, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote in a Macworld column,

The central conceit of the iPad is that it���s a portable computer that does less���and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and more elegantly. Apple can only begin phasing out the Mac if and when iOS expands to allow us to do everything we can do on the Mac. It���s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.

Back then he wrote that long-term (“say, ten years out”), iO...

I’ve done some minor updates to Coyote Tracks, my web sit...

I’ve done some minor updates to Coyote Tracks, my web site, tweaking the styling and updating text. I’ve also consolidated the RSS feeds���yes, they are still a thing���into just one, so if you’re seeing this via RSS or on Tumblr, you’ll only see article-length posts.

A brief chat about Chuck Wendig, the Internet Archive, and bad information spread in good faith

Because I’ve got a bug up my butt about this again, let’s briefly dig into a social media myth that Will Not Die:

“Chuck Wendig is suing the Internet Archive!”

No. No, he is not.

There are two important bits of background here.

First, the Internet Archive. If you know them, you probably know them because of the “Wayback Machine” that archives millions of web sites. They do a lot of other archive-ish stuff, though, including collecting and scanning books. A while ago, they decided to create a...