Feed Weekly #200 (!)
A short applause for issue #200. We made it this far for one simple reason: smirk. Most of our colleagues had zero confidence in the content team to deliver more than a couple of issues, and now they have to live with our smug faces 4 ever. So long suckers, see you on the tail end of internet fame! If you've read these 200 issues, you'd be a lot smarter than you look right now. Also, thanks to our solid external audience of at least three people. We couldn't have done it without you. Smirk galore, read on for our weekly list of things we found useful and/or interesting in what has been another ridiculous week for the design+tech industry and the world as a whole.
Reading list
- Let's start off with a little state of things from Google I/O, and their list of the 20 most impactful changes to web UI to come out of 2023.
- Some might have picked up on memes of Sundar Pichai endless treak of using "AI" in every sentence. Here he is, talking through his perspectives at The Verge.
Design of the week
- While absolutely everyone in the tech and design are talking about AI, one very notable exception does not. Apple is doubling down og usability and privacy, while Google is in a dead spiral/stare contest with Microsoft and OpenAI. Check out their rundown on what they're working on in relation to Cognitive Accessibility.
- Having googled "Antipodian", we are anticipating Counter Forms typographical venture launching in a mere two days time.
- Full auto foundry is a workshop based open-source type foundry that explores how processes of automation can influence the design of typefaces.
- Aww, things have gone to clean and it's about time to bring back the magical world of rasters. Stockhaster rasterises your images with numerous "intelligent patterns" and exports a png at the end of it.
- Yes. Someone, namely @JohnPhamous explains the "prediction cone" in nested menu interaction. Love it.
Tech of the week
- 1Password, once a great password vault, now an exploded myriad of ridiculousness, but still almost unavoidable if you want a quick solution for a whole team, yet sucky because everyone ends up having to write down something physically anyways, by that defeating the whole point in having a SECURE system in the first place, then having users spend a lot of time figuring out what version they're on twice (once for computers, once for mobile) and wether or not someone's paid for the damn version (inserting chill pill) is here to save the day once more, just with passkeys instead of password. In preparation for users to whip up their digital wallets, 1Password is asking developers to start utilising their system with just a few lines of code. Look, it's most likely great, but it's called Passage. Hopefully the last one.
- While the tech world ponders halting AI development in order to assess the ethics, OpenAI is elaborating the service side, with this new app that'll sync your conversations and support voice input right from you favourite pocketable device.
- Here's an engineering guide based on lessons learned from researching and creating Large Language Model (LLM) prompts for production use cases, courtesy of Brex.
- Google's AI Test Kitchen reminds us of the early days of Chrome, with the Chrome Labs experiments that tended to stirr up quite the buzz. There aren't a lot of demos there quite yet, but that's also a good time to get started. Check out MusicLM, which allows you to describe a musical idea and then have it made for you.
- So let's say you already have generated an image of sorts, but you'd wished the car was slightly more angled, or someone's gaze was slightly more to the right. Enter another insane capability coming out of the generative image manifold: Drag Your GAN. Seriously impressive and useful stuff.
That's it for #200!