Tweetbot 4.5 Adds Private Profile Notes
User profile notes. These are private notes you can add to any user's profile. Can't remember why you followed someone? This feature is for you. Requires iCloud and is accessible from the gear menu on a profile.
I really need some way to remember why I followed people. Although I didn't know what feature I really wanted out of Twitter, profile notes seems to solve it really well.
The Marvel Symphonic Universe
That can totally explain why I always think the marvel movies are so boring.
∞ Vesper, Adieu
John Gruber's postmortem on Vesper:
If I could do it all over again, here is what I would do differently. I would start the exact same way, with Dave and me designing Vesper for iPhone. But then, before Brent wrote a single line of code, we would immediately design Vesper for Mac. And that’s the product we’d have built and shipped first. There is downward pressure on pricing for Mac apps, but the market is still there for quality apps that cost $20–100 (or more). The plan would have looked like this:
- Build Vesper for Mac. Sell it for around $20.
- Build a sync system.
- Build Vesper for iPhone.
- Build Vesper for iPad.
- Maybe build a web version.
I think this plan would have worked. For productivity apps, I always want a Mac app first. Otherwise I am not going to invest with a premium price.
∞ It’s time to publicly shame United Airlines’ so-called online security
So, just to summarize, United has:
- Compromised its users’ security by adopting a terminally stupid threat model (keystroke loggers), and …
- in response to that threat model, implemented infuriatingly counterintuitive, hard-to-use security questions, rather than…
- something which actually would address that threat; two-factor authentication! Instead they…
- …doubled down on their stupid security questions and called that two-factor authentication.
United has always been very bad at software systems. Now they just reached their lowest point.
∞ May Seymour Papert Rest in Peace
Seymour Papert, whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn, died Sunday, July 31, 2016 at his home in East Blue Hill, Maine. He was 88.
In the late 1960s, at a time when computers still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Papert came up with the idea for Logo, the first programming language for children.
Logo was my first programming language I ever used. Although I didn't know what I was doing back then, it had certainly influenced me as a person. May Seymour Papert rest in peace.
Reimagining Google Fonts
The new Google Fonts is beautiful.
7 Steps to Becoming Better at Making Games
- Make a game.
- Make another game.
- Make yet another game.
- Make more games.
- Make games when you don't feel like it.
- Make games when you do feel like it.
- Keep making games.
∞ The Must-See Documentaries for Designers & Artists
Shut up and take my time.
∞ I fly 747s for a living. Here are the amazing things I see every day.
I decided to write Skyfaring, a book about flying, in order to set down for myself some of the remarkable details of the job I'd dreamed of since childhood. I guess I hoped, too, that these details would be of interest to readers who travel so often that flight has become an uninteresting experience for them. Here are six of the more amazing things I've learned, or relearned, in the 15 years that I've been flying.
Fancinating.
∞ Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.
Another great piece by Dan Grover:
As I’ll explain, messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world. Chat apps have responded by evolving into “meta-platforms.” Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down.
The reason why bots is a thing now is, the companies, who don't own a platform, want it to be. And they missed the point.