I'm thinking something I could use for news, with a feed that I curate myself. I'd open the app in the morning and see that I have a feed with five newstoks in it. I swipe to the first one, general updates from my local news, swipe for the weather, swipe for sports, etc. They'd all be short-form, and take the same amount of time it would take me to skim a newspaper. Once I get through each "card," my feed is done and I can put the app down and go about my day.

I could curate this feed to contain only the sources I want, and ideally content would not be user-generated, and instead more akin to traditional television with regularly scheduled programs. Then I can check at breakfast and see all the early news programs, check at lunch and see mid-day content, and ditto for the evening.

I'm not going to ruminate about social media, content, and news, but this would be a very refreshing change of pace instead of constantly being protective of my time, since everything is designed to suck away as much of it as possible.

A guy can dream, right?

I'm trying to get away from the lifestyle of taking a shit ton of photos and then laboriously organizing them at a later date. I could totally take a photo, switch to the gallery app, select that photo, and then move it to the right folder, but as many tilders can probably relate, that is not conducive to the ADHD lifestyle. I need something at the point of contact.

Now, we all much admire the Richard Stallman mindset and the libre/commons ideals of GNU GPL folks, they are the ones who pioneered the open source foundations by giving us things like core utils, emacs, gcc, etc. at a time when proprietary solutions were having a field day with absolutely zero competition.

However, the GNU GPL software license has a few practical problems when it comes to development of web apps. I came across these while developing a PHP web framework recently. I had initially considered GPL v3 but I will have to go with a permissive license like MIT or Apache due to these issues:

1. The GPL applies to your entire software as a whole including derivative works. Now what constitutes a derivative work is often highly technical but not even an attempt has been made in GPL to clarify that. That question has been left vague for some reason which is never good from a legal perspective.
2. In my case, the two require files are in the core directory while a plain index.php lives in the root for the user to override. This index.php is included as a template or stencil which the framework's user is supposed to override with their own code. In GPL lingo, this might well cause it to be a derivative work and that will require them to "contribute" those changes back to me which doesn't make any sense at all! There needs to be an exception for included sample or example files for which the GPL shouldn't apply.
3. There is also a problem with GPL due to the nature of web or Internet. Another app I am developing is a bit heavy on JavaScript and contains static *.js and *.css files. The mere running of the app in a web browser will cause these files to be "distributed" through the <link> and <script> tags. From GPL perspective, this becomes a technical violation as no GPL license had accompanied this distribution. And in case you minify or compress your JavaScript or stylesheets for efficiency (which is a very common practice), this violation becomes even more grave as you're technically distributing GPLed source in an obfuscated form!

The GPL badly needs to be upgraded for these scenarios. Until then, it remains a good use case for desktop or console apps which run directly on your computer and usually have a clearer boundary of what constitutes a distribution and/or derived work.

Are there any other people on Tildes who regularly use VR?

• What has the experience been like for you?
• Which headset do you own?
• What do you use it for?
• Do you use it regularly?
• Any favorite/recommended games/apps?

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.