maguay

One of my favorite "you can just do things" experiences was one day thinking it'd be nice if our friend group had a group Christmas party ... and then just starting one. Kept it going five or so years, faded out after a while after people started taking turns and logistics piled up, but I'm proud of having pulled it off.

But man do they take a lot of time, money, and dedication to pull off well.

Author here, yikes, sorry about that. Going to go get that fixed.

Absolutely, but it came several years before MIME for example for formatted emails with attachments, and other things.

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).

Washing dishes, strangely, hits that for me. One of the reasons I've never found dishwashers to be worth it.

There are dozens of us!

I'm living in Thailand, the self-declared Land of Smiles, and ... it's not very smiley.

I visit Japan, which social media seems to say is a terrible place to work and make friends, and it strikes me as much more friendly and outgoing. Same when I'm in the States, where I find it far easier to strike up a random conversation and enjoy the nods on the sidewalk.

Somehow I think the core differences is wherever you spend the most time, the gilding wears off and there's a core discontent underneath everything everywhere if you stay long enough.

I'm building a writing app for perfectionists: Reproof (https://reproof.app/)

I've been a writer for over a decade and a half. I'll often rewrite intros and other sections a half-dozen times, or cut quotes and bits that don't quite fit, only later to wonder if an earlier take was better.

I built Reproof to solve this. Every paragraph is versioned, so you can rewrite paragraphs and switch between the takes to see which sounds better. There's a clipping pane on the bottom, to cut things and save them just in case you find a spot to include them later. And there are a bunch of writer-focused features: Write and copy text in either rich text or Markdown, open two documents side-by-side and find/replace between both, selective find/replace to edit only some of the results, command palette to search across everything, daily versioned backups, and more. And lots more to come.

Nearly every other writing app is a digital piece of paper with linear paragraphs. Reproof instead lets you explore the best way to write what you're trying to say.

Ahhh this too. Love flights without WiFi.

Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.

And then you have Swatch, making cheaper versions of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, as almost a licensed dupe (though since both are owned by the same parent company, it's almost more of an iPhone SE to an iPhone Pro comparison, in a way).

This ... means the page could render a QR code for humans while letting bots see the actual URL. That is incredibly cool.

Author here: That is true, and it's true in perhaps an even more nefarious way than Google's Instant Answers that showed direct quotes from your site. Both kill clickthroughs, but the former at least let you speak in your own voice without smoothing out an average answer from multiple sites.

It's an increasingly hard game to win, with diminishing returns in clickthroughs from "winning." Which makes it all the more crucial to write stuff your followers want to read, and to grow that following person by person, even if it's far slower to start than traditional SEO was.

I've always wanted a writing app built around experimentation, where you could write multiple takes on a paragraph then swap them in and out to see how each sounds in context. That, and I wanted a writing app that treated both Markdown and Rich Text as first class citizens, with side-by-side documents for notes alongside a draft, full keyboard control, and more.

And so I built it: https://reproof.app/

It's taken forever (never reinvent the text editor, they say, and they're right) but it's finally at the point where a handful of us are using it for daily writing, and it's just about ready to launch.