Development – Page 3 – Arcane Science Lab

It’s no secret I use Apple products pretty heavily, although not nearly as much as you might think. With very few exceptions I purchase my Apple products very much on the trailing edge due to the high cost of everything they sell, and I hang onto everything well past the ability for Apple software to update the device, although Apple will still push critical bug fixes out to even those devices.

For example, my wife still has my iPhone 8 Plus I’d purchased in early 2018, and it just got a critical bug fix update even though it’s still running 16.7.7 while my up-to-date iPhone 11 Pro Max, purchased in September 2019, is running the latest 17.4.1, although not necessarily with the complete suite of features that you might find on an iPhone 15 whatever.

Both of us have decided that unless the battery completely dies in either phone that we will not update, especially for any “compelling” feature such as AI. I certainly don’t consider AI in anything “compelling,” more repulsive than anything else. I go out of my way to disable anything that has the whiff of AI taint on it.

For example I’ve managed to disable Siri on everything I own, because I get so sick and tired of having Siri pop up when I say something that the microphones on either my Apple Watch or my iPhone hears, which sends Siri off on a tangent to which I yell “Shut the fuck up!”, only to hear Siri tell me what a bad person I am (seriously). Again, fuck you Siri. And because it always disturbs me to hear Siri speak out of my Watch, I went into the app and completely turned off Siri, removing everything that had been gathered and was siting on Apple’s servers, which was another “feature” that really bugged me.

After that long drawn out rant, let me now show you what also really bugs me. First, mobile Safari the way it looked after the last few iOS updates.

Mobile Apple Safari’s main page immediately after an iOS update

This is my main Safari page. I use folders for a bit of organization to keep bookmarks on the main page to a reasonable minimum. You’ll note the four folders are Cooking, Photo, Tech and Following. Note they are blank. They aren’t supposed to be this way, and haven’t been blank since the day this feature landed in mobile Safari. Now let me show you have it should look.

Mobile Apple Safari’s main page immediately after a reboot of the iPhone

What you see now is how it’s supposed to look. The empty folders now display little thumbnails of the links inside those folders. If there are more than nine links, then it shows just the first nine, which is just fine. But they aren’t blank. Some might say this isn’t such a big deal, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things it might not be. But I never had this issue, and when this bug cropped up several releases back it was jarring to see it and made me wonder what else was wrong that I couldn’t see.

What makes this even more problematic for me is that I didn’t reboot my iPhone to just clear up Safari, but to clear up my Apple Watch Series 7’s inability to install watchOS 10.4. It hung with the iPhone Watch app saying it was preparing to install the update, and it wouldn’t finish. After some number of days I rebooted first the iPhone, and that didn’t fix it. Then I rebooted the Apple Watch before whatever was wrong got cleared and my Apple Watch finally finished the update.

That’s not the only time I’ve had to reboot my iPhone to fix an issue. I’ve had to reboot it twice so far this year because I got started to get call failures both incoming and outgoing. Then several more times I couldn’t get my iPhone to properly sync with my Acura MDX and Apple Carplay. All of this has become noticable since these last few iOS 17 updates.

Do I think Apple is trying to push me to getting an iPhone update (or even an Apple Watch update)? No. Frankly I think this is just sloppy Apple software development pushing out buggy software to their products.

I’ve never questioned Apple’s quality assurance until the last 12 months. My complete trust in Apple software QA (and now, it would seem, hardware QA) has grown eroded a bit. I’m not about to leap over to Android, not because I’m “trapped” by Apple in spite what the Department of Justice might say, but because I’ve dealt with Android vendors and they are all, without exception, shit. I’ll stick with Apple not because they’re such as shining beacon in the night but because they’re the least of all crappy devices, and I’m looking straight and hard at Samsung when I say that.

I’ll stick with Apple for the foreseeable future, but if any manufacturer does manage to come along doing a better job, I will probably make the transition from Apple to this new mythically better vendor.

VIM 9 running on Ubuntu 23.10 Raspberry Pi

This is the lightest of lightweight comparison of Vim 9 and Neovim stable release 0.9.5 running under Ubuntu 23.10 on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Vim 9 is the regular package installation bundled with Ubuntu 23.10, while Neovim was built from source. Neovim was built from source because the latest neovim version available was 0.7.2 (via apt show neovim); if you’ve been following Neovim then you will know how much has changed since stable release 0.8, so that makes 0.7.2 pretty much a non-starter.

Vim 9 is running with the Afterglow color scheme and PowerLine for the status line layout at the bottom. I’ve written about this already. The code common to both examples is a simple command-line utility I wrote in Rust, which is also installed on this Raspberry Pi. I’ve been a vi user since at least the early days when I was exposed to BSD Unix via DEC Ultrix running on a MicroVAX, back around 1985. Once exposed I stuck with it because anything else back then for editing source code was horrific to use by comparison. Of course there was no coloration back then. If you wanted color you either used a white, green, or orange monitor. Your choice.

I should note that VIM 9.1 was released on 2 January 2024, but the way distributions are managed you won’t see it in the regular distributions unless you, the user, take extraordinary actions, such as using an alternative repo, use Flatpack or Appimage, or build from source. Because the Raspberry Pi 5 is ARM based, there is no Flatpack or Appimage except for x86_64. As for Snaps, well, nothing there for this platform, and if there were I wouldn’t touch it. Vim 9 is sufficiently stable that it’s good enough as is.

I found the color scheme Afterglow to be easy on the eyes and quite helpful reading and writing source code. Where-ever I use Vim, I have Afterglow installed side-by-side.

neovim 0.9.5 running on Ubuntu 23.10 Raspberry Pi

I built Neovim because I wanted to give it a try on the Raspberry Pi. There are instructions to install from source on the Neovim website. They’re quite clear and it took very little time to build my copy and install it for use. To make it easier on me I executed the following:

make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/pi/tools/neovim-0.9.5/

There are instructions in the Neovim documentation that illustrate almost the same command sequence. I’ve reached a point where I have a ~/tools folder in my home folder to install whatever, so that I don’t have to use sudo to make it all available. Yes, I have to add a bit extra to my $PATH, but the little extra effort makes my regular environment much cleaner as a consequence, especially if I want to clean it all out later.

After building and installing my local neovim binary, I installed the AstroNvim Neovim configuration. And one other piece to install: I had to download and fully install all the Hack Nerd fonts from GitHub (see link below). I downloaded Hack.zip, unzipped everything, then copied all the Hack font files into ~/.local/share/font, logged out and then back in again to pick up all the fonts. If you don’t download the full set then you wind up with oddball square glyphs instead of the special characters that Neovim and AstroNvim use.

Then I started nvim and got to work.

I particularly like the way that Neovim plus AstroNvim works, creating a quite powerful IDE-like environment. In the example above I’ve used the predefined key sequence [SPACE] e to open a file view column to the left. I can use either the arrow keys plus the space bar to select any item, or I can click with the mouse. It can handle multiple open and tabbed files to the right, and it still has the complete vi key sequence to work with.

I believe that regular Vim, especially versions 9 and later, is a perfectly decent vi clone. But given the choice between vim and neovim, I’ve started to install and use neovim over vim.