Watts Martin's Blog, page 2

Panic's Nova text editor (a review)

Panic, the long-established makers of Mac utility software, seems fully aware that introducing a new, commercial code editor in 2020 is a quixotic proposition. Is there enough of an advantage to a native editor over both old school cross-platform editors like Emacs and explosively popular new editors like Visual Studio Code to persuade people to switch?

I’m an unusual case as far as text editor users go: my primary job is technical writing, and the last three jobs that I’ve worked at have a “do...

Signs of the old Apple

For a long time, there’s been two competing narratives about Apple’s pricing:

They’re “premium”: sure, they’re expensive, and yes, you pay for the brand name. But when you compare them with products of equal quality, counting not just feature specs but design, materials, and build quality—so an iPhone with a Galaxy S, a MacBook with a Dell XPS—they’re rarely unreasonably higher, and the user experience of macOS and iOS is arguably1 worth it.

They’re “luxury”: there’s nothing about a Mac, an i...

Random (but not angry) thoughts on "Game of Thrones"

(This will have spoilers for previously-aired episodes. Avert your eyes if you care.) “Everyone hates this final season!” I’ve noticed. Entitled nerd rage has been a thing over the last few years. “Oh, come on. Benioff & Weiss [the show’s creators] are terrible hacks!” Are they? They not only story-edited your favorite episodes, but they wrote most of the episodes that fans and critics both love. “Battle of the Bastards” (the second to last...

Low cognitive load blogging

Hey, did you know I used to be a blogger? Okay, it’s not quite fair to say that I’m no longer a blogger; if you check the Journal tab of my website, I’ve made about a half-dozen posts this year. But that’s way down from the original Tumblr-hosted Coyote Tracks; in the earlier parts of this decade I was at least managing a few posts a month, and occasionally even a few posts a week.

I’ll be at WorldCon 76 in San Jose

While I’ve been remiss in blogging (as usual), worth mentioning: I’m going to be at the San Jose (California) WorldCon, the World Science Fiction Convention, this weekend. While I’m not doing any programming, I’ll be in and out of the dealers’ room, as my publisher, Argyll Productions, has a table there (and my previous publisher, Sofawolf Press, also will have a table there).

If you’re interested in catching me somewhere, the best way to ping me is on Micro.blog or Twitter. I’ll be there Thu...

My purpose in blogging

That title sounds like I’m going to try and share something insightful with you, but the truth is that I haven’t the faintest idea what my purpose in blogging is anymore.

I feel like I’ve hit a breaking point with Twitter, but I’ve felt that off and on for over a year, so I won’t make any promises to swear it off. Even so, it’s absolutely been a distraction, and sometimes much worse—call it a depression amplifier, perhaps. Part of me wants to talk about politics, but part of me suspects it’ll...

The unbearable glibness of tweeting

I still love Twitter. A lot of us still love Twitter. But it’s past time to admit it’s an abusive relationship. (“Yes, he hits me sometimes, but it’s only for the retweets.”)

The common wisdom is that the Big Blue Bird’s problem is their lack of moderation, that the service is Exhibit A in the case against Silicon Valley’s belief that you can solve everything with algorithms. I think that’s some of it, but I don’t think it’s all of it. When your software becomes global community infrastructur...

Feed housekeeping

I finally remembered that I’d been using FeedPress for, er, feed stuff (remember RSS?) on the original Coyote Tracks, and I’ve updated it to pick up the feed from the new site instead. So if you were one of the couple hundred people who’d been reading posts that way, hi!

Since the new blog merges what was Coyote Tracks and my rarely-updated writing blog, Coyote Prints, you may get more than what you want here. If you only want tech posts, you can subscribe to the tech category feed. If you on...

Kismet

My first full-length novel, Kismet, was published by Argyll Productions in January 2017. Here’s the back cover blurb:

The River: a hodgepodge of arcologies and platforms in a band around Ceres full of dreamers, utopians, corporatists—and transformed humans, from those with simple biomods to the exotic alien xenos and the totemics, remade with animal aspects. Gail Simmons, an itinerant salvor living aboard her ship Kismet, has docked everywhere totemics like her are welcome…and a few places t...

Shifts in the blogging tide

Shifts in the blogging��tide Which semi-open platform do I like��better? I���m reading ���How Yahoo derailed Tumblr,��� an excellent story by Seth Fiegerman over on Mashable, and it���s making me think of my own relationship���������such as it is���������with Tumblr. I have more than one friend who thinks of Tumblr as the domain of endless streaming GIFs and disaffected armchair activists looking for things to be angry about.