Linked List: April 1, 2017

Saturday, 1 April 2017

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Upcoming Is Back ★

Andy Baio, on the About page for the newly relaunched Upcoming:

Launched in 2003, before Flickr or Facebook, Upcoming was the first site to use a social network for event discovery. After two years, Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo, running for a decade before Yahoo shuttered it in 2013.

Shortly after they shut it down, Yahoo offered to sell the domain back to me, an unprecedented move for a former acquisition.

I decided to launch a Kickstarter project to gauge interest in bringing Upcoming back from the dead. With the incredible support and infinite patience of 1,787 backers, I rebuilt Upcoming from scratch, restored the event archive, and relaunched the community in March 2017.

Thank you for believing in it.

Looks great. Somehow feels karmically right that the return of Upcoming has coincided with the end of The Deck.

The Talk Show: ‘Warmest Regards’ ★

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the end of The Deck ad network, my weird story about getting kicked out of Amazon’s affiliate program, Apple’s new products announced last week (Red iPhone 7 models, larger-capacity iPhone SEs, the new 9.7-inch just-plain iPad, and Apple’s excellent new Clips app), Samsung’s new Galaxy S8, Twitter’s new reply system, CarPlay getting its ass kicked in a head-to-head comparison with Android Auto, ISPs and Privacy, and more.

Also, a brief debate over where to position the MacOS Dock.

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Dan Frommer: ‘Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Shows Apple Is Behind the Smartphone Design Trend’ ★

Dan Frommer, writing for Recode:

While Apple pioneered the all-screen phone concept with the first iPhone, Samsung and other companies have recently pushed it further, trimming the frame around the display so much that the forehead and chin on the new Galaxy S8 are barely there.

For another example, Andy Rubin — the founder of Android, and before that one of the people behind the Sidekick phone — recently tweeted a teaser photo of another slick-looking, edge-to-edge device, presumably from the handset company he’s working on, called Essential.

Rubin’s teaser shot for the Essential truly is impressive — it shows a true edge-to-edge design, with almost no bezels on either the sides or the top and bottom. Looks very cool. But: it’s vaporware. Shipping is what counts, and the Galaxy S8 is shipping.

I’ve been hearing that Apple is working on an “edge-to-edge” iPhone design since early last year. If Apple truly eliminates the chin and forehead, they’ll leap ahead of Samsung. But I don’t see how anyone can deny that Samsung is ahead in the race to eliminate bezels.

There’s a lot more to “design” than how a phone looks from the front, though. And to me, the Galaxy S8 looks like it was only designed with the front face in mind. I don’t think the back looks good, and the placement of the fingerprint scanner is undeniably awkward. And the ports and speaker holes on the bottom are, as usual for Samsung, misaligned.

Twitter Rearranges Deck Chairs on Titanic ★

Twitter’s design team, explaining why they changed the default new user avatar from an egg to a bland silhouette:

We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others — often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.

This is so ridiculous that a lot of people suspected it was an April Fool’s gag. The problem is the actual harassment, not the egg icons. Changing the icon doesn’t affect the actual problem at all.

And it’s a bad idea. The egg was something Twitter owned. It fit marvelously with their brand. Their icon is a bird. Their “new tweet” button shows a feather. The egg felt totally Twitter. This new silhouette looks like it came out of a stock icon set.

(There is some interesting stuff in this post about the work they did to make the silhouette feel gender-neutral rather than male.)