Is this big news? No. Probably not. There aren’t that many new features that are going to blow your socks off – but too many people use Google Chrome and this is a great opportunity to give Firefox a try!
Firefox are working to make their app faster, better, and offer more privacy protecting features. And, whilst they don’t get everything right, they’re a better company to support than Google.
It could be very unlikely that you’re using Matrix to message others, but it’s a nice little decentralised and end-to-end encrypted way of messaging friends and family. Two key things I look for in a messenger service.
I run my own Matrix server because I’m apparently a nerd. This means if you have a Matrix account too, you can message me on @matt:gossip.land – but you need an app to do so.
(If I know you in person and you want to give it a try, get in touch and I’ll hook you up with an account on my server)
Cinny describes itself as being “a pleasant experience because the overall look” and that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. The app isn’t doing anything special – it offers many, or even less features, than other Matrix apps – but what it does, it does well.
And that’s everything. All I have to tell you today is that Cinny is a small, useful app offering a clean and simple messaging experience.
Back in 2011, I had a concept for a videogame website. In a nutshell, it could be described as “IMDB for games” – but had a bunch of extra features to make it “better” and also a lot better than the only existing competitor at the time, MobyGames.
It was the following year that I shared the idea with Opera Software colleague and friend, Jon Dubielzyk, who suggested we should make it. And so through 2012/13 we worked on the site. A lot.
Although we made the website twice – in some form or other – we never actually got around to publishing the website to the public. We were attempting too much, we possibly lacked the technical knowledge to build the site properly at the time, and I guess the world just had other plans for us.
Jon went to work for Google in London, then moved to Australia. Half the fun of working on the site was working with Jon. He’s very talented and a very nice guy. My heart wasn’t into working remotely and I’d given up on the idea of Game ID ever happening.
2022 – Game ID is out now!
This week, If you go to the App Store on iOS, you can download the Game ID app. This is a brand new take on the original concept made by Jon and his friend Darren O’Neill.
It has some core features of the original Game ID website, but is streamlined and done well. You can create lists, rate games, and read the latest video game news.
I’m thrilled for Jon that he’s revisited Game ID and got something out of the door and into the app store. It looks great – Darren and Jon have done a lovely job on the app.
So, download the app today, follow @gameidapp on twitter, and start rating your favourite games!
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
And it’s literally that. Wiby is a vast collection of sites that were or look like they were built in 1999, but many of them are still maintained today.
Like most search engines, there’s a bunch of commands you can add to your searches to tweak results. Details on the settings page. For those that don’t really know what they are looking for, there’s a Surprise Me! option which takes you to a random site in the search index.
And if you wanted to use it as your default search, adding !g or !b to the start of your search will kick you over to Google or Bing.
I’ve found it useful to use a few times when wanting to explore the web and my commercial search engine of choice is just giving me results to the walled-gardens of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, eBay, Reddit, etc.
A search for the private cryptocurrency ‘Zcash’ brought up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity which doesn’t rank in the first few pages for the same query on the big engines.
This person who runs Android Arts seems to sketch out concepts for video game consoles, and now I want a Sega Cube.
How about “the most complete set of information about goat milk” thanks to Everything Goat Milk?
Wiby really makes me feel like there are people on the web still carving out their own hobbyist spaces – something which I thought was lost to the closed groups and subreddits of big corporate sites.
A few weeks back I ordered some oslo.town stickers from moo.com and as soon as they came, started applying those tacky little dots to various parts of Oslo.
It didn’t take long before all 200 were stuck up and my pockets were empty.
Hopefully, come the new year, I’ll order a lot more and continue to subtly advertise my little social network for Oslo.
The site has very few daily active users, but that’s fine by me. Especially since the site is connected to the fediverse, which already contains millions of users.