🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #284

It's Friday! Let's end the week with success!

#iOS - Apple is planning the most sweeping change yet to its operating system names. The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26”.

#InstagramBatteryDrain - Folks using Instagram on Android devices might have noticed it’s such a battery hog. Well - they finally came around to call it a bug instead and have released a fix for it.

Google Launches Official Store In India
Google has launched its official Google Store in India, allowing customers to purchase Pixel products directly from the company online. The store sells a variety of Pixel-branded devices, including smartphones, watches, earbuds, and official accessories. Google has partnered with leading banks to offer no-cost EMIs and instant cashback.

India Reminds Big Tech To Stop Using Dark Patterns
India’s Department of Consumer affairs has reminded big tech companies that it has rules that prohibit the use of dark patterns. Dark patterns are deceptive design practices that deliberately mislead and confuse customers of online services and apps. Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, Booking[dot]com, Samsung, Mastercard, Uber and WhatsApp attended the event.

Unacademy Co-founders Gaurav Munjal And Roman Saini To Exit
Unacademy is an Indian edtech startup co-founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh. Munjal and Saini are reportedly exiting the company within 2-3 months to spin off Unacademy's language learning app, Airlearn, as a separate company, with Sumit Jain taking over as CEO of Unacademy.

Practo Expands To UAE With Digital Healthcare Platform
Practo is a 17-year-old Indian digital healthcare platform that connects users with verified doctors & hospitals. They just launched in the UAE and are already claiming having captured 10% of Dubai’s population on an annual usage basis.

Spotify - Introduced personalized podcast recommendations on the Home page, a Following feed for tracking favorite shows, and new features for creators to recommend content and engage with fans.

Angular - Version 20 has now been released.

DeepSeek R1 - Minor upgrade to the 685 billion parameter reasoning AI model under a permissive MIT license.

Discord - Introduced Orbs, a new in-app currency for earning and redeeming rewards like Nitro subscriptions and badges.

Telegram - Integration with xAI's Grok chatbot, allowing users to access AI-powered features such as writing suggestions, chat summaries, and moderation assistance.

Instagram - Now supports 3:4 aspect ratio photos, allowing for more accurate representation of original images in-stream.

Magentic Ui | A research prototype of a human-centered web agent

Qlib | Qlib is an AI-oriented Quant investment platform that aims to use AI tech to empower Quant Research, from exploring ideas to implementing productions. Qlib supports diverse ML modeling paradigms, including supervised learning, market dynamics modeling, and RL

Togo | A fast, simple and beautiful terminal-based todo manager built in go

The Power Of Pen And Paper In Coding
A developer swears by their trusty notebook as their most important tool, using it to think through problems, design solutions, and reflect on their code, finding it helps to clarify ideas and identify gaps in knowledge.

Designing For Calm: Reducing Anxiety In User Interfaces
UX design can contribute to user anxiety or help alleviate it. Calm design prioritizes predictability, forgiveness, and nonintrusive interactions, using patterns like progressive disclosure, forgiving interactions, and predictable feedback to create a clearer, more empathetic user experience, especially in software applications.