Commented Links for 2020-07-06

Reddit and LinkedIn Apps Capturing iOS Clipboard, Python Library for Pretty Terminal Apps, Zola Workflow, Modern Pascal, Bash Test Framework, Dependency Manager for Python, C Quirks.

Reddit and Linkedin apps also caught copying and pasting clipboard contents

Recently, there was some news about TikTok capturing clipboard content in a recent iOS update, which notifies the user on the desktop when something is copied on the device or vice-versa -- the gist of it is that in the next iOS version, when you do a copy in one device, it will notify you that something was added to the clipboard, so you can paste the content in any other Apple device.

And now the Reddit and LinkedIn apps running on the new iOS also seem to push the notification.

Since it is the first version of iOS 14, it could be that something is wrong with the API and it is notifying something that is actually normal, and it wouldn't be the first time Apple broke something like this in new OS versions. But, at the same time, we live in an era where every freaking app wants to capture as much data as it can from the user and you can't deny that it wouldn't be weird if Reddit (which is aggressively pushing towards using their app in the mobile website) and LinkedIn wouldn't do something like this.

Honestly, I think the API isn't broken. Apple did that on purpose, to show bad actors without claiming they are bad actors.

Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.

I'm finding curious how it seems there is a "renaissance" of terminal apps these days; and, tied with that, the amount of libraries that help developers build pretty terminal applications.

And here is another one, this time in Python.

My Zola Workflow

I do use Zola on this blog too (and I'm currently abusing the tagging feature, but that's a discussion for another time) and here is Jason set up to generate the pages when pushing content to his github.

There is only one issue I have is that he's using Docker to keep Zola. But Zola is a Rust application and will produce a single binary and I don't see why Docker is necessary here (not counting access to Glib, that is). One could just add the Zola binary to their source content and be happy with it -- I'm inclined to go with this route, once I stop procrastinating and make an automated deployment of this blog, which currently is a single shell script.

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

Ah, Pascal. The language must of us, old farts, learnt in the UNI.

I have to admit that I forgot most of the stuff I used (due the lack of use) and I'm always happy to find these gems talking about some of the languages I lost contact over the years -- not to mention that I have this idea of writing an application in Pascal, just for the giggles.

Bach Testing Framework

Bach is a testing framework for Bash scripts.

DepHell

A tool for managing dependencies with Python. Converts from one format to another and even allow creating a dockerfile for strong isolation.

C, what the fuck??!

I like C and I won't lie. Even with its quirks, it is a fun little language.

But the amount of quirks -- some quite obscure, as shown here -- is really a pain.