Category: Blog (in English) ⁄ Page 17 ⁄ Manual do Usuário

MOS brings macOS’ smooth scrolling to any mouse

26/1/2025, 8h46

The biggest (only?) issue with using a non-Apple mouse on macOS is losing that smooth scrolling, also known as kinetic scrolling.

It might seem like a silly detail, but it’s such a nice feature that I really miss when it’s not there.

A few years back, when I swapped out my MacBook’s trackpad for a cheap mouse, I found a solution in this quirky, free, open-source app called MOS.

MOS does one thing, and it does it well. It has a few options to add exceptions to its effect, which is sometimes necessary, and it lets you hide the menu bar icon. Awesome!

All this time, though, I’ve learned to live with (and accept) one major annoying flaw: it would “freeze” the scrolling when it got interrupted in some apps made with Catalyst (Apple’s tool for converting iPadOS apps to macOS) and Electron (web apps turned “native”). It’s hard to explain, but trust me, it’s super annoying.

There aren’t too many of them, but I use a few of those apps, like WhatsApp and Signal. Apple itself uses Catalyst in standard macOS apps like Maps, Messages, and Weather.

After almost two years of complete silence, MOS 3.5 just dropped the other day, bringing just one fix:

In Catalyst apps, scrolling is not properly responded to immediately after scrolling stops, including Maps/Messages/Weather, etc…

While it doesn’t mention it, the fix also applies to Electron apps.

After stumbling upon this update and sitting down to write this, that I realized there are alternatives to MOS, even if they come with their own issues (and I’m not sure if they’re immune to the glitch MOS had in Catalyst/Electron apps).

There’s magicScrollWheel (which hasn’t been updated since 2020) and SmoothScroll (proprietary and paid, a USD 10/year subscription). The latter even has a version for Windows. I’m not sure if Microsoft’s system offers smooth scrolling; if not, it’s worth a shot.

PS: SmoothScroll has a video that explains smooth/kinetic scrolling, which is tough to put into words, way easier to explain with moving images.

PSS: I’ve been using Latest to keep track of updates for apps that weren’t downloaded from the Mac App Store. That’s how I found out about MOS 3.5.

Screen time and face-to-face conversation

23/1/2025, 9h05

I spent almost 11 hours last Sunday staring at screens, not counting the TV. Between my phone, tablet, and computer, I ended the so-called day of rest with tired eyes, a fried brain, and a bit of frustration.

Not all those hours—an excess even for me, who works looking at screens—were wasted. I spent a good 40 minutes, for example, talking to my parents via video call. It’s hard to think of better uses for the screens that surround us than that.

The problem was the other 10 hours, or most of them.

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18/1/2025, 8h20

This Friday (17^th), the Read.cv platform announced that it was acquired by Perplexity, an AI startup, and it will cease operations.

Read.cv had a social network focused on design called Posts. In June 2024, I wrote about it. I called it “the last good vibes social media.” By that logic, “good vibes social media” has come to an end.

Coincidence or bad omen, the announcement coincided with my opinion that the only way to shield a social platform (any venture, in reality) from eccentric billionaires and mega-corporations is to make its sale impossible.

In this context, Mastodon and other applications based on the ActivityPub protocol are the only viable solution we have today.

US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel

17/1/2025, 11h29

I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about Free Our Feeds, a campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture”.

Free Our Feeds consists of a group of experts willing to raise USD 30 million via donations, over a three-year period, to create a foundation and “[…] turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”

It’s a noble goal, but not very original. On Bluesky’s website, one of the first sentences on the cover says:

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TCL’s bet on screens that look like paper

15/1/2025, 9h05

Since 2021, TCL has been investing in an intriguing screen technology called NXTPAPER: an LCD panel that attempts to simulate paper to be less harsh on human eyes. As someone who spends more time than recommended looking at screens, this greatly interests me.

The Chinese manufacturer announced a new version at CES 2025, called NXTPAPER 4.0. It brings a “significant advancement” in the weak point of previous versions, (low) brightness, thanks to a “sophisticated nano-matrix lithography technology”.

I don’t know what this means, but it seems to have yielded results. The screen of the Tablet 11 Plus, one of the devices with NXTPAPER 4.0 announced, reaches up to 550 nits. This value doesn’t compare to the best traditional screens, but it should be readable.

In addition to the tablet (still without price or release date), TCL also announced a phone, the TCL 60 XE NXTPAPER 5G. (Good name, marketing folks.) Both tablet and phone have an “NXTPAPER Key” that toggles between conventional mode and “Max Ink Mode,” which, according to TCL, “turns the display into an e-ink format designed to reduce eye strain and ensure maximum eye comfort.”

When activated, Max Ink Mode also disables notifications and adds a super nice side effect that I’ll only believe when I see it: a huge increase in battery life, up to 7 days of reading and 26 days (!) on standby. It will be released first in Canada, in May, for USD 199.

The rest of the 60 XE phone’s specifications seem decent, a level above those of its predecessor that Marques Brownlee tested, liked, but not enough to recommend it.

Some videos show the “NXTPAPER Key” and “Max Ink Mode” in action. TCL made a clip (13min) of the section where they discussed mobile devices in their CES presentation and made it available on YouTube.

While E-Ink (company) tries to make its screen technology (the one used in Kindle) faster, some manufacturers have been betting on the same approach as TCL and are trying to make conventional screens more eye-friendly. The startup Daylight launched an (expensive) tablet in 2024 with an even more aggressive proposal — black and white LCD panel, similar to those of calculators.

Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

10/1/2025, 7h16

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7^th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

***

It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.

WordPress’s uncertain future and the promise of ClassicPress

18/8/2022, 16h24

Almost a decade ago, I launched a tech blog in Brazil called Manual do Usuário (“User’s Guide” in Portuguese). Since its inception, it is published with WordPress, one of the oldest CMS — a content management system — and by far the most popular on the web today: it’s estimated that 40% of active websites use it nowadays. WordPress is open source, works well, there’s almost nothing to complain about.

In December 2018, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released version 5.0 with big fanfare and a radical change: Gutenberg, a new, very visual post editor based on content blocks instead of text.

Gutenberg changes the writing process a lot. If before I was presented with a text area with some formatting buttons at the top when writing some post — a kind of simplified Word —, now it was possible to manipulate the whole appearance of the content using these blocks.

This was not a very well received change. To this day, the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the Word-style editor used until WordPress 4.9, is one of the most popular on the platform, with +5 million active installations and a five-star (top) rating.

Automattic doubled down on Gutenberg in early 2022 by bringing to WordPress 6.0 a thing called Full Site Editor: now, in addition to posts, someone could design the entire site with blocks/Gutenberg. WordPress moved even further away from being a mere blog or text-based publishing tool to become… I don’t know, anything other than that.

With Gutenberg, Automattic — which, it should be mentioned, runs a commercial operation based on WordPress, WordPress.com — decided to pick a fight with DIY and more modern rivals, notably Squarespace and Wix. Not by chance: these have achieved great recognition and a lot of users (and money) in recent years, because they are easier to handle for non-programmers.

And it is indeed easier to make a custom site with Gutenberg, but at what cost? For me (a person who can’t code, but can deal with simple HTML and CSS, by the way), the biggest hurdles are the added complexity when writing anything with blocks and the “dirty” code Gutenberg generates when displaying the site to visitors. (I care a lot about this “invisible” part of the site. I’m not the only one).

WordPress’ new direction alienates a significant portion of its user base. At the very least, those 5 million who use Classic Editor by this day. Maybe we aren’t the most profitable users, but we’re a crowd that, in many cases, has relied on this tool for a very long time to earn our living or just to maintain sites that are doing just fine without Gutenberg, thank you. This is my case: Manual do Usuário has been around for almost a decade.

At the moment, WordPress meets the needs of a site like mine because it is still possible to neutralize much of the excesses that Gutenberg brings to the system using a lot of workarounds in functions.php. Until when? I don’t know.

All WordPress development is dictated by Gutenberg, both within Automattic and in the ecosystem, by third-party developers of plugins, themes, and solutions. This creates apprehension in those who don’t get along with the blocks and would rather do without them. WordPress community support has always been stellar, but it started to fade into something sparse for those out of the blocks train.

The Classic Editor, for example, was supposed to be discontinued at the end of 2021. It got an extra year of support due to its popularity. At the end of 2022, will it be abandoned? I don’t know.

Even a simple site like Manual do Usuário has several dependencies with the chosen CMS. After all, it’s a huge archive that was published on the features, limitations and possibilities of WordPress. Migrating to another tool is always an option, not infrequently a traumatic one that leaves after-effects.

That’s why I’ve been looking fondly at ClassicPress. In 2019, shortly after WordPress 5.0 was released, a group of developers decided to stay in version 4.9, forking the main WordPress into something new. ClassicPress was born.

In three years, however, progress has been slow. Making matters worse, the bureaucratic part and the internal dramas of ClassicPress’ project continue to distract everyone from what matters, from writing code.

At the end of June, the two developers leading the ClassicPress Initiative, the non-profit company responsible for the project, left under heavy criticism. A new group took over with the mission to regain enthusiasm and move the project forward.

It’s not an easy job. Automattic’s structure (and money) are on another scale of magnitude. ClassicPress Initiative is still counting the pennies to pay operating expenses. On exit, the former directors said there was USD 352 left in the company’s bank account.

Even in this not-so-promising scenario, it would be great if ClassicPress thrived. The new management has opened a crowdfunding initiative to cover expenses. Manual do Usuário, in my capacity, has become an early supporter.

It is not yet time to migrate my site to ClassicPress, however. The project is too raw for my needs and current dependencies, and ClassicPress new board still has to figure out fundamental issues, such as deciding to maintain compatibility with WordPress plugins or going for a complete break.

One day, if things go well, I’ll migrate. My fear, however, is that that day will come before rough edges are polished, when WordPress becomes something incompatible with Manual do Usuário, with what it was at the beginning until the fateful version 5.0 at the end of 2018.

I went all in spreadsheets for personal finance

10/8/2022, 11h24

The obscure, weird app that I had been using for five years to record my financial transactions failed to import data from the old phone to the new one. I took this as sign: it was time to move onto a better solution.

Personal finance doesn’t need to be complex, yet it’s only useful with a pinch of automated calculations, consolidations, and charts. I started researching for a new app with low requirements: something simple, that allowed me to enter my transactions (expenses and income) and review them at the end of each month or specific period.

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Apple’s Marxist TV Show

4/8/2022, 18h24

Apple TV+’s Severance is that kind of entertainment full of references to thoughtful, deep themes distilled into obviousness. No wonder (and, of course, not only because of this) it’s been so successful.

Even someone as ignorant as I am in Marxist theory can pick up on such influence in the show. Not so much on the viewer’s merit, though. It is that Severance kind of rubs this in our faces: the work is repetitive, mysterious, nobody there can see its result or even know what it is for, and employees give up their autonomy in a way that the owners of capital can only dream of today. It’s pretty much Karl Marx’s theory of alienation 101.

To those unaware, in Severance (the TV show) a mega-corporation, Lumon Industries, developed a brain implant capable of splitting someone’s consciousness into two: one exclusively dedicated to work, and one for everything else. Whoever goes through the severance procedure kind of becomes two people, whom everyone refers to as “inners” (workers) and “outies” (free, non-worker one).

The novelty is sold as the future of work, an easy and convenient solution to enable the utopian split between “real life” and “work life,” taken to an extreme there: when going down Lumon’s underground elevator, employees simply switch personalities and forget any memories from outside the company building, and vice versa.

Mark S., the protagonist played by Adam Scott, volunteered for the severance procedure after losing his wife in a car accident and burned-out at his job as a professor. It was the escape he found to mitigate the pain (at least from 9 to 5) and get back on the market.

Obviously, this arrangement doesn’t work for long. Two interconnected events trigger the suspicions and move the story forward: the arrival of Helly R. (Britt Lower), who from the first minute hates the “inner” life she sees herself stuck on and does her best to escape Lumon after Petey (Yul Vazquez), Mark’s former boss and friend, fired and “reintegrated” — i.e. reversed the severance procedure —, goes after the “outie“ Mark, to whom Petey is a complete stranger.

Along the way, Mark and his colleagues begin to discover the inhumane system they have subjected themselves to, the widespread corruption from their superiores at Lumon, and that the sky is blue. (It could just be a silly joke, this last discovery, but considering that the “inners” never go outdoors… maybe not?)

The macrodata refinement division’s office, where the four main characters work, resembles a typical 1980s American office — right down to the computers, with their monochrome CRT screens with keyboard and trackball attached.

Photo: Apple.

The aesthetics of this environment is a marvel in itself. And despite the visual strangeness and the anachronism — revealed in external scenes, outside the weird office and Lumon’s labyrinthine corridors, where tech and other things are contemporary —, the treatment of the employees is recognizable to anyone who has ever worked in an office, perhaps just a little more exaggerated. From the pathetic “perks” (although the “defiant jazz” scene is quite amusing) to the dumb bureaucracy, not to mention the micromanaging of the employees, it’s all there.

In that sense, Severance is perhaps the best joke that comedian, director and executive producer Ben Stiller has ever told: the show works perfectly as a self-parody of Apple, which publishes it on its streaming service. Apple, let’s remember, a company that built a USD 5 billion headquarters where employees bump into unsigned glass walls because ~aesthetics and creates barriers for WFH despite the increase in productivity and quality of life of employees, both of which was proved true during the pandemic.

That Severance is available only on Apple’s streaming service is both a fine irony and a declaration of the overwhelming victory of capitalist logic over other ways of thinking, a logic capable of swallowing everything, even the sharpest criticism, and regurgitating a sleek product with a price tag attached.

In the universe of Severance, the Severance show could just as well be released on a Lumon streaming service. Even a Steve Jobs-like leader they have: the spirit of Kier Eagan, the beloved founder, is present all the time as a guide and an inspiration to the obedient employees of the company.

The first season ends at the climax, but with a cheap and lazy cliffhanger, another symptom of the system in which the show exists — after all, you gotta keep those Apple TV+ subscriptions. And here we go, waiting a whole year to find out what happens in the already confirmed second season.

Unfortunately, all this transforming potential ends up being wasted by many people, judging by the comments on social media and reviews from the press, for whom apparently Severance is just a stylish, well paced science fiction set in a strange office. C’mon, even Apple itself, which vetoes sex, violence, and politics from a number of Apple TV+ shows, seems to ignore the extremely subversive appeal and political nature of Severance.

In the end, it’s like those people who complain that Rage Against the Machine’s music would be better if they left “political bs” out of it. Ignorance is bliss.

The iPhone with a button joke

2/8/2022, 9h14

In my iPhone SE (2022) review, I wrote that the “iPhone with a button” (Touch ID) became a recurring joke in Brazil. Explaining the joke is rarely a fun proposition, but hold on for a second; that’s interesting, I promise you.

A few months ago, random people started making jokes on Twitter associating Touch ID iPhones with poverty.

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The best iPhone

28/7/2022, 8h11

The iPhone SE is the most boring phone that ever existed. Almost nobody notices you have a new phone; when someone does, the conversation ends quickly and invariably in a sentence like “it’s just like the old one, only faster”.

I love this.

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Instagram no Longer Allows People Without an Account to View Photos and Videos on Computers

23/4/2020, 7h34

Instagram raised the wall that separates people who do not have an account from those who do. Since at least April 21st, Instagram doesn’t allow unregistered people to view photos and videos from public profiles on computers and tablets.

Public profiles, those that don’t have the padlock that restricts content to registered followers, have always been accessible regardless of login. Not anymore.

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