Technology

FWIW, @TwitterDev, being forced to use Twitter’s site or native apps is a dealbreaker for me. Please reconsider. apps-of-a-feather.com

“Fingers crossed the future is more diverse.” @davatron5000 finds that Android’s proprietary grass isn’t greener. daverupert.com/2018/04/dave-w…

Hello, dear reader!

March is gone, but its links remain.

I gave a brief talk about designing information at the annual Society for News Design conference, and also shared my notes from the other talks I took in.

Always ahead of the trends, I left Facebook at the beginning of the month, a little over two weeks before the news about Cambridge Analytica broke (news which long-time readers may not have found shocking). Since think… See more →

“Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters.” bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

🎶 JavaScript, JavaScript, oh Java Java Java JavaScript

:pop:

badum dum dum 🎶

Great piece from @ftrain on the parallels between the blockchain and dot-com bubbles, and the good and bad to come. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

I want an app that checks a database of upcoming NYC concerts against my @lastfm data and emails me a weekly digest of relevant shows.

I thought tonight’s show might sell out so I got chickens months in advance.

I visited Facebook, got angry at a notification I didn’t ask for, and deactivated my account before a cooler head could prevail. Try it!

“[T]his trend of corporations-as-activists is […] the result of a government that’s unable (or unwilling) to serve its citizens.” twitter.com/beep/status/96…

“One of my greatest fears for the web is that building it becomes the domain of a professional priesthood.” adactio.com/journal/13498

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

Scheduling a disciplinary hearing for Adobe Illustrator. Let me know if you’d like to attend.

“Above all, my old iPad has revealed itself as a cursed object of a modern sort. It wears out without wearing.” nytimes.com/2018/02/06/mag…

I beat this drum a lot, but if you love movies, you need to be on @letterboxd. And their newly-updated iOS app is 🥇 itunes.apple.com/app/id10542710…

Hello, dear reader!

January is gone, but its links remain.

In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.

I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →

Yes, the likely actions are Snooze the Alarm, Stop the Timer. But the buttons’ inverted functions across modes mess with my head every time.

Actually, Google Drive File Stream, everything is not up to date.

An excellent visual explanation of how scan lines and color work on analog and digital video screens. youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2d…

Antarctic Brooklyn cabin fever amplified by Spectrum outage

Happy New Year, dear reader!

December is gone, but its links remain.

I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.

This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →

The challenges of connecting with music in the age of smart speakers, from the always-thoughtful @elliotjaystocks. medium.com/@elliotjaystoc…

Thoroughly fascinating detective work on the arcane specifics of how and why Google Maps is far ahead of Apple Maps. justinobeirne.com/google-maps-mo…

How might we have better empowered non-tech people to participate in the open internet? Could we have stopped its corporate calcification? twitter.com/nytimes/status…

@meyerweb Aaaaaand here’s my uncle and my dad, both of whom passed away years ago. Not quite the same thing, but still.

After he’s written and spoken extensively on how design/tech can be more humane, FB gifts @meyerweb a photo of his dead daughter AGAIN. twitter.com/meyerweb/statu…

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

Most of my writing energy this month went toward a post about the typography and spatial relationships underpinning my site’s recent redesign. I also wrote a handful of film reviews, the most substantial of which outlines my disappointment with the ambitious Loving Vincent, an animated film made from thousands of oil paintings.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of this month’s links are devoted to thinking through… See more →

Good @LeahFessler piece about how the problems with differing socialization of men and women perpetuate on @SlackHQ. work.qz.com/1128150/your-c…

Nothing like “solving” a problem by moving it to blockchain and ignoring what actually makes it a problem. Living wage? What’s that? twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Hey @KudosProject, what exactly is the difference between tips and “performance-driven rewards”? businessinsider.com/uber-for-busse…

Working on a @jekyllrb site. Archive pages are rendering with category lists that aren’t in the markup and it’s freaking me the fuck out.

@tweetbot The straw that broke the camel’s back. (I also added regex to mute tweets with 5+ @ mentions. gist.github.com/imathis/3006330 h/t @jasonsantamaria)

Apparently @tweetbot mute filters can take regular expressions! Just zapped the 280 scourge from my timeline. ⚡️ blog.chrishannah.me/use-mute-filte…

Ugh, two typos in there. I’m usually more careful. @Twitter, I want (limited) post-publish editing capabilities, not 280 characters. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

“Email bombing is a perfect parable for 2017, a time in which we appear to be collectively losing faith in the promise of the internet.” twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/st…

For now, no interest in taking advantage of 280. The giant tweets in my feed are messing up my Twitter rhythm. I wonder if/how I’ll adapt. 😕

A nice overview of the engineering magic behind @Spotify’s Discover Weekly. hackernoon.com/spotifys-disco…

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

For my part, I wrote a bit about my first ten years on Twitter, dusted off the ol’ dream journal, and published the full calendar for Robtober, my annual horror movie binge. I also wrote a bit about each of the 31 movies included in Robtober this year. They’ll all be collected on my site later, but for now they’re available on Letterboxd.

With Robtober keeping… See more →

Is there a person on earth who responds positively to passive aggression when unsubscribing from a service they didn’t consent to receiving?

TL;DR: Twitter is mostly a platform for me to complain about car alarms. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

I didn’t understand Twitter at first. A service that would constantly update me via SMS about the minutiae of my friends’ activities? Uh, no thanks? Using it via its website was less intrusive and slightly more appealing, but the whole thing still seemed to me like a really disorganized and fairly pointless chat room. Nevertheless, most of my friends in the web design community had joined by late 2006, and the service dominated SXSW Interactive… See more →

Email clients and other digital products have come and gone, but I used @aim daily for nearly 20 years. That’s a hell of a thing. twitter.com/aim/status/916…

There are lots of opportunities for tech to do more good and less harm, and @sara_ann_marie is on the case: sarawb.com/technically-wr…

This is some handsome work. Looking forward to seeing how it’s implemented. Congrats to all involved! twitter.com/AaronRobbs/sta…

My new Beats earbuds have arrived and I finally have the earwax necklace I’ve always wanted.

Butterfly emerges from chrysalis, tentatively flaps its new wings. 1000 miles away, Apple TV remote feels the breeze, cues up Full House.

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

“Your memo was a triumph of motivated reasoning: heads men win; tails women lose.” economist.com/news/21726276-…

I keep wondering if/how a different response to the Google memo might have altered James Damore’s destiny of becoming another Pax Dickinson.

“I refuse to debate this. Does that make me inflexible? Yep, sure does. But […] not everything is worthy of debate.” adactio.com/journal/12658