FeedCity

Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!

https://ti.to/clearleft/ux-london-2025

The Knicks got beat last night. And the game seemed so won. When Brunson sat down in the fourth period because he was in foul trouble, the Knicks and a huge run that put them up by 17 with less than 3 minutes remaining. My numbers might be slightly off. Then they brought Brun...

Stephen Hackett throwing some cold water on the io products hype:

To be clear, the failure of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device with no screen. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.

I don’t agree that the Rabbit R1 was a failure. It fell short of expectations, but that team is still churning away. A new kind of AI-first device is still more likely to come from someone new, without the smartphone baggage.

Also sprach Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. Or in English, thus spoke Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Language and thinking are intertwined. I’m not saying there’s anything to the strong ...

You might’ve noticed there’s a new status line in Micro.blog’s publishing progress, providing a little more context for what the platform is doing. I’ll continue to tweak this so the progress is more useful.

Almost lost in all the OpenAI hype this week was that MCP is now supported in OpenAI’s responses API. MCP was a big part of Microsoft’s keynote and at Google I/O.

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

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One of my favourite parts of working with the web is the developer tools available. With browser developer tools, we can inspect individual elements on a page. We can even move, edit, and remove elements. We can change styles, inspect the values of scripts, and more. There ar...

I’m not convinced that the designer of a $10,000 gold watch (now obsolete), who gets driven around in the back of a Bentley, and who spends his spare time in coffee shops ‘inventing the future’ with the likes of Sam Altman, is capable of designing products for the rest of us.

Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.

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Om Malik blogging about today’s video of Jony Ive and Sam Altman:

The slick video harkens back to Ive’s glory days at Apple when he would talk about the chips, designs, and aluminum on videos extolling the iPhone, the watch, and the laptops. In a way, what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.

What stood out to me in the announcement about io is that there will be a “family” of devices. Maybe one without a screen, a couple with small screens? I assume voice will be a big part of this, but also perhaps not. It could truly surprise us.

Wednesday session

I love playing with code in the browser. I often create blank HTML files to explore ideas and to learn. I like experimenting with CSS features I have never used in a new file so I can learn the fundamentals and explore. I can start from a blank slate and see how my code – and...

I have been using my website editing bookmarklet for the last few months to edit several websites. I can click the Edit bookmarklet and, if the page I am viewing has a rel=edit link, link anchor text that indicates an edit link, or is a page on my website, the corresponding e...

I'm changing the direction of my blog.

If you’ve enjoyed my recent series about the open social web, great! There were four parts, which I think are collectively some of my best work: What the future of Bluesky might look like How Mastodon could be the future of online communities What I’d do if I was running m...

I mentioned Chris Lydon's weblog for the ears and got an email back, and this made me think some more. We need someone to do a canvas of how intellectuals use ChatGPT-like systems to advance their research and creativity, or just for learning or fun. It's the same kind of op...

Remember intranets?

Pepperidge Farm remembers

A great talk by Matthias on what you can do with web standards today!

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