Coyote Tracks
Coyote Tracks
Watts Martin
I’m a science fiction/fantasy author and a technical writer. A few years ago I was known for being a technical blogger on Tumblr; now I blog right here. I left Twitter a while ago, but you can find me posting on Mastodon and Bluesky now. My pronouns are he/they.
Latest Posts
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the...
So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy....
I. I wasn’t born in California. I wasn’t born in Florida, either, even though it was, until 2002, the only place I ever remembered living, the place I would say I was from. I was born in Dallas, but only lived there maybe six months. I...
When TextMate burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, it didn’t take aim at Emacs and Vim as much as BBEdit, a Mac-only editor around more than a decade at that point. TextMate offered radically easy ways to create sophisticated new...
Update, April 2024: While this was all true when I wrote it in mid-2021, Nova has continued progressing, and I’ve actually ended up using it a lot more for web development than I expected to, chiefly because of its integrated...
So, what is it? Music mixed in Dolby Atmos. So, like, surround sound? Yes, with an asterisk we’ll come back to. Most surround systems use multiple channels: the original Dolby Surround used four (left, right, center, and rear), then...
So what’s the deal? Apple Music can now stream files as “lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 48 KHz sampling rate (which is better than CD quality), or “hi-res lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 192 KHz sampling rate. Does...
Basecamp is both the name of a small tech company and their primary product, a web-based project management tool that includes forum-like message boards and a Slack-like chat component. It’s pretty good. (So I’ve heard.) In some ways,...
At the end of 2010, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote in a Macworld column, The central conceit of the iPad is that it’s a portable computer that does less—and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and...
Because I’ve got a bug up my butt about this again, let’s briefly dig into a social media myth that Will Not Die: “Chuck Wendig is suing the Internet Archive!” No. No, he is not. There are two important bits of background here. First,...
Panic, the long-established makers of Mac utility software, seems fully aware that introducing a new, commercial code editor in 2020 is a quixotic proposition. Is there enough of an advantage to a native editor over both old school...
For a long time, there’s been two competing narratives about Apple’s pricing: They’re “premium”: sure, they’re expensive, and yes, you pay for the brand name. But when you compare them with products of equal quality, counting not just...
For a while about a decade ago, I was doing tech blogging; I never rose to “A-list blogger” level, but I probably hit B-list for a couple years, based on who was linking to me and the “yeah, I think I’ve heard of Coyote Tracks” comments...
I’ve been using an iPad Pro instead of a laptop for going on two years now, and have definitely spent more time on it than I have on my personal Mac during that time. Name a major writing app on the iPad and I’ve almost certainly not...
I take my 12.9″ iPad Pro to the office every weekday, where I sneak in writing during lunch breaks. On weekends, some weeknights, and even the occasional work-from-home Thursday it travels to coffee shops and microbreweries around San...