It’s been a while, huh.

Looking at the archives, I haven’t updated this site in over four years. Quite a bit has changed in that time: an entire US presidential cycle, my three-and-a-half-year job at Microsoft Teams has come and gone, COVID-19 is still here, I had to say goodbye to our kitty, I bought a house, the entire nature of social media has radically changed, we lived through the boom and bust of NFTs, I played way too much Final Fantasy XIV, I fell down the VTuber rabbit hole, I joined my partner’s business running behind-the-scenes operations, I’ve started researching and experimenting with large language models and generative coding, and plenty more. I work at Kickstarter now as a senior iOS engineer, because it seems more vital than ever to build tools for creatives to get funding for projects, which also means I’m a union member now.

The good news is that I can build the website again, and I’ve already made a few minor changes, such as burning Twitter off of here updating my social links to point to Mastodon and Bluesky, and adding an automatic dark mode across the site. I have never been a great “blogger,” so I am also planning to adjust the site’s structure and design to be more focused around collections of pages rather than blog posts. For example, I love video games, and I want to organize and write about some of the games I really enjoy; a page about my Warrior of Light in Final Fantasy XIV would be a great archive for my own enjoyment. My website is for me as much as for you.

Given the decaying state of social media, the general fracturing of society along ideological lines, and the ongoing reality of the dead internet theory, it feels as good a time as any to try and kick the tires on maintaining my own personal internet garden again. I still believe in the tenets of the IndieWeb, and want to support those technologies where I can, along with bridging to the fediverse and maybe run a PDS with the blog content. I want to try to maintain a positive outlook here, but also with a critical eye on systemic and corporate levers of power. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up, but hey. Nothing ever happens without intentionally starting it.

Until then, please consider tossing me back on your RSS reader such as Feeder or NetNewsWire. Thank you very much!

When Twitter’s mobile apps were still Tweetie, they had a screen which let you change the API root. So if your API method is named 1/statuses/update.json, you add that to the end of the API root, giving you a URL that looks like https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json. If you change it to http://foo.com/bar/, then the API’s URL becomes http://foo.com/bar/1/statuses/update.json. You could use this if you were in a network where Twitter’s API was blocked, but you had a proxy server which wasn’t, you could still connect. Soon after, WordPress and Tumblr built versions of their API which supported the Twitter API, so you could use those services from within Tweetie. Then Twitter bought Tweetie and moved everyone to OAuth.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that this was still present in Twitter’s official apps. I’ve been a big fan of App.net since it came out, whose API is different than Twitter’s, but not terribly so. I thought it might be interesting to try to build an “API translator” which pulled the App.net streams and posts into the Twitter app. The team behind App.net had a hackathon this weekend, and I had my project.

Today I shipped the first alpha of Apparchy, which turns Twitter’s official iOS apps into App.net clients. You sign up for a free account on apparchy.net, add your app.net account, and then log into the Twitter app with your Apparchy username and password. Then, the Twitter app will start loading data from app.net through the Apparchy API. You can view your stream, your mentions, your profile, your followers, and your friends, as well as post, reply, star, and repost. It’s not entirely complete, and some parts of the app will have no data or return nothing, but the core experience is pretty good.

Apparchy implements Twitter’s OAuth security, and sends all data over HTTPS, so the process is as secure as any other call through Twitter. Apparchy doesn’t touch the Twitter API at all, and so it’s not bound by any of Twitter’s terms of service, should they be applicable. The only way this will get shut down is if Twitter removes the ability to change the API root in an update to their app (which doesn’t sound likely, from what I’ve heard).

Apparchy is what is possible when you have open APIs like App.net’s and standards for how to handle server communication. It took a lot of research and trial/error to get it to work, but it works very well. I had a blast building this, and hope that it can be used for a long time. If you have an App.net account, give it a try for free at Apparchy.net.

Two years ago, I began working on a new Twitter client for iPhone, named Streamlines. I hinted at it about a year ago, and has been a driving force in my development of MGTwitterEngine and a ton of open source projects. I’ve come to the conclusion that I won’t have time to finish and release it, as there’s still probably another 6 months of development needed to really ship it, and hostility from Twitter and from users of other Twitter clients make effort into building one unsustainable. However, I think there are UI concepts in there which are totally unique and have never been seen before, so I’d like to share them with you before this project is lost to the annals of dead projects.