Anton Maliauski Anton Maliauski

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There used to be so many cool, beautiful phones, but today there are only identical “black mirrors”.

Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman (2005 year)
Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman (2005 year)
Yes, if you compare smartphones, you can find better and worse designs. A black rectangle, after all, can be made with rounded corners, or with another; a matte or glossy case; play with the camera block, etc.

Smartphone Apple iPhone 16 (2024)
Apple iPhone 16 (2024)

I’m more about innovative design. I’m trying to understand what attracts me to those small phones with buttons and joysticks, whether they are needed today or are they a step back for the sake of nostalgia, and not real convenience. Or maybe a new form is needed, but what kind?

All these beauties have moved to a virtual environment, and the smartphone has become a thin client that is required to interfere as little as possible. Perhaps this is good.

I was looking for a font in Google and at first I didn’t quite understand what was going on. My first thought was “Fuck, the fonts are gone!” Then a pause… Stop! I’m in Google’s search results. Really? Exactly!

If you’re looking for a popular font, it will replace its fonts in the results with the one you’re looking for. Take a look at the example of the georgia or courier font.

Google results for georgia font
Google results for georgia font
Google results for courier font
Google results for courier font

Now I’m sitting here thinking whether this is good or bad. When you expect such behavior, it’s good and useful, but when you don’t, it’s “Help!” and “What’s going on?!” Why make the user panic?

From series The web is back
  1. Open standards, instead of subordinating platform standards
  2. It's time to take back the web

I remember the web like this (showing a small network). It was a cozy place where we would go in the evening to read the news, our favorite forum, or the blog of another stranger with a mysterious nickname.

The Internet didn’t scream, didn’t try to attract our attention1, didn’t jump at us from around the corner. It was a network (web) - protocols, devices that served the purpose of uniting us.

Typically lists are sorted alphabetically. How to be first on the list? You either need to be born with a name starting with the letter “A” (DONE!), or come up with a nickname, site name or something else starting with… a symbol (!@#).

Example from my RSS aggregator. I subscribed to the blog arseny.page and it immediately proudly took first place. Of course! I don’t know if the author did this intentionally or not, but it’s funny. By the way, I’m still in the top three (and yes, I signed myself up - of course)! And I finally understood why 37signals at one time returned the name . ;-)

ALT
Screenshot from my RSS reader - NetNewsWire

P.S. Judging by the screenshot, it’s been a while since I watched what’s new!

From series Robot vs human
  1. Misconception: AI will take over all the mental routine, and we will create meanings

Dmitry writes in Threads:

In my opinion, after the rise of AI as a technology, the main task of a person will be to correctly and time after time determine his point B. And this is key

I answer:

Recipe: If you add the acronym “AI” to the text, it becomes a little smarter! 😆People have always determined (in a certain number of attempts exactly correctly) point B and will continue to do so. Or are you saying that AI will finally work, and people will have nothing left to do as soon as point B is placed on the map (see. write the correct hint)?

From series The web is back
  1. Open standards, instead of subordinating platform standards
  2. It's time to take back the web

Today, while working on his Space , I decided to check what the preview of the notes 1 in Meta would look like. But he changed his mind after he saw a “closed door” in the form of a login page. My page Facebook I have long been closed and I don’t want to check I can enter using the login and password or I need to restore the account first (or it will recover after entering the debugger).

Login page for the Meta repost debugger
Login page for the Meta repost debugger

But we are talking about something else. More recently, every platform came up with and imposed on us its standards. As an example, AMP from Google or the same pages from Facebook (I don’t even remember what they called). They try to introduce such standards in any direction of technology, because it is profitable to manage the standard and have dependent users.

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