Omar Rizwan @rsnous Twitter profile

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Omar Rizwan

7 years

⭐️ I'm releasing Screenotate 2.0, my Mac/Windows screenshot+OCR+context app: When you take a screenshot, it recognizes text inside + the originating URL, then saves it as a self-contained HTML file for later search

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

🗄 TabFS: mount your browser tabs as a filesystem

TabFS

A browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.

omar.website

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 months

inventing a new lossless compression algorithm for screenshots that identifies all fonts and GUI elements in the screenshot, checks that it can now reproduce the screenshot in a pixel-perfect way, then just stores that semantic data

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 year

"A number of readers of the K&R C 2nd edition book believed that pointers and arrays are the same, due to the non-optimal pagination."

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 year

i want 'programmers looking down on spreadsheets' discourse but like the opposite, like spreadsheet people looking down on programmers 'how can programmers stand not seeing the concrete data they're operating on' 'how can programmers tolerate not being able to live edit code'

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

but why 5??

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 month

it reminds me of Yoshiki's JSON demo -- the concept that most software is equivalent to a spreadsheet plus some fine-tuned styling

Chess.com

@chesscom

2 months

wish there was a better way to play chess online 😵‍💫

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

i always assumed the Bézier of Bézier curves was some 19th-century French mathematician, but it turns out he was a CAD and automotive engineer in the 60s

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

8 years

WTF: "one of the civil engineering profs wrote soil simulations in postscript"

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

idk

Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

idea: ssh into your browser tab and get a REPL

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 months

there's something Edward Tufte or Magic Ink-adjacent about this -- the thesis that information design on computers/phones has gone too far in the direction of interactivity, hiding too much, & there should be a return to a more information-dense print design ethos

Patrick Collison

@patrickc

6 months

I wish digital maps had a setting to increase label density by a factor of 10+, for a perspective like the road atlases of yore. We manufacture these amazing high-resolution displays but then render maps in crayon.

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

@saramagenheimer I like the idea that your square gets bigger the less you talk, so eventually the screen is dominated by huge silent faces

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

8 years

"The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise…"

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

"… we realized that we had to rethink what we meant by 'serving a function.'"

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

🌟 Announcing Screenotate 3 for Mac! New version of my OCR app, which steps in every time you take a screenshot & recognizes and saves the text (plus the original URL, window title, …) Now you can also copy the recognized text straight to clipboard:

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

i fear and resent scrolling (e.g. scrolling way up to see chat history) b/c i know application developers don't take it seriously as app state like I'll click on another chat, then back to the chat where I'd scrolled way up, and the app'll have thrown away my scroll position

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

there should be negative port numbers so website can have an evil version at port -80 / -443

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

"I was giving some thought to the general evolution (I use the term loosely, here) of Unix since its inception at Bell Labs, and I think it could be described as follows."

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

we need software to be uglier so that ppl feel more comfortable making their own software

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

y i k e s: "changing the size (in bytes) of an unused environment variable, can dramatically (frequently by about 33% and once by almost 300%) change the performance of our program."

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

15 days

always surprised at how much I learn by just physically retyping/transliterating code someone else wrote

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

thinking about how the Apple Lisa let you have multiple files with the same name in the same folder because why not? you can distinguish them by putting them in different spots in the folder!

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

"Sometimes tracing `open()` is a quicker way to find where config and log files exist than to read through the product documentation."

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

sufficiently good design is indistinguishable from all your users being smarter

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

So much of what people like about terminals isn't really about plain text! - low latency - information density - ability to automate (even copy and paste, not just scripting)

apenwarr

@apenwarr

4 years

@creachadair Yes! Plus the absurdly high input-to-output latency compared to rxvt. I sometimes think it's not terminals I like, it's just information density, which by all rights should be much higher on graphical displays. Sigh.

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

systematic bias against interactive programs

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 months

we need a Manhattan Project to build a good epub reader

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

the arrogance of ImageMagick to be like, yeah, we're gonna call our command `convert`

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

word processing idea

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 months

good example of the potential if you can take even a well-known existing visual representation (I've liked for a long time) and turn it into a 'mini-IDE' by adding liveness and provenance / brushing and linking

BYP

@_B_Y_P_

1 year

Finished REDE, a Regex IDE which visualizes the structure and evaluation of Regex/NFAs for my submission to @handmade_net visibility jam

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

9 days

feel like [local web server from this folder] now needs to be built into computer in the same way that unzipping files has been built into computer

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

i think there is real power in the fact that PDFs are essentially uneditable by normal software. exporting a PDF is like ritually sealing your document

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

"Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." "Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down [Japan's Ise Grand Shrine] and build it anew."

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

📝 I've written about Geokit, my mapping system @Dynamicland1 : It's a pretty detailed explanation of both 'what it does' and 'how it's made' which might help illustrate what's so unique about Dynamicland

Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit

omar.website

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

7 months

i think phone number verification is sort of a betrayal of the whole dream of the internet

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

if i wanted to write software to last as far into the future as possible, i would probably write it as an NES or Game Boy ROM

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

Always have an extra word in your startup's name so you can drop it when you get big

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 year

'they must make so many mistakes, i can't believe whole Fortune 500 companies rely on programming to operate'

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

notifications from actual human beings (your friend sent you a message!) and notifications from computers (this app has an update!) are not the same thing and should not be treated the same way, imo

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

I'm less interested in learn-to-program tutorial & playground apps and more interested in how people can organically pick up computing in response to an existing need: doing their finances in Excel, customizing their Tumblr, whatever

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

this is a great read:

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

i like the idea of making a 'toy' instead of a 'game' or 'app' because it sets a high standard of, like, this thing should be fun to interact with on a very basic mechanical level, even when there's no bigger story or incentive structure

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

they put a fence around your computer, then expect you to be grateful when they make playgrounds and APIs so you can crawl in and use a bit of it

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 months

there should be secret programming languages

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

Plan 9 and Dynamicland both dramatically simplify application code by providing _common ways to list and act on objects_ a ton of code is just about enumerating things for the user, then letting the user pick from them -- list views, buttons, drag & drop, checkboxes, commands

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 months

@tylerangert

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

Who decided to call it Airbnb and not apt-get

Nintendo .DS_Store

@sliminality

5 years

Thinking of renting a new apartment. Might try apt-get this time

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

pretty print

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

nice thing about dialup Internet that you have to explicitly enter into a space of being 'online', it's a sort of ritual that takes a minute, you get greeted by what's new 'since last time'

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

'continuity' of urban fabric: can I walk from point A to point B and be interested the whole time? Yes in Tokyo, Manhattan, central Paris or is the city a bunch of islands, each interesting but surrounded by dead zone of single-family homes (or worse, parking or highways)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

a programmer on the team whose job is exclusively to delete code

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

why are rmdir and rm different programs? because it used to be that _you had to be root_ to create and remove directories using system calls, so you needed rmdir(1) to be setuid root 😬😬

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

📝 'Skew' in the history of computer systems:

Skew

'Skew' in the history of computer systems & how it produces complexity

omar.website

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 months

feel like there is 'monk debugging' where you stare at the code and think really hard and try to spot things and there is 'shark debugging' where you're constantly swimming around and throwing random stuff at the program to see what happens (and if you stop swimming, you die)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

feel like 'multiple files with same name' takes the GUI seriously in a way that unique filenames don't it takes the idea seriously that you move things around on-screen and conceptualize/access them that way, instead of sorting lists by some attribute or typing names in

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

Cartogram of Canada is so weird

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

it feels like we keep orbiting this: a programming system where when you have a value, say `4`, it always comes with a provenance? (did it come from evaluating `2+2`, did you prompt the user and they typed in `4`, etc: these are all different flavored `4`s)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

Unix processes should maybe all run 'Web servers' and you can send your browser to like ' http://Chromium.localhost' or ' http://clang.localhost' and see various live internal data structures and computations of that program

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

the VB6 GUI builder was also wild because it produced programs that perfectly matched the appearance of normal Windows programs so you didn't feel like an outsider, or like you were using a toy

Inactive; Bluesky is @hillelwayne(dot)com

@hillelogram

5 years

1. Visual basic 6's GUI builder was revolutionary, and it's a travesty nothing has succeeded it. VB6 could have democratized programming to the same degree spreadsheets did.

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

Idea: video game where you write a commit message every time you save your game

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

like whenever I've put a lot of work in to scroll somewhere, I feel like I've climbed a mountain that is liable to collapse at any time

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

idea: when you come of age, you have to construct your own font, and everything you type from then on is in that font

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

I just learned that "Show Clipboard" is a thing in the Finder menu ???

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

9 months

I now know like 5 different ppl in New York who are writing browsers

Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 year

The crew

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

Wow i want like a tiny one of these on my desk

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

Camera roll and e-mail inbox are the new filesystem

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

i am constantly googling how to read and write files

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

huh

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

it was great to talk about my Breakout-inside-a-PDF project at @bangbangcon yesterday!

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

Programming language where it's easier to work with image literals than with string literals

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

(I moved to New York!)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

the basic problem with both programmers and economists is not simply that their models are wrong or unfair (although they often are) instead, it's that they have /power/ to force people to conform to those models

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

assigning sounds or frequencies to different pieces of data on your computer so (if you listen closely) you can hear the texture of what your computer is crunching on at any given moment

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

chart like this (), but for perceptions of cost of method names like "get", "find", "compute", "generate", "check", "lookup", etc

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

1 year

i feel like if you have to log in to see a page, that page is no longer really on "the Web"

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

transition from 'word processing software' to 'notes software' reflects the transition from 'want to make a nice print document for work' to the work always being inside the computer the entire time

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

IDE with rumble feedback

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

code that deletes itself if you don't execute it periodically

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

looking at what things you can undo/redo tells you what things the software developer saw as 'meaningful actions' you can't usually undo moving a window around, because that's thought of as 'a superficial UI change'

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

thank God

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

6 years

Catching flies with @ncasenmare

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 months

a nice thing about PDFs is that you can't embed videos into them

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

i still believe that it's possible to have GUI that reveals rather than hides the real structure of the computer

Jonathan Parkes Allen

@Mar_Musa

2 years

Compare this imagined future to the actual future: most of our wonder devices are veritable black boxes to most of us, and have grown more so (think of what the rise to dominance of GUIs has meant for how we interact with our computers and what we know about their structure)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

how many iconic dreams (owning your own home, your own bookstore, your own cafe) are about making a _space_ you identify with, rather than about the associated work style or personal status?

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

need this, but for making a Web browser

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

button you can click on any file on your computer that tells you how and why that file got there (was it part of the OS? did an app install it? did you download it yourself? from where? did someone email it to you?)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

i think these are the main types of user interface

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

thinking

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

there should be a mode where you can temporarily lock your phone into a screenshot of whatever's on screen, so you can pass your phone around to show people something without it feeling weird like you're entrusting them with access to a part of your body

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

today is my last day at Dynamicland. 🙂 I'm tremendously grateful to have had the opportunity to work with @worrydream and the rest of the group.

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 months

the psychology of stuff that's plugged into the wall is so superior to the psychology of battery-powered stuff. abundance mindset

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

5 years

rural electrification is such a powerful aesthetic "Brothers and sisters… The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house." – farmer testifying in rural Tennessee church (early 1940s)

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 months

anyway, the whole point of using a computer is so that you can control a GPU which then controls a high-resolution bitmap display, and/or so that you can send packets over the internet to your friends in other cities

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 years

i feel like it should be respected, rather than a source of embarrassment, that you have a workflow that's valuable and specific enough that it's worth retaining an ancient computer

jenna kovalsky⚡️

@abcdefghijenna

2 years

Spotted at my new dentist office. 👀

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

minimap in the corner of your Twitter feed

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

4 years

i love this -- the energy of using screenshots and camera roll for everything, or making your Web page with HTML tables / <b> and <font> tags / inline CSS instead of 'the way you're supposed to'

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

the difference between "Save to Photos" and "Save to Files" feels like it's an organizational difference inside Apple, not something i should have to care about every time i take a screenshot?

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

2 months

your personal website should feel like a restaurant website

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Omar Rizwan

@rsnous

3 years

Thinking about this

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