I've been lucky enough to work on iPhone apps since 2009, starting a small iOS application development shop right after college. Throughout my time working to build a small studio, the work of the Iconfactory was always something to aspire to. Along with companies like Panic and The Omni Group, they have helped define what makes the Apple ecosystem so special.
Nice post from Cameron Banga on working with the IconFactory to get a sick new icon for his Bluesky client, Skyscraper.
The IconFactory is a hell of a team. They've been around since the 90s and you've probably seen their work whether you realize it or not — they've done everything from the Windows XP icons to a lot of indie apps, and even made quite a few of their own apps like Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, and a ton of others.
I bought a pixel art portrait from them a year or two ago and I was super happy with it — and it looks like they're still offering them on their website to this day.
So many people are turning to AI slop for their app and icon design these days because it's so cheap and easy, but there's no comparing that trash to human-made art.
ⓘ This is not a paid promotion; I just really like the IconFactory, and smaller (human) teams like them are struggling in the age of AI-everything. If you can afford it, when it comes to hand-made vs something a bucket of microchips can shit out, always go team human.
One can debate the merits of Beta Minecraft. But, it is unlikely that our elderly zoomer ever experienced it. If he did, it was long after the vanished springtime of his life. In general, youthful zoomers did not grow up with personal computers. If we had one, it was probably a locked down school Chromebook. Far more people played Minecraft on consoles or on Pocket Edition. And these are very different games from Beta.
I love this! It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly. As an aging millennial, most of the retro games I've fallen in love with over the years are things that were never on my radar as a kid. We had a NES console with a pretty good selection of games in the 90s, and while Super Mario Bros 1-3 still hold a nostalgic place in my heart, my favorites today are the ones I never had. Castlevania, Bonk's Adventure, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, isometric Sega Genesis games like Light Crusader and Landstalker, and other classics I just never played until adulthood like Secret of Mana and Fire Emblem. The first time I ever saw Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was on the PSP and I wasn't that impressed. Then, years later, I played the original version front to back on PCEngine CD and it instantly became one of my all time faves. There's this raw charm and character you get with older games. Just because the shiny new one looks more polished and adds a bunch of extra stuff, it's not automatically better, you know?
The beta years were definitely the golden age for Minecraft, full stop. It was simpler and more limited in the way of blocks, so you had to get a little more creative, but that also means it wasn't overwhelming like it can get these days. It still ran like shit if you didn't have a higher spec PC, but it was a walk in the park compared to how resource intensive the later versions have become. I could at least play it on my old plastic MacBook with all the graphics settings cranked down back in the day. And best of all, it wasn't owned by a megacorporation yet. It was just a solid indie game that came out when I was a teenager — and that's some true nostalgia for me.
Gen Z kids flocking to the beta version is a lot like my love of retro console games that came before my time. It somehow feels a little sentimental, but more for a simpler time in general than simply reminiscing on the good ol' days.
For what it's worth, the folks on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft have determined 1.7.3 beta to be the sweet spot.
I was there in the early days of phone apps. I built stuff for Symbian, BlackBerry, even the bloody Palm Pilot! The central problem with apps has always been that they are hard to update. Every new bit of functionality - or even a new page - needs to be tested on a thousand devices. Once done, it takes an age to distribute to users. The only way to solve that is to have the app dynamically pull in new functionality from a remote resource. At which point, you've reinvented the Web browser!
Sometimes I still daydream of a world where Firefox OS actually caught on and didn't die a horrible, premature death. I don't think the term "progressive web app" had even been coined yet, but that's essentially what your apps would've been. From what I understand, anyway. I have like four apps on my phone that aren't stock. Everything else I use lives in Safari. That was always the whole point of smartphones for me; a thing with a fully functional web browser that lets you carry the entire internet around in your pocket.
I came across this neat blogroll web app earlier today. You can add each website manually or import an OPML file from your RSS feed — pretty much what I was trying to mimic with my old blogroll, only it looks really slick and it's much easier to manage. On the paid version, you can style it however you want but I'm just using the free one right now because it does everything I need it to do. Some of the links are a little wonky though; I'm getting an error in Safari for random sites:
Safari can't open the page.
The error was: "Navigation was blocked
by Cross-Origin-Opener-PolicyI think it's because I embedded the HTML directly on my blog and it doesn't jive well with Leaflet, so I just made it an external link in my nav. It's a pretty cool little widget nonetheless.
That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston, which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.
I wanna buy this but I have three more new books to finish on my kindle before I can justify buying another one 🤪