7 Things This Week [#16]
A weekly list of things I found interesting, delivered on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
- T-Mobile has a program to let people test out their service before making a complete switch. I love this idea! It’s so risky to switch carriers, even if you spend hours pouring over coverage maps. Allowing customers to test the service, on their device and with their workflows, without making a total commitment to switching is something I’d like to see all carriers do. Good on T-Mobile for leading the way here. Via Allison Johnson at *The Verge*(https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/29/22555810/t-mobile-test-drive-iphone-esim)
- Margaret Middleton shared recommendations for making places more welcoming to all with gender-inclusive signage on Twitter. The first and most obvious: a toilet icon for a bathroom. Why did we use person figures for those signs, anyway? These small changes make a big difference, and they always make me smile.
- On All Consuming this week, Noah and Adam reviewed Vacation sunscreen. While I can’t personally speak to its quality, I do love the website. It’s retro in an entertaining way — matching the parent company, Poolsuite, aesthetic. Check it out even if you have no interest in purchasing unknown sunscreen on the internet.
- It just seems punitive that Instagram has denied publishing from the iPad, even as they’ve enabled it on their website. A decade later and they’ve not made a native app for the device best suited for enjoying photos, and they have now actively denied it from valuable features on its website.
- I thought that Myke and Jason had a really well-considered conversation on Upgrade regarding the ramifications that Apple could face by both playing chicken with regulators on App Store policies and not giving ground to developer wishes. The legislation and sideloading discussion begins about 50 minutes into the episode.
- This app demo blows my socks off! Just by scanning a pile of Lego bricks with your phone, you can get tons of ideas of what can be built with them. The app spits out instructions and can guide you on finding the correct bricks within the pile. Camera and machine learning technology have come a long way to be possible at such speed on a mobile device. While I don’t have lego bricks to test it with, I wish that I did!
- I came across another fun project this week: iPod.js, made by Tanner Villarete. If you’re nostalgic for using an iPod, this website (when accessed from your phone) can get you pretty close to that sweet music-specific experience. Log in with your Apple Music or Spotify account, and you’re off to the races navigating through the iPod menus to select a playlist, album, artist, or song from your library. And don’t miss the fully-functional Brick game, which I used to play for hours on end. (See also: this website by Zane Kleinberg for Dashboard nostalgia.)
Thanks for reading! If you found these things interesting too, or have something exciting to share, please drop me a line on Twitter!