Linked List: November 26, 2024

Tuesday, 26 November 2024

The End of the Line for Delicious Library 

Wil Shipley, on Mastodon:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

The end of an era, but it’s kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)

It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.

They were even clever and innovative in the ways they promoted the app. The first time Delicious Monster sponsored Daring Fireball for a week, their sponsorship message read, in its entirety:

Organize the shit you like.
Get rid of the shit you don’t.
Delicious Library 2.

When they created an iPhone version of Delicious Library, they announced it via this delightfully intricate but decidedly lo-fi stop-motion-animated video.

20 years go by and there’s some inevitable nostalgia looking back at any art form. But man, Delicious Library exemplified an era of indie app development that, sadly, is largely over. And make no bones about it: Delicious Library was a creative work of art.

‘It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of as Many Trans People as Possible’ 

The Onion Editorial Board:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.

OpenAI Might Be Making a Web Browser 

Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen prototypes or designs of the products. [...]

Making a web browser could help OpenAI have more control over a primary gateway through which people use the web, as well as further boost ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly users just two years after its launch. It isn’t clear how a ChatGPT browser’s features would differ from those of other browsers.

In a signal of its interest in a browser, several months ago OpenAI hired Ben Goodger, a founding member of the Chrome team at Google. Another recent hire is Darin Fisher, who worked with Goodger to develop Chrome.

But OpenAI isn’t remotely close to launching a browser, multiple people said.

Goodger and Fisher’s hirings weren’t secret — both keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn — and just because two people have previously created new web browsers (even multiple times) that their new gig is creating a new web browser. But it sure feels like a good guess.

Fisher most recently was at The Browser Company for two years, working on Arc, an innovative browser that I admire for its originality but which simply did not click for me at all. The Browser Company is in flux, too, working both on Arc 2.0 and an as-yet-unnamed second project that might be a more traditional web browser.

Combine this with regulatory pressure on Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome, and it’s an exciting time for web browsers. It’s kind of wild how every few years the web browser market gets shaken up. The pattern that’s repeated several times is that just when the browser market seems settled — like the markets for, say, spreadsheets and word processors — there’s a period of flux and new entries shake up the market. There was a point when it seemed like Internet Explorer would be dominant forever; today it doesn’t even exist. There was a point when Firefox seemed entrenched on Windows; today it’s an afterthought. Today Chrome seems entrenched, as dominant as IE once was. Maybe not?