Verb Noun Enter

i made a joyride for your eyes because this song is awesome. ❤️

and here’s how i made it!

I admit I didn’t pay attention to this song’s story until now. Turns out I really needed to hear it, so maybe someone here does too.

The Korean title is actually “Holding Back Tears”. The first 2 choruses start with:

I don’t know how to stop the tears

and end with:

tell me, please, how to hold back tears

Then, Bad Day Siyeon encounters Future Siyeon, who looks unshakable and ethereal. And I hope you have a pillow nearby, because she says this [emphasis mine]:

I don’t know how to stop the tears, but even if I hate myself like this I pause a moment swallow those tears, and

in my diary, where it says “are you doing okay?”, above those words, I write down “now, I shall be okay” I shall be okay

Yup, you don’t stop the tears. You swallow them.

And I hope I’m interpreting this right: the grammar of “잘 지낼게요” expresses intent. A fine translation would be “I will be okay”, but it’s not “relax and everything will go okay on its own”. It’s “I, of my own volition, choose to be okay”. It hits different, I imagine.

And because that wasn’t enough, Future Siyeon whispers into her ear, and we see real-life footage of how the crowds look from the stage. Because wouldn’t we all want our future self to come tell us that everything will turn out fantastic.

I’m bawling. All I did was show up and listen, but they’re thanking us because they get as much from us as we do from them.

Okay. I too shall be okay.

SongPocket is an immersive player for your Apple Music library.

  • Gallery view showcases one album’s artwork at a time.
  • Manual reordering lets you put your favorites on top.

Kinda like a crate of records!

I started SongPocket in 2020.

Five years changes a person. Past Me would hate some aspects of modern SongPocket. But I still want giant artwork with no distractions.

Now, bittersweet news: future updates are paused, because I’m becoming a pirate.

I’ll still be working on my apps, just not publicly. SongPocket remains available and open-source. (Likewise with Font Booklet.)

And you’ll still see ideas from me, just not here.

I fell in love with computers when I saw iMovie in school, because I learned that technology can make people creative in ways they otherwise never could be.

Ever since, I’ve tried to pay forward that experience. Here’s to magic carpets for the mind.

I’ve always wanted to do this: I rewrote almost all of SongPocket’s internals, but because nothing’s new for users, I only bumped it to v3.5.2. 🎩

Specifically, I rewrote how it positions albums and songs, and saves those positions to storage.

The goal

SongPocket lets you reorder albums and songs, so it stores the position and Apple Music ID for each.

To do that, it used to use Core Data, which provides both runtime structures and persistence. Those are separate under the hood; you use different code to handle RAM and storage, because RAM is fast but temporary, while storage is slow but persistent.

So why replace Core Data? I’m preparing to someday switch from Media Player IDs to MusicKit IDs, which’ll require changing the persistence system anyway. I could migrate to a new Core Data model or to SwiftData, but I chose … 🥁

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Today, a post written by my granny. Enjoy.

dear internet

i am granny yuai and i am 84 today as far as u know.

i got the ios 18 on my iphone and the video swipy bar in the photos app is no good.

on the ios 17 it had a long swipy bar for long videos but now it’s always the same size.

so now when i watch a 4-hour video of my great great great grandkids i touch it and it goes like 5 minutes not 5 seconds.

i wish they would keep the good things.

love

granny yuai

How can you let people easily select multiple items on a touchscreen?

It’d be nice to not need to tap or swipe over each item, and remember, no Shift or Command keys.

I can’t believe we still don’t have a convention for this, seventeen years after the iPhone.

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SongPocket is a music player inspired by record crates.

It’s got reorderable albums. Group related releases, or put your favorites on top.

And super fun expandable tracklists!

What’s great

SongPocket is the best damn music viewer I know of. I made it for myself.

You can’t unsee reordering. How come you can reorder your to-dos, but not your albums? Your collection feels so personal when you can arrange it just so.

Artwork goes edge-to-edge because phones are tiny compared to vinyls. You don’t even need to play an album to see it at full size.

And the play confirmation prevents accidental interruptions. It makes other apps feel like hot coals.

But most importantly …

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I wanted to try this for years.

In Tog on Interface, Tog designs a picker for selecting one or more options, but not none.

Think languages or time zones: you need one; you can have more; you can’t have none.

We actually don’t have a dedicated component for this, even today. We use checkboxes for multiple selection, and disable continuing when none are selected.

But what if?

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Wait, you can do that with BASIC line numbers?

To add a line in between line 10 and 20, I just have to pick a number between 10 and 20, like 15. And then I type my line.

—Kurt Leucht

I thought they were just for GOTOs.

There’s more:

I wasn’t happy with line 15 and I wanted it to be different. I could just type in a new line number 15.

That blew my whippersnapper mind.

The trick is, there’s no files and no compiling. There’s no “editor”!

You simply write into the computer’s memory, and tell it to run, from the moment you turn it on.

Even on my TI-83 calculator, the program editor is a separate mode. But on an Apple II, it’s the default environment.

Defaults matter; they express a product’s purpose.

  • A Macintosh shows you the Finder. I guess I’ll arrange some files and windows.
  • An iPhone shows you the Home Screen. I guess I’ll browse some music and websites.
  • A Game Boy? Put in a game, silly.
  • And an Apple II? This thing is for programming.

That’s what inspired a generation about what computers should be.

Hence this complaint:

Every step between turning on the computer and running your program loses 30% of the students.

—paraphrasing David Brin

Imagine having to log in to your guitar and create a music document before you could start strumming.

A popular misconception is that good design offers multiple ways to do the same action.

That’s redundancy; the opposite is monotony—having exactly one way to do some action.

Monotony sounds dull, but is actually a profoundly clarifying guideline. I first heard about it from Jef Raskin—yes, the Macintosh guy.

Let’s analyze some examples.

1. Journal entries

iOS’s Journal app has a delightfully short feature set:

  1. Create and delete entries
  2. Edit and add attachments to entries
  3. Bookmark and filter entries

Unfortunately, it lets you bookmark, edit, or delete an entry in 4 ways:

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