Posts by John Tornow

Slack:

Today we’re launching a new logo, as we start to refresh our look in general. We loved our old logo, and look, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided to evolve it.

The design work was done by Pentagram.

Change is hard, and I’ve been so used to seeing the familiar Slack icon for years that this will take some getting used to. The logo itself doesn’t bother me near as much as the awful dark purple background behind it.

Related:

• Pentagram’s ‘Range of Possibilities’ for Slack by John Gruber

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Rocks, bricks, and some driftwood pieces on the shores of Lake Erie in New York.

It’s a cold day in Texas and I’m missing the beach. Taken last fall during a business trip to Soho Beach House, Miami. A lovely place to begin working on a new project.

“Christmas trees” on the shores of Lake Erie near the city of Dunkirk, New York.

It's that time of year again for the annual Christmas tree trip. Some views from the tree farm in East Texas earlier this month.

Scenes from an early morning walk through New Orleans this summer.

Great new update to the app I spend more time using than anything else.

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It has been an interesting couple of months in the open source software licensing world. A few weeks ago, there was some controversy over Facebook’s use of a BSD + Patents license on its open source contributions. While this patent grant was not new, it has gained some publicity over its use as applied to React.

Adam Wolff at Facebook tried to clarify the issue a few weeks ago:

As our business has become successful, we’ve become a larger target for meritless patent litigation. This type of litigation can be extremely costly in terms of both resources and attention. It would have been easy for us to stop contributing to open source, or to do what some other large companies do and only release software that isn’t used in our most successful products, but we decided to take a different approach. We decided to add a clear patent grant when we release software under the 3-clause BSD license, creating what has come to be known as the BSD + Patents license. The patent grant says that if you’re going to use the software we’ve released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for patent infringement. We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility.

It seems reasonable when explained this way, but that didn’t stop many organizations from removing React from their future product development roadmaps.

Matt Mullenweg wrote about how the Wordpress team would no longer use React for its new ventures:

We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is and how we’re officially adopting it for WordPress, and encouraging plugins to do the same. I’ve been sitting on that post, hoping that the patent issue would be resolved in a way we were comfortable passing down to our users.

That post won’t be published, and instead I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

Then, last week Facebook released another update changing the license for React and other projects to the MIT license starting this week:

Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We’re relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don’t want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.

This is great news. I think the entire community was very surprised to see this change. This is a credit to the way the open source community should work, and it’s wonderful to see that Facebook is willing to be open minded and participate in what’s best for the community.

I spend a lot of time working on React-based projects for startups and larger companies so I’m happy to see that this should no longer be an issue.

Dan Frommer of Recode took some photos from the first keynote at Apple Park this week. Beautiful.

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AtF Spark is a font that allows for the combination of text and visual data to show an idea and evidence in one headline. This builds on the principle of Sparklines defined by Edward Tufte and makes them easier to use. Sparklines are currently available as plugins or javascript elements. By installing the Spark font you can use them immediately without the need for custom code.

This is lovely.

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Michael J. de la Merced and Oliver Strand, in the NYTimes:

Under the terms of the deal, Nestlé is acquiring 68 percent of Blue Bottle; the coffee company’s management and employees will own the rest. Neither side would disclose financial terms.

Although Blue Bottle is one of the most important players in the third-wave coffee sector, it has distinguished itself from its rivals in significant ways. It has spurned many of the hallmarks of high-end shops – barista competitions, lengthy travelogues about journeys to find the perfect small coffee farm – while emphasizing the aesthetics and experience of a well-prepared cup.

Blue Bottle has also helped drive trends within the industry, particularly in the case of cold-brew iced coffee.

The company’s approach has fueled enormous growth. Blue Bottle expects to nearly double its store count this year, to 55 outlets from 29. And it has continued to develop ready-to-drink products, as well as an online subscription business for its roasted beans.

How about with this new backing we get some stores in Texas?

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After yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone X, Apple posted some new Fall “WWDC” videos about how to design and build apps for the new phone.

The Human Interface Guidelines have also been updated:

Avoid explicitly placing interactive controls at the very bottom of the screen and in corners. People use swipe gestures at the bottom edge of the display to access the Home screen and app switcher, and these gestures may cancel custom gestures you implement in this area. The far corners of the screen can be difficult areas for people to reach comfortably.

Don’t mask or call special attention to key display features. Don’t attempt to hide the device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don’t use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas either.

Allow auto-hiding of the indicator for accessing the Home screen sparingly. When auto-hiding is enabled, the indicator fades out if the user hasn’t touched the screen for a few seconds. It reappears when the user touches the screen again. This behavior should be enabled only for passive viewing experiences like playing videos or photo slideshows.

The UI Design Resources have also been updated to include a Sketch file (or Photoshop if that’s your thing) with all of the new UI components for iPhone X.

Manton Reece, on last week’s A List Apart announcement:

It’s a good post, but I see his conclusion differently. The solution isn’t fewer link blogs, but more of them. By taking microblogging back from Twitter, we create a natural place for traditional blogs to grow. Indie microblogging is the gateway drug for long-form content.

To everyone reading Zeldman’s post about A List Apart and nodding your head, retweeting the link, clicking the like button… Dust off your blog and actually post about it. A better web is built one page at a time.

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Jeffrey Zeldman:

As A List Apart approaches its 20th anniversary–a milestone in independent, web-based publishing–we’re once again reimagining the magazine. We want your feedback. And most of all, we want you.

We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial. If you want to highlight local events or innovations, expand your skills, give back, or explore any other goal or idea, we’re here to support you with networking and backing from the community.

I’ve been following A List Apart for nearly 20 years now too. Time flies. Count me in.

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