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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • It’s pretty reliable. For livestreams, it doesn’t always show correct timestamps and scrubbing back in time doesn’t work properly. But for videos it works well. It replaces the YouTube player with the default iOS video player and adds buttons to the top to change things like quality and the native player allows you to choose subtitles and set playback speed.

    As it uses the native player, it also supports picture in picture, so you get that without YouTube Premium. It also works for YouTube embeds on other webpages.




  • It’s all very nitpicky, but for me, that’s what differentiates a good UX from a great UX. Just “close” isn’t really enough for me personally.

    Take the swipe gestures on comments for example:

    Let’s take a look how they look like:

    Apollo | Memmy

    Here are the main differences:

    • In Apollo, the icons are smaller and have different padding, which looks better to me (should be an easy fix)
    • The icons are animated in Apollo (they have an animation when they are “locked in” before lifting your finger)
    • The icons have an outline version and a filled version in Apollo (although I don’t really care)
    • The haptic feedback is more subtle in Apollo (big one for me as I absolutely love the delicate feedback that the “Taptic Engine” in iPhones can provide)
    • The haptic feedback only works the first time a given icon/action is “highlighted” (or locked in?) without releasing your finger in-between (like shown in the video, swiping multiple times left and right)
    • When lifting your finger after locking in the downvote action, it briefly shows the upvote icon during the animation where the comment slides back into position - Apollo shows the downvote icon, making it very clear that you just downvoted and not accidentally upvoted

    I know that all of these things are achievable, but I feel like a lot of this would be “more correct” by default when using SwiftUI (the sliding mechanism is probably using a lot of custom code in Apollo as well, but still).

    Another example are grouped lists (say Profile > Subscriptions). Tapping on an entry instantly highlights it. In native SwiftUI apps, the list items have a small delay before highlighting. While this might seem odd, it’s less irritating when scrolling with an ever-so-slight delay between tapping the display and beginning to scroll. Also, the separators between elements starts where the text starts in SwiftUI (by default), the arrow icon is thicker etc.

    Again, this is very likely achievable with React Native, but with SwiftUI this is the default behavior.

    As I said it’s all very nitpicky, especially considering that Memmy is in a very early state. I feel kind of bad for having so much criticism over issues so minor. But these minor things is what made Apollo so great for me, even over all other third-party apps that were also good, but not great in my opinion.



  • I’d imagine you’d have a hard time using USB power banks to form a battery that resembles (for example) a MacBook Air battery:

    MacBook Air battery

    Considering most power banks use 18650 cells or similar (but even if they are thinner), I can’t really see how you’d form a battery pack that fills the space effectively on most notebooks anyway.

    It’s also a lot of work finding the correct cells to use (form and size wise), ordering them, if it’s in a power bank prying that apart, desoldering the old and soldering in the new cells. >= 99% of all people would purchase complete, fitting battery packs for their model of laptop.


  • While that’s great, what I’m more concerned about is pricing for original replacement batteries. I don’t really care if I have to send my phone in for 2 to 3 days (which is what it took last time I sent an iPhone 11 Pro to Apple), what concerns me more is pricing. Especially with older phones, having to pay $69 to $89 for battery repair (plus shipping) is quite a lot. Self-service parts cost the exact same price from Apple currently.

    The EU should forbid charging more for replacement or repair parts than the cost to manufacture them plus a small (!) markup.

    Also, please extend this law to include all kinds of electronics (smartwatches, laptops, tablets etc.).

    Especially AirPods and other true wireless earbuds should have replaceable batteries, as they are basically dead after 3 to 5 years, which just feels wrong considering everything except the batteries probably lasts a lot longer and when you get an expensive “battery repair” they just give you new AirPods.