🍦Ice Cream Drama, Trifolding Phones, and the Magical Blackberry Inbox

one inbox to rule them all

May 03, 2021

Hey friends! Hope you’re doing great this week.

Our infant son is doing fantastic! He’s happy, healthy, and very sleepy . . . just like us haha. We’ve been drinking a lot of coffee.

I’ve been enjoying The Head on HBO Max. It’s a murder mystery set in the arctic. It’s quite good! I’m currently on the second to last episode . . . and I have to be honest. I have no idea who’s doing the murders.

I’ve been listening to a lot of UK Drill rap while I work to keep concentration and flow. Here’s a great playlist that I’ve been grinding my work to.

Surely, we can’t leave out that “The Josh Fight” actually happened last week?

If you aren’t aware of the real life meme, a dude named Josh FB messaged everyone else with the same name and challenged them to a fight for the name at a set of coordinates.

And it actually happened!

Crazy, I know.

Well, let’s hop on into today’s topics!

🍦McDonald’s Ice Cream Drama

The plot thickens! or should I say . . . the ice cream thickens haha.

So you know how the ice cream machines never work at McDonalds? Well, apparently a third party company developed a device “which could easily "hack" into the soft serve machine and fix it.“

It’s called Kytch, and it sounds really cool. Essentially, it turns your dumb ice cream machine into a smart device.

You can even monitor your machine remotely via an app! A fantastic way to stay on top of potential issues that busy employees may not notice in time.

Well, to some McDonalds franchisees, this was a dream come true

Some McDonald's franchisees saw Kytch as a much-needed solution to their soft serve problems and started using the device quickly. After all, they had been waiting for a system-wide solution for years, but McDonald's never delivered on their promises. What they were left with were expensive machines whose inner-workings were inaccessible to them, unless they hired Taylor-approved distributors to perform pricey maintenance and fixes. On the other hand, Kytch basically offered user-friendly tools for diagnosing and, in some instances, preventing soft serve machine malfunctions. (Source)

Everything sounds great, right? Well, McDonald’s was not a fan - and quickly rolled out a very convenient solution after years of ice cream issues.

McDonald's—seemingly out of nowhere—issued a franchise-wide notice discouraging store owners from installing Kytch, and advising them that the use of the device would invalidate their warranties with Taylor. The following day, a follow-up email from McDonald's announced the release of Taylor's own "Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity"—a user-interface device similar in concept to Kytch. (Source)

Sounds so convenient, doesn’t it??

Kytch believes that there’s more than meets the eye.

Kytch's contracts forbid McDonald's franchisees from sharing the technology with third parties. If, as Nelson and O'Sullivan believe, Taylor did manage to access a Kytch device (which the company has not denied), it would have been with the help of a McDonald's franchisee. As they revealed to Wired, the Kytch makers suspect several of their McDonald's clients have violated their contracts—including, notably, Gamble—and they plan to file lawsuits against them. (Source)

It’s a fascinating tale. What do you think? Did McDonald’s screw over Kytch and copy their software?

📱 Trifolding Phones

I’ve written recently about rollable phones - twice in fact.

Well, it’s time to talk about trifolding phones - like the one on WestWorld.

I’m excited to say . . .there’s evidence that some may actually be arriving in the next year or so!

Enter the Galaxy Z Fold Tab - the ultimate in folding phones so far.

Here’s the Let’s Go Digital render from Tom’s Hardware. This is based off a Samsung Patent.

Personally, i think there’s a darn good chance that this will come out in the next two years, especially when you take into consideration that TCL already has a prototype of a trifolding device.

This is a real picture from CNET.

Yeah. That looks pretty darn cool to me. Heck, watch this hands on video.

It will be a few years before these are normal device, unfortunately. It’s gonna take at least one to three early adopter generations to work the kinks out of these. Not to mention - this brick is gonna have to get substantially thinner before I carry something like this around.

I really do enjoy living in these “new” smartphone times. The last six years have been a great battle of bigger screens, faster processors, and bettter cameras.

We’ve returned to the madness of experimental devices - and possibly the final frontier in Smartphone development.

Can we get better than a folding pocketable device we can use as a phone, tablet, and portable laptop?

That’s the big ticket question.

While we ponder, let’s wander back to some original iPhone commericals from 2007

or the Sidekick

📶The Magical Blackberry Inbox

Once upon a time, the Blackberry phone ruled the world.

Then, Iphone wiped them from the map . . .

and now the only modern Blackberry phones you can buy are a few years old.

There was one killer feature that has never been replicated since.

Back in like 2004 or 2005 you had a BlackBerry. There was an “app” on there (they weren’t called apps back then) where you would see all your incoming messages. Any type of messages, doesn’t matter what “app”, what service, it was all there . . . Now today. You have an iPhone or an Android. Want to check your Facebook messages? Open the Facebook Messenger app. Want to check Signal? Open the Signal app. Email? Open your email app (and you might have more than one of those, even).

Since 2005, the amount of avenues for messages and notifications have doubled, or tripled!

Think about it. The average person probably gets messages on at least 5 of the following.

SMS, iMessage, Google Chat, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Snapchat, Twitter, Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord, Pinterest, Skype . . .

They all ping in their respective apps - trying to get you to commit yourself to spend more time there. Remember when Facebook Messenger thought it was Wechat? **shudder**

Here we are in the year 2021, and there’s only one major challenger rising to the occasion - for $10 a month.

It’s called Beeper - and it’s one inbox for all messaging - kind of like the Blackberry experience.

Check it out at the link!

Beeper

But what about all your other apps? like Gmail, Clickup, Spotify . .

Well for that, there’s TryShift which is insanely cool

TryShift

🐙The Land of Random

Random randomness for you to ramdomly muse about

Host Audio Chats on Your Site

This is pretty darn cool. Host Clubhouse style audio chats on your website with visitors. We’ve come a long way since the humble chatbot . . .

Join Space

Build Your Own Live Ticker Tape

Want your Stonks or Cryptos in a live pixel feed? Do it yourself with this Arduino Tutorial.

I want to build it

Troll Your Friends with Windows XP

This fun website is a replica of Windows XP with a lot of crazy little pranks. Just open the site, close the welcome windows, and make it full screen. Your friend won’t know what hit ‘em.

geekprank

Write Interactive Fiction

Using this markdown editor, you can write your own interactive fiction! There’s quite a bit of coding involved, but not toooo much. One of these weeks I’m going to write one.

Inkle Studios