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Focus, but in Reverse
Rani Molla writing for Recode:
Even people who work on this sort of stuff for a living had trouble with Focus. Vanessa Bowen, a user experience designer who specializes in design systems, says she appreciates Apple’s minimal design but missed a psychiatric appointment when she turned on the personal version of Focus, which lets
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The Cringe
I touched on it yesterday, but Casey Newton wrote a lengthy piece, The hard truth about Truth Social, and I had too many highlights not to share.
What else is there to say about Truth Social? It’s based on technology from Mastodon, the open-source social network. Its parent company, Trump Technology & Media
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What Was Hard is Now Totally Simple
Julia Evans: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
I was talking to some friends the other day about the types of conference talks we enjoyed. One category we came up with was “you know this thing that used to be super hard? Turns out now it’s easy and anyone can
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This is the Truth
The Verge reporting on Trump's social network launching today:
As of this writing, Truth Social’s website is loading intermittently, but collecting names and email addresses for users who wish to sign up. Notably, the site is not secured through HTTPS, which means any information submitted will be visible to intermediaries on the
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Come on, Kanye
Kanye West on Instagram:
Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player. Not on Apple Amazon Spotify or YouTube. Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes. It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own.
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Apple Could Make Podcasting Better for Everyone
John Gruber: Nilay Patel and Walt Mossberg on Spotify’s Ambitions to Dominate Podcasting
Apple’s not doing nothing in the podcast space, but it seems to me that their Apple Podcasters Program that launched last year hasn’t really had much of an uptake. I could be wrong about that. But even if Apple’
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What if Apple Ran Their Physical Stores Like their App Store?
Jason Snell: Apple's worst-case scenario might be the best thing for the iPhone
A no-longer-exclusive App Store might tighten its rules and become more opinionated. It might even be more willing to reject shady developers, blast scam apps, and decline certain types of apps altogether. Apple acts as if today’
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A Unified Code Base
1Password is adding tools to generate and store SSH keys, which is lovely, but this thread on Hacker News expressed concern with how it was implemented. In response, someone from the 1Password team had their devs implement a fix quickly.
We spoke about it internally many times in the past but couldn't get
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Your NFT is Probably a Copy of a Copy of a Copy… (even if it's legit)
Slidebean's latest video about NFTs:
You can take Paul's Photoshop file and copy it, reproduce it, and it wouldn't lose a single pixel of quality, but there's still only one original file; the one that Paul Campion worked on when he was producing Lord of the Rings
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In 2022, Cloud Gaming Should be Additive, Not the Whole Product
Kingdom Hearts Fans Aren't Happy With The Switch Cloud Releases - George Foster
Towards the end of Sora's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate reveal trailer, Square added another tease for Kingdom Hearts fans - all of the games up until that point coming to the Nintendo Switch. There was one catch though, that they
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Why I (well, Lloyd Coombes) Blog Using Drafts
Why I blog using Drafts - Lloyd Coombes
It’s a utilitarian approach, and yet there’s something I love about that. Perhaps even better, Drafts will let me share my text in a variety of ways. I can fire stuff over to a million different apps, or export into HTML to copy into WordPress.
While
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Maybe It’s Not Confidence Holding You Back
Is Confidence the Secret to Success? Not Exactly.
Over time, Dr. Gill said, they realized that “inequalities were being explained away through this psychological characteristic of confidence.” Their research is distilled in “Confidence Culture,” a feminist cultural critique that will be published by Duke University Press on Feb. 9. The book skewers the notion that
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Just Some Plain Good News
A Cancer Treatment Makes Leukemia Vanish, but Creates More Mysteries
Dr. June and his colleagues, Dr. J. Joseph Melenhorst and Dr. Porter, report that the CAR T treatment made the cancer vanish in two out of the three patients in that early trial. All had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The big surprise, though, was that even
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The Six Colors Report Card
Apple in 2021: The Six Colors report card
John Siracusa said, “Every new Mac Apple introduced in 2021 was a hit. The new MacBook Pros have rescued that product line after years of decline and dysfunction. The multi-colored 24-inch iMac is a breath of fresh air after nearly two decades of white and
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Security Updates End for Google's 2018 Flagship
Pixel 3 and 3 XL get final update with February security patch
Google today rolled out the final update for the Pixel 3 and 3 XL.
For reference, the Pixel 3 came out a month after the iPhone XS. Imagine if iOS 16 was announced at WWDC and Apple said it would support the iPhone
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It’s More Than 3%
John Gruber: Going Dutch
Consider Stripe, which is incredibly popular (and deservedly so). Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. That’s very fair and delightfully simple, but while that extra 30 cents per transaction is negligible for large transactions, for small ones, it’s very significant. Consider a $10 in-app purchase
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Malleable Software
Settings are not a design failure
While I was reorganizing my phone, I had a sudden realization: Settings are typically seen as the result of design failure. The thinking goes that as designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustments by the user. Consequently, offering customization options is interpreted
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Why Luke Skywalker Might Have Weirded You Out
The Unbridled and Mildly Horrifying Evolution of CGI Luke Skywalker
Read this horrifying description of Respeecher from a sound editor who worked on the series, Matthew Wood: "It's a neural network you feed information into and it learns," Wood says. "So I had archival material from Mark in that era.