Geeflow

Not in American college football, but in German pro soccer, someone shorted the stock of a team and subsequently tried to blow up the team with multiple bombs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_b...

I can't recommend spaced repetition enough. I use it for everything: Phone numbers, names, business knowledge, dungeon and dragons, ...

A different article[1] sums it up pretty well: "Anki makes memory a choice, rather than a haphazard event, to be left to chance."

[1] https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Reduced speed with degraded battery doesn't only happen for phones unfortunately. My Lenovo laptop is painfully slow when unplugged. I thought something is broken, but Lenovo told me it's because the battery is degraded. The consequences are similar as with phones: The battery can't be easily changed and the costs for letting it be changed by Lenovo are not worth it considering the age of the laptop. So I'll likely live with it until I'm annoyed enough to buy a new one.

I once built such a trial option myself. You could start a free trial (just within the app, no "native trial" involved) and then sign up for the paid plan with native in-app purchases once it ran out.

It got rejected by Apple. They insisted I use the native app store trial which is opt-out.

Actually, some people do.

There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is.

I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)

Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)

I wouldn't be much surprised. The amount of things people do _not_ notice is staggering. When I do usability tests there's almost always something that doesn't get noticed although I thought it obvious and/or important.

Personal anecdote: I managed to buy paper for my printer and only noticed upon arrival that it was the wrong size. The product photo looked right to be. I did not bother to check the details - or even the product title. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, regarding "if the person isn't drunk": There's a great short talk called "the user is drunk" which makes one much more sympathetic to such seemingly unexplainable comprehension fails that sometimes drive product designers mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk&feature=emb_titl...

Was able to log in... what a great nostalgia flash! :)

Sad to see how many links are broken now...

... and some, like postsecret.com, are surprisingly still live and active 15 years later.

To extend on your analogy a bit: Imagine working on that term paper on GitHub and then having your repo deleted. The odds of reproducing that information completely is zero. But there might still be some forks (related species) around. So it's pretty hard to wipe out everything.

"Sign in with Google" also fails. So this outage is taking quite a few otherwise unrelated third party apps with it.

Sounds reasonable - but I'd still prefer to stay away from people who are shedding the virus.

There is also a similar theory that cloth masks might have the unintended positive side effect of building immunity. They are not perfect, so the virus might still reach its target. But the viral load could be reduced enough that instead of infection it leads to immunity.

Hey everyone,

I’m happy to show this project to you after years of mostly lurking. :)

Too many people are walking through life, working on never-ending task lists, losing sight of the big picture and missing what’s really important to them. Are you constantly working on what’s most urgent instead of most important? End up where the circumstances take you instead of taking control of your own path? Keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again instead of actively working on improving things? Then Focality is here to help you!

I started building Focality while working a full-time job and then became a father. So I had plenty of time to battle-test it myself in demanding circumstances. ;) This is the tech stack I used:

  - React
  - Material UI 
  - AWS Cognito, AppSync, DynamoDB 
  - Capacitor to wrap it into native App containers (iOS & Android) 
  - RevenueCat for handling payments 
  - Sentry for detecting errors

The biggest challenge so far has been to get attention. I knew this space would be crowded, but it’s quite a bit harder than expected. It feels like a new competitor launches every day (probably is). Users have so many options that it is very hard to engage them to learn their needs.

The second biggest challenge has been the Apple bureaucracy/requirements. :)

On the positive side, I’m really impressed with how powerful the frameworks have become. A few years ago it would not have been possible for me to build a side-project for web, iOS & Android. Neither would it have looked that good without the help of a designer.

Cheers

Florian

P.S.: I’m also launching on Product Hunt today if anyone is interested: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/focality

My thoughts exactly. Location Sharing in Google Maps is a totally different use case.

Commercially it was probably a tough sell. Engagement metrics were probably abysmal - since you only need it in exceptional circumstances.

It's really sad though. This was one of the products that really stood out for me. Not just a gimmick, but something that can really make a difference. I wish Google had shown a bit more idealism and kept it around.

I also ran flash on a HTC Wildfire around 2010. Flash sucked and drained the battery. But it was great to be able to access flash content. At that time, I frequently stumbled across content that I could not access otherwise. I was very happy that I was able to access it on my device, despite the crappy flash experience.

Take that as a data point that Flash on day 1 would have been good at least for one user. :)

Apple's decision probably still benefited the ecosystem as a whole because it drove the adoption of flash replacements.

Podcast Addict is my favorite podcast app. I have been using it with great satisfaction for years. I hope that gets sorted out quickly.

Another aspect that I don't quite understand: The story claims that Google asks for the app to be published as a new download. And indeed the provided screenshot includes this request (in pretty small print). This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't Google be satisfied by just changing the existing app? Any ideas what the reason might be?

I believe this is one of those things that are really hard to understand unless you have experienced it first hand. Although I always knew how important prioritization is, I understand it way better since working on my resource-constrained side project. You often fail to appreciate just how many obviously good things you can't do because there are even more important things to do.

Or, to quote Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are."