LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #34:

THE INTERNET OF THINGS STILL DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY

_“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”

~ Arthur C. Clarke_

Designing without cliché

Headspace is a popular website and mobile app that lets people explore the concepts of meditation and mindfulness by guided meditations. I use headspace on and off, and always found the branding of both the company as well as the app itself to be really excellent. It does not use any imagery that comes to mind when thinking about meditation - you know, monks, and chakras, and mandalas and that stuff. Instead, it uses whimsical, funny and cuddly characters in everyday situations to help us understand what mindfulness can do for us in our everyday life.

Fast Company ran an interesting interview with Anna Charity, head of design at Headspace.

Well worth a read if you want to design without cliché.

The Web Design Museum

Want to reminisce about the good ole days of the web? Then have a look around at the web design museum. Check out Apple’s old websites and see if they really look like you remembered them. Apple’s websites have always been benchmarks in clean design and aesthetics, but if you look at their 2001 site, … I don’t know.

Compare that website, that is merely 17 years old, with the iconic designs of companies like Olivetti, Braunor visual designers like Bruno Munari, you can’t help but notice how badly web design ages. All the schmaltz of the candy bar tabs and menus, too much clutter huddled together (and in 2001, that was a lot of white space!) makes it look so dated.

Is Evernote in trouble?

Source: Unknown/Multiple (New Yorker maybe?)

Evernote is a note taking app that has once been the darling of the startup scene. After some rougher times and questionable business decisions like issuing “digitally enabled” Moleskin notebooks or bags literally no-one needed, it seemed to get its senses back together with a software update that finally raised the quality of the app to a more modern standard (even though the change they highlighted most was a logo update).

But now, four C-Level executives left the company practically at the same time, which is never a good sign of company health or outlook.

For me, that might spell trouble. Evernote is so ingrained in nearly all of my workflows that it basically is my operating system. I don’t know what I would do if Evernote ceases to exist or dramatically changes its offering.

I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens. Jumping ship to a new platform seems mighty premature to me.

How’s your innovation doing lately?

Source

According to some research, the inefficient use of developer hours will cost the british economy roughly 100 billion USD over the next decade. Main reason: Developers are tied down by maintaining their previous work (now called “legacy system”) instead of writing new code. Around 17 hours / week are used by developers to maintain or support existing IT systems. And fight a fight or two with the IT department, I would assume.

That’s a pretty impressive number: Around half of your developers time is wasted on things that have little to nothing to do with their jobs. No wonder most companies struggle at keeping a high innovation output going.

Amazon as a hardware company, data protection and the always-on microphone

Source: Product HuntWhen the GDPR entered into force earlier this year, a lot of people  thought this will be the starting point for a new way to design digital products and services. “Privacy by Design” was a common theme, and some commentators like Seth Godin (whose ideas I highly respect) even thought that these new data protection laws will change the way marketing works forever.

Fast-forward a few months, and what the GDPR has left us with are annoying “cookie notification” bars we click away as soon as we see them.

More proof that data protection is not the top-priority of the industry is Amazons latest announcement of multiple new Alexa-driven products: It seems like Amazon is betting heavily on hardware and voice-activiation. The funny thing is: All those devices pose an immediate threat to your privacy - Never forget that all of them have microphones that are on_all the time_- yet data protection or privacy was not mentioned once during the whole presentation.

Number Palindromes

Do you know what a Palindrome is? Of course you do. And in case you forgot: A palindrome is a word or sentence that can be read in both directions. For example,“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” But palindromes can also be numbers. For example, 194.491 is a palindromic number.

Here’s a fun fact that has just recently been proven: You can construct any number (okay, any integer) by adding three palindromic numbers together. For example, 2018 is the sum of 2002, 11 and 5.

This website lets you play around with the numbers to test it for yourself.

The proof (if you don’t trust anyone): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06208.pdf

Don’t mess with a Philosopher

This is Voltair. Looks like a nice guy, but was a fierce debater and could deliver an epic burn even on his death bead. SourceAs Voltaire was lying in his death bead, a visiting priest demanded he renounced Satan. Voltaire - a sharp thinker even in his last minutes - replied: “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”

Thank you for reading this edition of Let’s Be Fwends.

The days are now shorter, the leaves are turning brown, and we’re saying good-bye to a nice, hot, and long summer. High-fives to the Earth for keeping turning around the sun and itself! It wouldn’t be the same without her.  🍂