So, I went ahead and got myself the iPhone 16 Pro Max. I’m forever thankful to my trusty Pixel 4a, but I couldn’t carry on due to how bad the battery life had gotten (1.5 hrs SOT). As a long-time small phone person, this was a big departure in many ways, but the supreme battery life (2 days of SOT for me), quality app optimisation (courtesy of iOS), and rock-solid longevity associated with iPhones essentially won me over.

I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t miss the simple one-handed operation of a smaller phone, but having a smaller phone results in less battery life now, and worse degradation later on. Despite having small-ish hands, I’m surprised at how much I’ve been able to adapt to the screen size, still doesn’t help that this thing is basically a brick in my pocket.

While I’d normally recommend upgrading every 4-5 years, I don’t see myself upgrading for the next 7 years at a minimum. This phone is very overkill for my needs, where I only make use of a small selection of essential apps, so there should be no excuses (I probably could have gotten away with buying a 16, but that Natural Titanium 😋).

Remember the curated lists that I’d look up to for inspo? (I brought up in my first blog post). I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I made the cut! 🥹

I’d like to give the biggest of thanks to Arcade Labs for admitting my site in, where I can hopefully serve to inspire others to create simple, but elegant sites.

tldr: the new Pixel line of phones has made me clueless about Google’s smartphone strategy.

The “AI phone” marketing shtick falls flat when you consider that the Tensor G4 chip is generations behind it’s competition in terms of both performance and efficiency. They’re also using the same NPU as last year, which means all the new capabilities is just “software magic”, which all recent Android devices can tap into with an Android update.

The fact that Google is now placing the new Pixels in price-parity with Apple’s offerings is just egregious when they are lagging behind in ultimate performance, efficiency and reliability. No matter what camera magic Google may be doing, the fundamentals are there to be met.

It’s basically a no-contest (in my eyes), which is a serious shame as a Pixel user myself; looks like it may be time to switch sides soon.

To the super attentive out there: you’ve probably noticed that this site has undergone a lot of changes (stylistically speaking) to put it lightly.

I’ll update the colophon in the not-too-distant future, but it essentially comes down to just continually immersing myself towards ensuring that this site comes across in a manner that I consider perfect.

Reaching perfection is a subjective thing, which of course will change as we experience new things. This in-turn leads to the cycle of change kickstarting once again, as we attempt to chase this new “perfect” in front of us. But change isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s that feedback loop that we incite from simply experiencing/applying new things that allows us to elevate our crafts, and crawl closer to mastery.

After all, we are all unpolished gems, continually refining ourselves as we go along.

Life update: I started (two days ago) at Evelyn Partners!

It was amazing to meet some of the team today, with there being a very pronounced soothing sorta feeling. Everyone just focuses on crushing what’s in front of them; and that’s how it should be, but with the additional sprinkle of supportiveness that helps to alleviate that first-day imposter syndrome feeling.

Now, you’ve probably had a look at the job title, and I can guess that you’re still pondering as to what it actually means (I did too for a while). To succinctly put it, it can be thought of as a full-stack role with a front-end focus.

I’m very much looking forward to creating plenty of memorable moments with the rest of the development team.

Of course, I forgot to add the license for the site. Not to fret, I’ve added it in the repo.

Also, huge s.o. to Ephraim Duncan with the work he’s done on his site, he’s seriously outdone himself with the guestbook page.

There’s just this unexplainable magic in seeing neat features packaged together so elegantly.

Life comes at you real fast. Here I was a couple days ago comparing the latest GPT-4o model to her, only for OpenAI to be forced to remove the “Sky” voice that had an eery resemblance to Scarlett Johansson’s voice. I’ll link Scarlett’s statement, but wow, just wow.

I know I’m a bit late to the party, but wow. That OpenAI keynote really spoiled Google’s party.

I’m ngl, I got a bit worried with the emphasis on text-based prompts until now, but with GPT-4o, at least we’re not that far away from having a fully-fledged Jarvis in our pockets.

Who would have thought that we’d end up getting Her along the way though?

Deciding on a sans-serif font is proving to be a very arduous task. In an ideal world, I’d love to use Helvetica Neue, but the fact that it is only available on Apple devices means that other users would miss out on seeing the site as I envisaged (I know, I’m picky like that).

While I’m at it, I’ll attach a few great font sites that I’ve run into:

• Uncut
• Fontshare
• Free Faces
• The League of Moveable Type
• Open Foundry
• Typophilia (admittedly a repository, but comes with plenty of info and quality sites)

The first iteration of this website is nearly completed at this point (thankfully). I’ll probably make a follow-up to my first post, focused more on my development experience on building the site.

Stay tuned!

Hey there! Just dropping in to say hi 🫡