mattkevan

9 ms·

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by mattkevan 2y ago
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club. You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your
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by mattkevan 2y ago
UX and UI are quite different, and are different again to visual design. UX is about understanding who your users are and what the problems they’re trying to solve are, then organising flows, content and layouts to help them achieve it. I’d
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Oh please do, that would be great. Yes, you can leave comments on text and I've just implemented comment replies, so you can have conversations on the comments. You can upload your own books as long as they're DRM-free epubs. Plea
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’m working on a collaborative reading app called Rdrs. You can upload a ebook, create a reading group, invite others and your reading position, comments and highlights are synced live with the group. You can also read privately, and as its
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Oh man, that brings back memories. I had a four pack of games from The Fourth Dimension - Cataclysm, Apocalypse, Chocks Away and E-Type. They were pretty much the only games we actually bought, rather than just demos from cover disks, so I
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by mattkevan 2y ago
As a UI designer and developer, I would push the blame further along the stack and say that execs and shareholders want “flashy, sleek, stylish”, in the same way everything has to have AI jammed in now, lest the number start going down or n
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’ve got a RM2 and a Daylight tablet. In ambient light the contrast is worse on the Daylight than the RM2 - the screen background is quite significantly darker. However, the Daylight has a backlight which increases the contrast enormously.
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Olivetti also owned Acorn Computer, inventor of the ARM processor, although Dave began a good few years before they bought it. Apparently the project was so secret that Olivetti didn’t know about it until the purchase was complete.
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by mattkevan 2y ago
That’s a fascinating project, thanks for sharing. I’m using epub.js as it already has things like annotations and highlighting and it’s fairly easy to override the book styles. From the research I’ve done, it seems that most ebook reader li
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by mattkevan 2y ago
That’s a cool idea, thank you for sharing. Yes, I want to tie conversations to specific locations in the text, but I love the idea of being able to set discussion questions as well. Will look into that.
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’m working on a collaborative ebook reading app. The idea is that you can create a reading group, invite people and then share comments and highlights and see each other’s reading progress. It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’ve been using Daylight Computer’s new Android tablet for a while now, which has a 60fps reflective grayscale LCD screen. During the day it looks and behaves like E-paper, but with a much faster display rate. It’s also got a warm backlight
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by mattkevan 2y ago
That's a good idea, thanks for the suggestion. It seems to be quite picky about which books it accepts sometimes, will have to look into that :)
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’ve not been happy with the state of desktop ebook readers for a while, so I recently built a simple web-based ebook reader. It’s designed to be a quick and easy way to read books while also providing decent layout and typography. Although
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I would love this too. Calibre is amazingly useful and powerful, there’s nothing else like it, but my goodness the UI is ugly. I’ve come to appreciate it as some sort of outsider art anti-design, defiantly refusing to follow any notion of d
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Check out Downpour - probably the closest modern thing to HyperCard to make fun clicky apps and games. https://downpour.games/
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Wow, that’s got a real Kai’s Power Tools vibe to it.
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I dunno, it seems to sync your notebooks back up to the cloud & other devices pretty well. It’s £3/month after the first year, but it still syncs. https://remarkable.com/store/connect
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Yeah this looks like a cool device. I love my Remarkable, but the lack of backlight and slow refresh rate means it’s not as versatile as it could be. A tablet that has similar screen properties to eink but with a backlight and 60fps would b
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by mattkevan 2y ago
Yes, absolutely. It’s why all the people saying AI is the death of creativity are wildly off the mark. Still needs an artist to guide it.
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by mattkevan 2y ago
As far as I can see, the whole history of art is a long argument about whether something can be called art or not. It's always art As a recent example, Tron was disqualified for a visual effects Oscar because it was all done on compute
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I love the Barbican conservatory, it's one of my favourite places. It makes me feel like I'm in some kind of 1960s futuristic space arcology. Looking through the windows it's disappointing to see not the strange, alien landsc
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by mattkevan 2y ago
The model was good, it’s just that the illustrations needed to convey specific concepts and were created for particular purposes, something gen AI is not good at without significant guidance. Superficial style is easy to replicate, the unde
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by mattkevan 2y ago
As a follow on: One of my friends is a professional illustrator and was concerned about the impact of AI on their work. As a demonstration I trained some models on their styles. They were worried right up until they saw the output. Yes, it
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’ve been using generative AI in my art for a good few years now and have a few thoughts on this. Yes it’s trivial to train a model on a particular style, I’ve done it many times, including on my own art. It can make things that look pretty
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by mattkevan 2y ago
I’ve been using Claude opus pretty heavily since it came out. In the last few days I’ve built a Mac app that can remove/replace image backgrounds in bulk with CoreML, despite not knowing much about Swift development. It works startling
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by mattkevan 3y ago
My parents live in a village next to Fingeringhoe, which never fails to amuse my inner 8 year old, no matter how many times I’ve been there.
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by mattkevan 3y ago
I bought a set of AA lithium from Amazon not too long ago, hoping to solve the problem of disposable batteries. They had a micro USB port in the side for recharging and everything. Sadly, they were crap and stopped working after one charge.
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by mattkevan 3y ago
I was getting bored with cutting out images from their backgrounds for a project I was working on. Existing solutions didn’t seem that great or wanted a monthly subscription, so this weekend I decided to build my own. With 0 knowledge of Sw
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by mattkevan 3y ago
I'm a UX designer and I'm also learning as much as I can about AI, working through courses from Jeremy Howard and Andrej Kaparthy, amongst others. This article is absolute nonsense and I'd expect more from N/N, which I

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