A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
This looks like an excellent—and free!—online event centred on privacy and safety. It’s got Eva PenzeyMoog, Robin Berjon and more!
View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.
I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Here’s a nifty little service from Zach: pass in a URL and it returns an image of the site’s icon.
Think of it as the indie web alternative to showing Twitter avatars.
What about a scarf or collar so the back of your neck prickles when somebody is talking about you on Twitter.
Or a ghost detector for homes, restaurants, etc that glows when someone is “visiting” in Google Maps/Facebook Pages or looking through a webcam? Maybe it would be better to control the air conditioning to produce a chill, or play barely audible infrasound, indications that there is a haunting in progress and the veil here is thin.
This is easily my favourite use of a machine learning algorithm.
Favicons are snitches.
A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.
Claire L. Evans on computational slime molds and other forms of unconvential computing that look beyond silicon:
In moments of technological frustration, it helps to remember that a computer is basically a rock. That is its fundamental witchcraft, or ours: for all its processing power, the device that runs your life is just a complex arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language. Smart rocks.
How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?
Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.
What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.
This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.
Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).
Now that all modern browsers support SVG favicons, here’s how to turn any emoji into a favicon.svg:
<svg xmlns="http://w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"> <text y=".9em" font-size="90"> 💩 </text> </svg>Useful for quick apps when you can’t be bothered to design a favicon!
A brief history of the manicule, illustrated with some extreme examples.
A look at the ubiquitous computing work that Bret Victor has been doing over the past few years at Dynamicland.
A bit of a tangent, but I love this description of reading maps:
Map reading is a complex and uniquely human skill, not at all obvious to a young child. You float out of your body and into the sky, leaving behind the point of view you’ve been accustomed to all your life. Your imagination turns squiggly blue lines and green shading into creeks, mountains, and forests seen from above. Bringing it all together in your mind’s eye, you can picture the surroundings.
The ellipsis is the new hamburger.
It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.
Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.
A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.