Dear Apple: Quicklook support

Hold onto your turtlenecks and jeans, I’ve got a doozy of a complaint and I’m about to employ the most hardened and air-tight argument in the history of the modern technological era:

It’s fucking 2021. Where is .webm and .gif support?

I get it. In the 90s and early 00s GIFs (pronounced “gif”, btw) had comparatively bloated file sizes. In the 10s, iPhones and OS X were increasing their market share. But come on, guys. Why do I need to open a web browser just to view a WebM or GIF that I’ve downloaded?

I just want to watch this loop I have, of a guy defend an attack from a political terrorist, rear his fist, and absolutely clean his clock. Like, I could watch this almost all day.

Funny bit: I can’t upload the webm I talked about to this blog software (WordPress). Maybe I need to change the title to “Dear Apple/Wordpress”?

Dear Firefox: Clickable Recommended Plugins

Dear Firefox,

After reading this article (TheHackerNews.com) about over a dozen Firefox and Google Chrome plugins that have been sending data about their users, I decided to make sure I didn’t have any of these plugins installed on my browser.

At the bottom of the plugins page, your browser had recommended a few plugins to me. I didn’t want to add them right away, so I thought I’d click on each plugin to see what the reviews said and to learn more without adding them to my browser.

But I can’t click on them.

What kind of campaign is this, to only give me the option to install these plugins first before being able to learn more about them?

I can’t click the title or the icon. But I can click the author? Sure, that means instead of one step, I might have to take 2 to 4 steps to find the intended plugin page. But seriously? In this era of UI design, no one chimed up and said “Hey, why don’t we make the titles and icons linked to the plugins?” Did that person get run over by a train that day? Because corralling users to add plugins without verifying them is another cherry on top of your recent scandal.

The Bystander Effect

It would’ve been my dad’s 71st birthday.

His old best friend Paul reached out to me today to tell me (for the 100th time) “He was my best friend. I loved him very much” but he never asks how me or my brothers are doing. What the fuck?

I wanted to reply “Yeah, I’m glad you ‘hope we’re doing well’, but how about, I dunno, write all of his sons and maybe try to be a part of our lives? If my dad was so fucking important to you, don’t you think you might want to keep the people, that were the closest biological ties to your friend, in your fucking life?”

It’s odd to me, how this guy, who supposedly can’t take a sip of water without mentioning his love for my poor father, can go over 1,000 days and not think to ask my father’s sons how the fuck they’re doing.

Well, I’m kind of having a fucking shit day, Paul. Where the fuck were you when my dad was abusing alcohol and not talking to his kids? I don’t recall you ever saying “I’m so sorry your dad treated his body like shit. I tried to help him turn that shit around.”

Nah. You just sat there and watched. Then, when he was dying on that hospital bed, you and your other god damn friends came down, saw him for a few minutes, went out and got shit-faced, and then fucked off back to California. Then you just sat by while his sons grieved and suffered. You fucking idiot.