Guillermo posted this recently: What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world. Designing a good name requires multi-dimensional thinking and is full of edge cases, much like designing software. I first will give credit where credit is due: I spent the first few years thinking "vercel" was phonetically interchangable with "volcel" and therefore fairly irredeemable as a name, but I've since come around to the name a bit as being (and I do not mean this snarkily or negatively!) generically futuristic, like the name of an amoral corporation in a Philip K. Dick novel. A few folks ask every year where the name for Buttondown came from. The answer is unexciting: Its killer feature was Markdown support, so I was trying to find a useful way to play off of that. "Buttondown" evokes, at least for me, the scent and touch of a well-worn OCBD, and that kind of timeless bourgeois aesthetic was what I was going for with the general branding. It was, in retrospect, a good-but-not-great name with two flaws: It's a common term. Setting Google Alerts (et al) for "buttondown" meant a lot of menswear stuff and not a lot of email stuff. Because it's a common term, the .com was an expensive purchase (see Notes on buttondown.com for more on that). We will probably never change the name. It's hard for me to imagine the ROI on a total rebrand like that ever justifying its own cost, and I have a soft spot for it even after all of these years. But all of this is to say: I don't know of any projects that have failed or succeeded because of a name. I would just try to avoid any obvious issues, and follow Seth's advice from 2003.

Mark your calendars for March 21-22, 2025, as we come together for a special Arduino Day to celebrate our 20th anniversary! This free, online event is open to everyone, everywhere. Two decades of creativity and community Over the past 20 years, we have evolved from a simple open-source hardware platform into a global community with […] The post Join us for Arduino Day 2025: celebrating 20 years of community! appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Disruptive technologies call for rethinking product design. We must question assumptions about underlying infrastructure and mental models while acknowledging neither change overnight. For example, self-driving cars don’t need steering wheels. Users direct AI-driven vehicles by giving them a destination address. Keyboards and microphones are better controls for this use case than steering wheels and pedals. But people expect cars to have steering wheels and pedals. Without them, they feel a loss of control – especially if they don’t fully trust the new technology. It’s not just control. The entire experience can – and perhaps must — change as a result. In a self-driving car, passengers needn’t all face forward. Freed from road duties, they can focus on work or leisure during the drive. As a result, designers can rethink the cabin experience from scratch. Such changes don’t happen overnight. People are used to having agency. They expect to actively sit behind the wheel with everyone facing forward. It’ll take time for people to cede control and relax. Moreover, current infrastructure is designed around these assumptions. For example, road signs point toward oncoming traffic because that’s where drivers can see them. Roads transited by robots don’t need signals at all. But it’s going to be a while before roads are used exclusively by AI-driven vehicles. Human drivers will share roads with them for some time, and humans need signs. The presence of robots might even call for new signaling. It’s a liminal situation that a) doesn’t yet accommodate the full potential of the new reality while b) trying to accommodate previous ways of being. The result is awkward “neither fish nor fowl” experiments. My favorite example is a late 19th Century product called Horsey Horseless. Patent diagram of Horsey Horseless (1899) via Wikimedia Yes, it’s a vehicle with a wooden horse head grafted on front. When I first saw this abomination (in a presentation by my friend Andrew Hinton,) I assumed it meant to appeal to early adopters who couldn’t let go of the idea of driving behind a horse. But there was a deeper logic here. At the time, cars shared roads with horse-drawn vehicles. Horsey Horseless was meant to keep motorcars from freaking out the horses. Whether it worked or not doesn’t matter. The important thing to note is people were grappling with the implications of the new technology on the product typology given the existing context. We’re in that situation now. Horsey Horseless is a metaphor for an approach to product evolution after the introduction of a disruptive new technology. To wit, designers seek to align the new technology with existing infrastructure and mental models by “grafting a horse.” Consider how many current products are “adding AI” by including a button that opens a chatbox alongside familiar UI. Here’s Gmail: Gmail’s Gemini AI panel. In this case, the email client UI is a sort of horse’s head that lets us use the new technology without disrupting our workflows. It’s a temporary hack. New products will appear that rethink use cases from the new technology’s unique capabilities. Why have a chat panel on an email client when AI can obviate the need for email altogether? Today, email is assumed infrastructure. Other products expect users to have an email address and a client app to access it. That might not always stand. Eventually, such awkward compromises will go away. But it takes time. We’re entering that liminal period now. It’s exciting – even if it produces weird chimeras for a while.

A quick intro to interfacing common OLED displays to bare-metal microcontrollers.