I Tried to Design an Icon for Zen – My Favourite Browser
I’m one of those who really likes the Arc browser. But at the same time, I’m quite worried about Google’s web hegemony (and the general trajectory of The Browser Company) – so I want to use and like Firefox/a Gecko browser. Sadly, I just don’t think Firefox is very good…
I get that Mozilla has a lot of things going on, and that creating a browser engine is a lot of work. But I really wish they prioritised having a focused team that's allowed to just working on making Firefox nice.
However, I’ve used Zen as my main browser for the last six months – and I’m pleased with it! (By the way, click here, to go straight to the new icons.)
In short, it’s a Firefox fork, that has copied a lot of the things I like about Arc – like vertical tabs, split-views, workspaces, and nice padding 🤤. It also has some original ideas – and my favourite one takes advantage of the great customisability offered in Firefox:
Zen Mods
You can easily install, and adjust the settings of, community created mods. These are mostly little tweaks, like themes, having the close button on the left side (and hidden without hover), cleaner extension menu/right-click menu/navigation bar, etc.
I really like that the browser is enjoyable out-of-the-box, but that I can still customise a lot to my liking.
But be aware: It is alpha software.
This means that not everything is polished, and that things change quite frequently. But, as mentioned, I’ve used it as my primary browser for six months, and I’ve still liked it more than most browsers.
One of the things that has just changed is the graphical profile, logo, and icon.
Guess What Apple Paid to "Buy" the Firefox Extension for iCloud Keychain
Good news! As of today, there’s an official Firefox extension for Passwords.app / iCloud Keychain.
“What? There wasn’t one already?" you might say.
Fair question! Maybe it was a bit much to ask of the famously cash-strapped company to take care of those of their users who want to use the only* independent* browser. (To me, this reveals one of the reasons why I think you should rather store your passwords with a third party you trust.)
Luckily, the lonely lad (or lady) Aurélien has been maintaining an unofficial add-on for years! 🫡
“But now Apple has managed to scrape together the cash to build one themselves??"
Not quite… Apple reached out to Aurélien, through Mozilla, to ask if Apple could simply get the code of the unofficial plugin. (Source)
“Ah, so instead of starting from scratch, they instead bought a good starting-point. Smart."
Well, not quite… From the GitHub thread linked above:
✉️ Feedback on the The Verge Subscription
The excellent tech website, The Verge, just launched a subscription – which I know they’ve worked on for a while.
Generally, I think the way they’ve approached it seems pretty sensible – but I still have some feedback. And hopefully, the fact that I’ve subscribed for a year will increase the odds of it getting better, and not decrease it.
Some quotes from the launch, to get you up to speed
All the emphasises are mine – meant to guide you towards the most important parts.
Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.
At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free.
Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.
Our vision has always been to build The Verge like a software product, and we have a big roadmap of features to come, like a true dark mode toggle, the ability to personalize the homepage feed, and a lot of wacky ideas about what it might mean to follow authors, topics, and streams across the site and — eventually — decentralized social platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.
In general, it seems OK
I'm Getting a New Car, and I Don't Care About CarPlay
Am I insane?
Time and time again, I’m hearing people say that they wouldn’t buy a new care without Apple CarPlay/Android Auto.1 (The after-show on the latest episode of Mac Power Users was the last example.) I also hear how stupid some companies are for not including these systems in their cars. And I just don’t get it. Or, to be honest: I think I know some reasons why my opinion seems to differ from most people’s.
I live in the land of EVs
Norway has been subsidising EVs heavily for many years. And I think this statistic shows the effect well:
| Year | EV market share |
|---|---|
| 2020: | 54.3% |
| 2021: | 64.5% |
| 2022: | 79.3% |
| 2023: | 82.4% |
| 2024: | 88.2% |
To put things into perspective: The EV market share in the US is currently at 8.9%, which is well below the 13% we had all the way back in 2014 – ten years ago.2
A welcome effect of this, is that we also have a healthy used-market for EVs – so I literally can’t remember the last time I talked to someone who weren’t buying an EV.3 I’ll come back to why this is important!
My experience
The car I’ve had for the last 3 years, is a 2019 Tesla Model 3, which I bought used. My wife and I are expecting our first kid in May, and we have a large dog – so we need something larger in the next 6 months. That’s why I’ve been looking at new cars again.
I’m pleased with my Model 3! And the Model Y would probably be the best purchase for us. But I simply don’t want to buy one, due to *gestures in the general direction of Elon Musk*. Luckily, we have tons of options over here. But when I started doing my research, I found myself not caring about whether the cars had CarPlay – even though I’m heavily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.4
The reasons I haven’t missed CarPlay
✉️ A Recommendation for the Great Note-Taking and Task Management App, NotePlan
In the latest episode of AppStories, Brendon Bigley filled in for Federico Viticci. Among other things, they discussed the apps he used, and he said he had research (and some writing) in Obsidian, while using the neat little post-it app Tot for “task management”. By task management, he meant that he kept his daily tasks in a note, and just deleted it at the end of the day.
This workflow made me want to recommend an app I like: NotePlan. And this post is a letter to him, about why I recommend that he takes a look.
Hi, Brendan! I’ve been listening to NPC on and off – but as I’m slightly more interested in the stuff AppStories focuses on, I’m glad you got the chance to bring your voice there as well. I enjoyed the episode!
When listening to your workflows and tastes in apps, I felt the need to throw a recommendation your way (which might also fit someone else who stumbles upon this letter): NotePlan. I think this app would be a nice upgrade over the way you use Tot, while, at the same time, also having the potential of replacing Obsidian. The writing experience is nicer than Obsidian’s – so it might even creep up on iA Writer! However, the writing experience isn’t absolutely top-tier, so I have to admit that I write my blog posts in a different app – while the files are in the NotePlan folder. (My favourite writing Markdown experience is Paper, which I wrote a review of here.)
Furthermore, it’s a bit expensive on its own, so if you don’t already already subscribe to Setapp 🖇️ (where the app is included), it might not be worth it, depending on which apps (if any) it manages to replace.
These are the ingredients the app is made up of:
At its core, it’s an Obsidian-like, as in just-a-folder-of-Markdown-files.
It does have plugin support, but it’s still far from as customisable as Obsidian.
However, if you’re mostly on Apple devices, it’s much more native-feeling than most Electron apps.1
As I heard you use Windows at work, it could be valuable that NotePlan has a web app as well – even though it’s not as good as the native experience.
It offers powerful note-taking features, like
- templates (with Javascript support!),
- backlinks,
- embedded images,
- code syntax highlighting,
- foldable headers and list items,
- synced lines,
- (light) front-matter support,
- voice notes,
- sketching and hand-writing transcripts,
- sharing live links to notes with others, and more.
I also like that it has a command-bar interface (with a fast search), and powerful custom themes.
But the Secret Sauce is the way it handles tasks and calendar notes! But before I go into that, I wanted to touch on …
How you can use it in conjecture with other apps, like Obsidian:
As mentioned, the NotePlan library is just a folder, that looks like this:
The Notes folder holds your regular notes, while the Calendar folder holds the calendar notes. If you wanted to dip your toes into the app, while using Obsidian in parallell, you could just add your Obsidian vault to the Notes folder. Then you just point Obsidian to either just folder, or the whole NotePlan folder (so you’ll get access to the Calendar folder as well). I think note links are cross-compatible between Obsidian and NotePlan.
"Julie", a New Single From My Band
I play bass in a band – and today we released a new single.
It’s called Julie, and I would love it if you gave it a whirl! 🫶🏻 It includes a modulation, an outrageous guitar solo, a fade-out, and good vibes.