Yo! I’m back with another week of discoveries and interesting topics for the second edition of Discovelist!

This time, featuring a squeaky clean new website, a very complete blog and the comments section. You even get automated emails and can (un)subscribe yourself! But we’ll get to that…

WWDC 2024 hype

Last Tuesday, Apple announced the 2024 edition of its annual World Wide Developer Conference, where they usually discuss major OS updates and unveil some hardware. There are lots of hints indicating that Apple is going to go full on A.I. this year. A surprising change of tone considering they’ve historically been very quiet on even using the term, instead using more technically accurate nicknames like “Machine learning”. There are also more and more bits of new iOS design that resemble visionOS’ design, meaning Apple could completely redesign iOS to go in that new direction. Plus, since the recent E.U. Digital Markets Act and the ongoing United States v. Apple trial, Apple’s planning on giving iPhones access to RCS messaging, application sideloading and alternative app stores with iOS 18. This ought to be great wins for consumers in the E.U., and eventually the U.S. if they can win their case.

Fresh finds

How A.I. Chatbots Become Political is an excellent opinionated article from the N.Y. Times on how Google Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. are fine-tuned to reflect or negate political bias, how they’ve become politicized and, according to some, too “woke”. The article’s data comes from a paper from an A.I. researcher, and features a simple 10-question quiz to situate your political bias (which, some in the comments have criticized for being inaccurate). Overall, I think it offers some good think points about politics entering tech and how it could impact society.

Let’s move on to less politics and more code and fun stuff, such as this JavaScript function which allows you to debug any website in 3D by viewing its layers and everything. It’s made by Orion Reed and you can play around with it on your browser’s Console or as a bookmarklet.

This week, project tracker/management app Linear released this banger article about their new UI, featuring lots of concept design, and really insightful information on how they redid the user experience by redoing their navigation, clarifying every many, etc. It is an article definitely worth reading if you’re into UI and UX.

Week highlights

Last week, I installed the Fitbit app and wrote my opinions on it. My main worry was about sending all of my health data to Google, and how I wanted to find an open-source steps counter. Introducing: Forest, which is everything I could’ve asked for. The app features a native Material You look and feel, and has this very rewarding system of planting trees in a virtual space when you reach your daily steps goal.

It’s like Forest, the homonym app for productivity, except it’s for tracking your steps.

Moving on to games, Discord announced last week that they were opening Activities to developers. Alongside this massive launch comes the App Pitches 2024 contest, where all competitors are tasked to come up with an original, professional, addictive and innovative game. Contest winners win $30,000, and category winners up to $15,000. I’m already on board, trying my best to figure out the Discord SDK with an amazing idea I won’t disclose just yet. If there is anybody else building for this contest, I’d be thrilled to know!

Vocabulary voyage

This week, fewer words are featured, because I didn’t take the time to jot them all, but I found some pure gold:

Fiddlestick (noun)

1. a violin bow
2. something of little value
3. fiddlesticks (interjection): synonym of “nonsense”

dinkus (noun)

typographical symbol (* * *) commonly used as an intentional info removal or section breaks in printed literature. Wikipedia

Yes I too was astonished knowing such a silly word existed for such a fancy-looking thing.

On the grill

This week, I’ve been all about finishing the website redesign, building the infrastructure for the blog, including the finalized comments section (and its own page) and newsletter system (you can subscribe right away down below, on the website!)

I actually plan on writing down a full blog article, posting some tidbits of my craft on Mastodon and perhaps start some frenetic TikTok tutorials and tips, so stay tuned for all that!

Here, I’ll just state the obvious and share some favorite screenshots comparing the old & new clembs.com:

The blog was essentially just the design pages, extended and reworked so they could have categories, dedicated pages, more SEO tags relevant for blog articles, a more blog-friendly header layout, and so on… A lot of old, ugly code was trashed away in the process too!

After a few months in the making, and probably a dozen of design and UX iterations, and countless reconsiderations regarding the sole purpose of a comment section, I’ve finally finished it!

It is pretty basic in and of itself, as it only features up & down voting a la Reddit, and threaded replies, but under-the-hood there is a lot of specifics to prevent abuse, ensure smooth logins, restrict accounts on the fly, grant badges automatically, etc. Not to mention all of the scrapped features like comment pinning, comment categories, media embeds, markdown support, project mentions, user profile pages, filtering and sorting, etc.

Again, this update is massive, I’m barely scratching the surface here, and it’s not even finished yet. I’ll be thrilled to share all of the specifics in a blog post when the right time comes!

Community corner

I’m once again passing down the mic to you guys to share your discoveries, projects, and everything else in between!

Shinyhero36 (@Shinyhero36) is developing a web app to start polls, cleverly named Svote:

My very first nearly finished project.

You can find the source code on github: https://github.com/Shinyhero36/svote

Looking forward to your feedback.

Carrotfarmer shared a Super Mario 64 ROM hack titled SM64 The Green Stars:

yooo i recently got into sm64 romhacks and they’re genuinely so good

im playing one called Super Mario 64: The Green Stars

ITS SO GOOD!!!!!!!!

it’s genuinely a breath of fresh air, everything looks good af. it’s good. i like it. i recommend 10/10

If you wish your work or something you particularly enjoyed this week was featured here, LMK in the comments, on Mastodon (@[email protected]) or via email ([email protected]).

See ya next week!

Thank you so much for reading!! Since I have had all week to prepare this issue, as opposed to on the spot on the first one, I had way too much stuff and didn’t include everything (like my review of Penny’s Big Breakaway, solid 9.5/10 to me, or Quiet on Set, a docuseries tracing back Nickelodeon superdirector Dan Schneider’s sexual abuse history).

LMK what you thought of this issue in the comments or wherever else! Clembs, out.