One of the best things about Android, the world’s most popular operating system for mobile devices, has always been its customizability. For the truly adventurous, that’s often meant ditching your manufacturer’s preinstalled software and installing a custom ROM, essentially a third-party operating system. In recent years, it feels like the popularity of custom ROMs has declined as manufacturers and carriers have made it harder to install them, and improvements to Android have made the advantages of a custom ROM less obvious.
This won’t mean much to many, but there seems to be a small number of people stymied by a weird problem: some Snap apps won’t work on Linux. You install a Snap app, and it might work the first time you launch it. But every subsequent time you launch the app, nothing happens. There’s no error message or indication that anything is wrong; your app just won’t start. If you run snap run appname in your terminal, you won’t see anything, either, but the app still won’t launch.
Hey email launched in mid-June to generally positive reviews, but coverage of the product itself was largely overshadowed by a fight between HEY and Apple regarding HEY’s monetization strategy.1 I’ve been using HEY now for about a month, and it’s a fantastic product, great enough to justify its $99 per year price tag (and I hate subscription apps). So what exactly is HEY, and why is it worth paying for email when there are so many free email products out there?
About a month ago, I wrote about developing a static website with server-side Javascript. As I discovered, there are a lot of advantages to a static site. But one of the disadvantages to the lack of a database is that it isn’t obvious how to make the site searchable. With no database to pull from, generating search results can be a challenge.
Rather than pull search results from a database and generating results pages with server-side scripts, static sides tend to opt for storing results in a single file or external database and relying on AJAX to submit queries of the search index.
I’ve experimented with server-side JavaScript in the past, but I finally had an opportunity to dig in and actually build a website with it. I have a lot of experience with JavaScript in general; one of my major professional projects over the past few years was developing a complex web application entirely in JavaScript. For a number of reasons, I had to work only with vanilla JavaScript (no frameworks or libraries like jQuery).
As I’ve continued to use Ubuntu as my Linux distro of choice on Dell XPS 15 laptop, I’ve made some modifications to my setup. I’m describing some of them here.
I recently upgraded my primary computer from the great but aging Thinkpad to a new Dell XPS 15 laptop. So far, I love the Dell, and a full review of that will come a little later. But now it’s time for a post reviewing the process of getting Linux up and running on my new machine.
Today, Google launched a major refresh to the design of Google Calendar for the web. The update is long overdue, but it’s extremely well-executed and looks stunning. Sometimes you just look at a design and it feels right. This is one of those. After using the new design for a while, I’d imagine it’ll be tough to go back to the old one.
The new Google Calendar design The design uses space beautifully and implements the bold colors, layering, and subtle animations of the material design standard.
Just a few days ago, I wrote about setting up my GNOME desktop on Linux. Unfortunately, the current state of play in the GNOME world is that it’s just really hard to make the desktop look polished. While there are a lot of themes that look nice, I’ve found a minor issues with almost all of them. I just couldn’t settle on a combination that satisfied me. That may change when Ubuntu adopts GNOME as its default desktop environment; Ubuntu is one of the most-used Linux distros, and it has an active community that creates a lot of great stuff.
2017 is the year of the bezel-less smartphone. Ever since the LG Prada was released in May 2007, capacitive touchscreens have become the dominant smartphone interface. Apple popularized them with the original iPhone, and now they’re ubiquitous. But the touchscreen has typically been borderd by unsightly bezels. That started to change this year.
Well, it really started last year. Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi launched the Mi Mix in November 2016. It was hard to get in the United States, but pretty much everyone thought it was beautiful, and a stunning innovation in the stale slab-like smartphone design that’s been essentially unchanged since 2007.
