Reading list

• Threads, perhaps aided by the perpetual demise of Twitter, was downloaded 100 million times on launch week. It just launched for us euro's this week. Here's the Pragmatic Engineer telling the real life story of the app development effort it took to make it all happen.
• The Source Type store has been live for a while now, continuously pushing quality goods. We ordered their latest book; Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice, by Ben Schwart, and look forward to reading it!!
• But what did the death of Twitter actually mean, and what is X now? In a series of articles, The Verge summarise and reflect on what we actually lost, and what we might have gained.
• Back in the early 2000's, Yahoo Pipes was defining the shape of things to come. Dive in the the early days of metaphorical plumbing and visual skeuomorphism in this Retool piece.

Design of the day

• Here are a bunch of fonts that are currently in progress over at the Llineto type foundry. We generally like the openness, and it's all presented in the awesome manner we've gotten used to from Lineto.
• Mozilla, the good guys of the internet, is out with an annual report, which also hints at things in the making. Some design cues were keenly following.
• Stripe, who are in the fortunate position of focusing it's "... Global Internet Economy", and certainly a fintech entity, represents an industry that is normally defined by booooring design. So when someone posted the Stripe Sessions 2024 page under the design section, this copywriter is working overtime to try to say something interesting about its design. Perhaps it's the UI, with the cards collapsing on scroll, perhaps it's just fresh for an industry that rarely innovates in this space. Perhaps we're looking at what everyone else will be copying going forward. You be the judge.

Tech of the week

• Wait, what. StyleX promises to provide the developer experience of CSS-in-JS libraries and bridge it with the performance and scalability of static CSS. Just like that, no mention of AI. Unbelievable. But seriously though, it's all very well explained here.
• Notion, on the other hand, now lets you ask questions to an AI bot that draws information from your own workspace. We've hired this guru, asking questions like "how to improve Feed" etc.
• In order for Threads to launch in the EU, there had to be an option to look inside without logging in. Now you can. Another interesting piece of information is its exploration into ActivityPub and the whole fediverse.
  

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