Yes, Dutchman here. It seems to intuitively understand when you want local results vs. international. When it doesn't, you can easily toggle above the search results. I'm never looking back.
I wonder if they're ever going to decide that enough emoji is enough, or will continue adding more until every word in the dictionary is an emoji. There have been some ridiculous inclusions in the past years despite more obvious candidates that are still missing.
The great thing about emoji used to be the constraints, which made for a clear overview of available emoji and made people use the limited set in creative ways to express different things. Besides the more extraneous options, they never should've started adding things like skin/hair color modifiers imo, sticking to the single yellow/neutral color instead. Counterproductively, that opened up ways for people to not feel represented.
This is the best description of how I experience my mind's eye that I've read so far.
I never have trouble imagining things as they do clearly 'render'—I can picture scenes, shapes, faces, motion, the styling of text I remember, basically anything—but it doesn't result in true visual output where I can see things as if I have my eyes open. If the latter is something that people can truly do, then I guess I do have some form of aphantasia.
I've seen people here mention IVPN in the same breath as Mullvad; do you have any insight on how they compare? AFAIK Mullvad is based in Sweden, which is a Fourteen Eyes country, whereas IVPN is based in Gibraltar, which is not.
I've been saying this for a while now. We should abolish this weird cultural tradition/expectation/normalization of continuous "news" consumption and replace it with periodical consumption of in-depth reporting on trends, like you said.
People believe following the news keeps them informed even though the news distors their world view because it mostly reports on exceptions to the rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog). "Following the trends" would keep people actually informed as well as provide them with actionable information.
Element looks and feels more like a replacement for Discord or Slack than WhatsApp or Messenger. My intention is to build an alternative to the latter two in terms of UI/UX. Something your grandma could use, like Signal, but decentralized and with features like quote replies and message editing.
The goal would be to build a beautiful, private, secure, delightful instant messaging app that happens to run on Matrix, rather than building a Matrix client period. It’d still allow power users to do stuff like federation, but would by default abstract techie/Matrix concepts like homeservers, rooms, and encryption keys.
I’ve actually had a pleasant chat with the developer of Nio regarding working together, but we ended up deciding it’s better to work on separate projects.
Nio is still in very early stages; the developer plans to refactor most of the app and couldn’t commit to a specific timeline or direction for it. On top of that, my vision for a client includes spinning up a (privacy-focused) business and later expanding to web, Android, and PCs.
Matrix has such incredible potential, but is still missing a mainstream-focused IM client with a beautiful UI and appealing UX. If there are any Swift devs looking for a passion/side project like this, hit me up (link in bio)!