They're not that big of a deal, but my two biggest annoyances with RFP:
1. prefers-color-scheme is completely broken, even in the dev tools. Mozilla refuses to fix this in any way, it is allegedly "by design" that you have to disable all RFP protection if you're a web dev and need to test the dark color scheme of your website.
2. Similarly, RFP always vends your timezone as UTC with no way to change.
that's a great way to get even more fingerprinting potential, each additional switch is another bit of identification on top of the actual fingerprint itself.
Is it only Apple TV (and not on iPhone for example)? If it's Apple-wide I can imagine it but I'm curious what is the possible reason that BBC can't support having a separate subtitle renderer?
Apple TV and AirPlay doesn't support "out-of-band" of subtitles into playback or the use of a separate subtitle renderer, the subtitles have to be linked in the HLS manifest. For a lot of OTT platforms, subtitles are processed and handled separately from AV media, so this is difficult to fix. Some platforms work around this by doing manifest manipulation either server or device side, both have pitfalls.
I just checked, iPad has it (and using colour coding, as that has come up elsewhere in these threads). On Apple TV a subtitle menu appears in the time bar, but it doesn't seem to do anything in either the "Automatic" or "CC" options it gives?
CC is a bit of an Americanism, perhaps it is running more directly though some Apple playback code that is more particular about subtitle formats?
I suspect the ultimate case is probably low usage statistics not making it a priority. The icon / BBC logo didn't update at the same time as the iOS version, so I suspect its a separate codebase for some reason?
iPlayer on TV (across all platforms) is a generic web application, topped with a custom wrapper app (think webview) for each platform, responsible to hook platform’s native APIs to Web/JS APIs.
I’m guessing there are some complications hooking Apple TV’s native subtitles APIs to relevant web APIs, and low usage statistics doesn’t help prioritising fixing the issue. Although the rumour is that they are working on a completely new Apple TV app.
I think Apple must allow it, either that or Google have tried really hard to capture in native code the "shitty non-native web app" feel with the YouTube app. But the iPlayer app does feel fairly native.
> If your suggesting Apple should proxy all internet traffic to devices — that is a horrible idea, incredibly dangerous, and a huge step in the wrong direction. To counter the issues I pointed out, Apple would literally have to be able to decrypt all the traffic and act as if they were the user, which is obviously a insane security issue.
Switch to “latest” view instead of “home” and you receive a chronological timeline without seeing the liked tweets. I can’t imagine using Twitter without this. See the instructions on how to switch on this Twitter support article: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-timeline
I've heard that viewing Twitter exclusively through the Lists feature also removes a bunch of cruft, but things aren't so bad for me that I've had to try that out.
They are a LOT more focused in tech (free tech specifically), not many of the interesting conversations here would be welcome there. Also, they allow new accounts only if existing account invites them - thus severely limiting the number of “btw I’m the creator of X that you talk about, let me tell you my story” type of comments that are abundant on HN.
As well as being good, they'll also be very experienced. What you're seeing in that post is specialised knowledge, likely built up over many years. We can't all know everything, as much as we'd like to!
In the comments of his most recent blog post, the author mentions support for parsing ASCII tabs will be left to third-parties, with rendering using his library.
