Comms was a sketch

I threw Comms out the window. Like a sketch.

Comms was the Mac app I launched here in August. It recorded your screen while you talked and drew, and turned the recording into a brief for your agent. In its first month it got more than 200 downloads and 29 weekly users.

I used it every day with my agents. Then I noticed that half my messages had no annotations at all. They didn't need a screen recording. I only need to draw when I design or fix a bug. Everything else I dictate with Wispr Flow.

So I started over. The new app writes down what you say and takes a screenshot at the moment you draw. I dropped all the controls. Press Fn once to start and once to stop. If a text field is selected, your words paste there. If not, you can send them to an agent.

Making things is so fast now that Comms ended up being the prototype. I shipped it, used it for a month, and kept what I learned, along with quite a bit of feedback from users.

The name changed too. Comms and trycomms(.)app never really made me excited. It almost sounded corporate.

Comms is now orbal.app. Still in open beta for Mac.

Jan

Dropbox says about 70 percent of its code is now AI-generated, the same share Uber reported. dropbox.tech

Figma opened Community publishing for Weave tools, from moodboard-to-room mockups to nail previews. figma.com

Nielsen Norman Group published PACED, a framework for deciding when to disclose AI use, as EU disclosure rules took effect in August. Nielsen Norman Group

Petdex lists more than 4,870 open-source animated pets for coding agents, Codex included. petdex.dev

Marina Willer at Pentagram built the BFI London Film Festival identity from projected light. It's Nice That

Who designs Wikipedia

Wikipedia's first logo was an image Bjørn Smestad submitted to a Nupedia logo competition in 2000. The puzzle ball came next. Paul Stansifer won a logo contest with it, and Wikipedia adopted a redesigned version in 2003.

The site itself has barely changed. "Consistency goes a long way to establishing trust in a piece of software," says Justin Scherer, a UX designer at the Wikimedia Foundation.

For the 25th birthday this January, a community member's doodle became Baby Globe, the first official birthday mascot.

Read it on It's Nice That.

Category Colors

Category Colors by Matt Ström-Awn builds colour palettes for charts with many categories. Set the number of colours and a range in the OKHSL colour space, then generate. The optimizer scores each palette on how easy the colours are to tell apart, how they hold up for three types of colour blindness, and how they print in greyscale. The result shows on live sample charts, with a report and hex values to copy. The code is open source on GitHub.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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