Controlling Podcasts, Books and Music via Hotkey in macOS Catalina

I’ve recently updated my computer to Catalina and remembered why I did not do it last year. Due to the split of iTunes into separate apps, the whole Podcasting and Audiobook playback has changed. And now, the media buttons are not working anymore as I would expect them to. As icing on the cake, I also found out that the Podcasts and Books apps are not AppleScriptable, so there is no straight forward fix.

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One of the last Tomatoes harvest of this year. I love having fresh Tomatoes for my lunch and some Basil as well.

One of the last Tomatoes harvest of this year. I love having fresh Tomatoes for my lunch and some Basil as well.

A programmer who uses the BANG! is saying, “At this point in the code, this value will never be nil, or will always downcast to the expected type.” Why is this important? Several reasons. For one, any time you have to deal with optionals, you have to deal with the possibility that the value will be nil. This creates an alternate code path and you have to decide what to do with it. If you’re not going to crash, what are you going to do? Throw an exception? Who will handle it? Log the error to the console? Who will ever see it? Silently fail and do nothing? What if the caller always expects correct behavior? Then you’ve just swept a bug under the rug.

⤑ Force-Unwrapping in Swift is NOT a Bad Thing - Wolf McNally (via iOS Dev Weekly).

I have not yet fought about this topic. However, when reading this article, I think Brent Simmons is right and on to something.

I've learned something that I suspect is true across much of our industry: the list of platforms in the world is iOS, Android, and desktop.

And this is something we as developers need to keep in mind. Especially as “native desktop developer.”

⤑ inessential: Desktop Means Web.

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