I've written a tiny browser extension for Safari and Chrome called Playlist Abandoner. It does absolutely nothing until you go to a playlist page on YouTube (youtube.com/playlist?list=xyz). On a playlist page, it adds a little button next to each video in the list. That button opens the watch page for the video.

"But wait," you say, "doesn't clicking the video already open the video's watch page?!". Well, yes, but there's one key difference: when you click on a video in a playlist, it opens the video in the context of the playlist, which means that when the video ends, the next one will start playing automatically.

Playlist Abandoner opens the watch page from outside the context of the playlist, meaning that you'll watch that one video and nothing else. Well, unless you click on another video manually, of course.

I mainly built this extension for myself; I make heavy use of the "Watch Later" system on YouTube, and most of the time I only want to watch one video from that list at a time. With Playlist Abandoner, I just click the magic new button and I'm taken to that video, by itself, and when it ends, it just… ends.

I'm sure there's a very small market for this extension, because the main point of YouTube playlists is to be able to watch them all in one go. But if it sounds like something you want, it's available to install from the Chrome webstore.

For Safari, it's a little more complicated; to create an actual .safariextz file, you have to be a member of the Apple Developer Program, which costs $99 per year. Seeing as I don't (yet) have any iOS apps to publish in the App Store, I don't really want to throw away $99 a year to publish a free Safari extension. To install the extension in Safari, you'll need to follow the instructions here.

On Thursday, Apple unveiled the latest MacBook Pro, with a fancy new multi-touch screen sitting above the keyboard in place of the function keys. And of course, instead of focusing on the exciting new features of the laptops, people are pointing out all the bad things.

I'm not saying you're not allowed to be disappointed that this shiny new computer doesn't have an SD card slot, or that the 15-inch model "only" has 16 GB of RAM. But people are saying that Apple doesn't care about the Mac any more because they removed the startup chime.

That's right, it's apparently a huge deal that these Macs don't make a loud "BOOOOONG" sound when you first turn them on.

Now, I am aware that the startup chime had a purpose, to signal that the startup diagnostics passed and the machine is fine to continue booting. But do we really need our computers to audibly tell us that every time we turn them on? There are other sounds a Mac can make at startup which indicate a fault; by removing the startup chime, it makes those fault sounds much more obvious.

I bet you never shut down your Mac other than restarting it for software updates and maybe to use Boot Camp. So you probably hear that chime incredibly rarely nowadays anyway.

So why the big fuss about the lack of a chime on these MacBook Pros? Nostalgia. Because that's just how it's always been, so changing it must immediately be a sign of doom.

On 512 Pixels, Stephen Hackett says:

However, the startup chime is ingrained into the experience of having a Mac, I'm sad to see it go. It’s tradition. It’s like losing the Happy Mac all over again.

"Tradition". "Part of the experience". These things may be true, but forgetting how loud your system volume was last time you shut down your computer and disturbing a quiet room with a BOOOOONG isn't a good experience.

Paired with the fact that apparently these computers turn on as soon as you open the lid, even if they were shut down, I think this is actually a great feature. Clearly Apple is attempting to design these laptops to feel like they're always ready to use in an instant. You don't even need to care whether it's in sleep mode or turned off. Just open the lid and your computer is there waiting for you. Isn't that a great idea for the experience of using a Mac? Having a startup chime would break that illusion.

Keeping things around just because they've always been there isn't how you design future generations of products. Just ask the headphone jack on your iPhone 7.

Nostalgia may be a nice feeling once in a while, but it is not a feature.

Update 17th January 2017

Joe Kuhns has written a Safari Extension which adds a PiP button to YouTube videos, as well as Plex, Netflix, and a handful of others. It doesn't add any additional functionality over what I outline below, but it makes it faster to enter PiP.

There seems to be some confusion about whether Picture-in-Picture, introduced in Safari 10.0 and macOS Sierra, is supported by YouTube videos. I've seen a lot of people saying it's not possible because YouTube uses a custom video player, not the standard one.

Yes, it's true that the standard video player shows a PiP button in the playback control bar, and that button does not appear in the YouTube player.

But PiP does work on YouTube; just right click on the video twice.

I don't normally write about technical development topics, but today I'm making an exception, because finding the source of my problem was incredibly difficult. I'm hoping that this post will serve me in the future when I inevitably come across this problem again.

This past Sunday, I took a trip to the nearest Apple Store for an Apple Watch try-on appointment. Obviously, spending about a minute and a half with each model isn't enough to write any meaningful reviews, but I do have a few thoughts about the models I tried on.