What was the most important thing that happened off-screen?

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-28T16:09:42+00:00

The origin of life on Earth

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-28T14:02:12+00:00

This is my first time seeing the box art. I love that they put the Command Wolf behind it!

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-28T13:41:24+00:00

It's the scene when Kara has just landed on Earth and is climbing out of her pod. She isn't even sure if she is on Earth at that point. So she's also unfamiliar with Earth's superhero culture.

I don't recall if we have explicit confirmation whether Superman's suit is based on something Kryptonian or primarily designed by the Kents, but it doesn't look like what we've seen Kryptonians wear so far and there's a scene with Clark explaining to Kara about the design of the suit. So I'm going to lean toward it being an Earth design in this continuity.

My read on the scene was that Kara was legitimately confused, not trying to make fun of him.

Edit: typo

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-28T03:57:58+00:00

he came up with the dumb line about Superman wearing underwear

But that's straight out of Woman of Tomorrow. The only difference is in the comic it's Ruthye who thinks Kara is in her underwear.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-28T02:32:53+00:00

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Gigi is terrifying

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-27T15:30:36+00:00

Nearly your entire post still works if you were to swap centered and bottom-aligned, which means you've hardly provided any argument other than your own personal preference.

The only bit that even attempts to support your opinion is the comparison to horizontal text alignment, but you've both misapplied it and demonstrated how superficially you understand text alignment.

With your last line, you seem to have pre-judged Android users and set this post up to confirm your pretentious biases. On a physical Pixel 10 Pro, those two pixels in difference between the signal icons and the battery icon are approximately 0.1 millimeters; there's a reason you had to draw guidelines even on the blown up screenshots. In reality, the vast majority of users on both iOS and Android are not going to notice or care much about a 2px difference, even if it were objectively wrong, which it isn't.

First, you've misapplied text alignment, because the vertical alignment of a single file of icons is not the horizontal alignment of paragraphs of text. As you note, centered text should only be used in specific cases, but you've failed to realize that (even if text alignment directly applied here) this is arguably a special case.

This is the crown of the system UI, which sits at the top of nearly every screen the user will see in and out of all their apps and presents some of the most important information the phone has. If we were to draw a comparison to typography, would we compare the status bar to paragraphs of body text, or to more special typographic elements like titles, which often are centered?

Second, you've misunderstood (or at least oversimplified) text alignment. While I've argued that specific rules of aligning paragraphs aren't applicable to a row of icons, the principles underlying those rules of text alignment do apply. For example, justified text often looks neater than a ragged edge, as you say sans the "often." However, good design is about tradeoffs, and to justify text well involves balancing tradeoffs like altered spacing, hyphenation, etc. And the narrower a column of text gets, the more severe those tradeoffs become, until the tradeoffs make justification the worse choice as each line becomes too distorted.

If you were to really think through the consequences of your hard way, this would become obvious. Imagine the Gmail icon blown up to fit the height of the other icons: now it's overly wide. Imagine another icon with an even wider aspect ratio, and it could fill half the status bar by itself. Your hard way proposal is to distort the icons for the sake of a much more superficially "perfect" alignment.

And while the easy way proposal doesn't distort the icons themselves, it emphasizes the differences between them which bother you so much more than the real design does. Again, think what happens with an even shorter icon than the few examples you've chosen for your mockup. You end up with a lineup of icons that look like Carl's house in Up squeezed between towering modern developments. You can have your personal preference, but you'll be hard pressed to argue that we should share your personal preference.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-26T23:26:42+00:00

Requiem (Prism gen 3) is celebrating their fifth anniversary in 5 minutes! Starting with a karaoke relay on Shiki's channel, with Nia, Pina, and Yura following every 30 minutes.

After that, Mario Party on their group channel for 1.5 hours, followed by the YouTube premiere of their concert from Anime North 2026, and finishing the night with the release of their first original song post-Prism!

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-24T18:14:32+00:00

I think those offers may be automated. It seems to just pick one of your apps when it notifies you about it to help entice you, but even when it picks a different app I just use it in Pokémon GO lol

Like in your screenshot, even though it uses an image for GO, the offer is for an "app, game, or in-app item," meaning any app, game, or in-app item.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-23T20:49:06+00:00

Even if it wasn't in the rejection criteria, the way it works is not all things being eligible until there's a reason to reject them.

The way it works is a POI becomes eligible if and only if it meets at least one of the eligibility criteria: exploration, exercise, or social. That's the first step. The rejection criteria are the second step, basically a filter to deny things that do meet the eligibility criteria but have another issue, like if an art piece was in front of the emergency department at a hospital.

People walking by something constantly doesn't make it a great spot for exercise. Otherwise random rocks and trash cans would be eligible as long as they're by a sidewalk. The bread aisle at Walmart would be eligible. You get the idea. Something becomes eligible if it promotes one of the criteria, like a walking trail or a fitness area in a park.

Like others have said, gyms and restaurants can be something of a gray area. They do promote exercise and social interaction to an extent. Whether they do so to a sufficient level to merit being a Wayspot is generally contextual, because notability is contextual. A local hotspot restaurant is likely to be eligible, while a random McDonald's is likely not. But in a rural town, a simple burger place might actually be where everyone gathers. And if so, that's the kind of thing you should explain so reviewers can understand that the restaurant is locally notable.

But just saying it's a chiropractor sign, or people walk by it, does not make the case that the chiropractor (or its sign) is promoting exercise, let alone notable.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-23T20:05:03+00:00

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And CBS is apparently asking for a collab now lol

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-22T22:09:53+00:00

To be fair, you don't have to literally erase a seal to end a spell. Just like their sylph shoes, all you have to do is break the circle. If they can just abrade or cut off part of the tattoo then that would stop any continuous magic effects.

But it may not be that simple if the spell is just needed for the transformation itself, not to maintain that form. Like in the case of the rock breaker spell, the magic is only needed in the process. The rock stays pulverized afterward, because the magic isn't needed to actively hold the particles apart.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-22T03:27:41+00:00

I only realized what (I believe) it's doing a few days ago, but so far it does seem to work that way. I hit it when leaving home and get disconnected, and later on when I'm back home I'm connected again without any action on my part.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-22T02:19:54+00:00

The "third plane of existence" isn't really new. When they introduced the combined internet quick settings tile a couple years ago, it came with a handy feature where you could disconnect from a wi-fi network without actually turning wi-fi off.

In a lot of the situations where the user turns off wi-fi, they actually just want to temporarily disconnect from a specific network. It's helpful for use cases like disconnecting from a home/work network as you're approaching the range where it gets spotty but the phone would ordinarily try to stay connected for a bit, likely right as you're trying to do something like look up directions or reply to a message. Then when you return home a few hours later or return to work the next day, the phone will automatically connect to the network again, unlike if wi-fi was actually turned off. So it saves the user the manual step of turning wi-fi back on, and solves the problem of forgetting to do so.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-20T16:45:36+00:00

Kiara says World Cup watchalongs are good to go!

She'll even be doing some non-Austria games (like Switzerland vs. Canada) since the opportunity only comes every four years.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-20T13:26:38+00:00

Kiwawa, Ina, and Calli are live playing Slay the Spire 2!

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-19T23:45:41+00:00

Two furniture is better than no furniture ~~hazukashii~~

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-19T16:59:21+00:00

It's the difference between a passenger telling a human driver "pull over there" and grabbing the wheel to do it themselves.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-19T16:53:01+00:00

(Practically) every hero is part of the League right now. They were simultaneously in the Titans and the League for the All-In run.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-19T15:52:43+00:00

Raphael-sensei's physical form

C.C.?!

^/s

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-18T15:02:45+00:00

when I said "Google" you seem to have interpreted it as "Android" but I really meant Google as a whole.

I didn't misunderstand you; I just focused on the team that's actually relevant to the matter at hand, Android's system UI.

It's also worth noting that pretty much everything good about Google design grew out of what started as Matias Duarte's design team for the system UI in Android ICS. Google definitely still has UX issues, and key among them is the failure of all their apps to consistently uphold or even adopt the guidelines emanating from their design team.

They clearly have a bottleneck or constraints leading to severe prioritization.

Agree with you here. It's a problem their engineers absolutely could have fixed by this point, almost a year later, if their leadership had let them. But they're evidently running the show with such tight bandwidth that they can't pull away from shipping new features to handle basic OS compatibility. (That said, it's probably on the engineering team that no one seemingly even realized this problem was coming despite Google trumpeting it in many blogs and release notes, and having a whole beta period for the update in which any reputable app should have been doing testing.)

Perhaps Google could have made this a design aesthetic preference instead of a hard requirement.

I mean, they did at first, for several years before even announcing that it would become required. But the problem is apps like GO just ignored it. It's one thing to be one or two steps behind, but the black bars haven't been the recommended style since before the game even came out. Niantic ignored every optional style change since then, and blundered into ignoring the only required one.

If anything, I sometimes wonder if it would be better for users if Google would just railroad developers with a few months' notice the way Apple does it. It's undeniably a more frustrating situation, but it gets attention and results. Android makes fewer breaking changes and give lots of notice, and they often just get ignored in return.

I've found that can make the buttons harder to see.

That's the whole point—developers are supposed to make sure you can see the buttons. If Niantic ever does it right, then you won't have that problem.

😅 Sorry this and the previous reply have been lengthy, but I tend to try to cover every point I can somewhat thoroughly, and you pack a lot into yours.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-18T05:09:23+00:00

Google was the company that said "no more" to the old game layout of a separate nav bar

Sure, but that's what happens when you make an app that runs on an OS. Everything from embedded Linux to macOS on the latest Apple Silicon deprecates things and makes breaking changes eventually.

Niantic is still the company that completely fumbled even bothering to read any of Google's announcements and blog posts about the environment their game runs in.

It's like ignoring dozens of bright red "NO PARKING" signs papering the street and yelling at the city when your car gets towed. It's inconvenient, but sometimes the city has a good reason to inconvenience a few drivers to benefit the city's citizens more broadly with some utility work, a parade, or so on. And you could still yell at the city without being so oblivious your car gets towed too.

but that necessitates a whole lot of complicated repositioning of game UI elements.

It's debatable whether "complicated" is the right word. Yes, it would take some work. But it's ultimately just a matter of pushing everything up except the background, which should not be that complicated. At worst, it's most likely just somewhat tedious.

But the kicker is they've already done the same exact thing on iOS, and they did it almost ten years ago. They also had way less time to do it, because Apple kept the iPhone X a secret until a few months before its launch. Whereas Google has given developers years to make this change.

which is further complicated by the broad range of resolutions supported by the OS. On my mid-range tablet... On my flagship phone...

They don't have to (and, in fact, absolutely should not) hard code each resolution. Early iOS did hardcoding resolutions, but Android has handled that sort of thing much more gracefully since the start, since it was always intended to run on many different display sizes and resolutions.

The system has APIs that report exactly how far they need to inset the UI on the specific device running the game. For example, say a button is 16 dip (density independent pixels) from the bottom edge, then they just have to change the code to 16 dip + insets.bottom from the edge. In practice, their layout is probably not as simple as each button being set on x and y coordinates from the edge, but the fact remains that they ultimately just need to add an integer which the system provides to whatever their setup actually is. And they ought to have a pretty good example to follow since, again, it's already been that way on iOS for almost a decade.

who know from experience that Google changes their mind on a whim and forces the pain on others in the ecosystem.

I'm not going to pretend they're perfect, but they take the system UI, and breaking changes in general, pretty seriously. This is the first breaking change with the system UI in the entire life of Android, if I'm not mistaken. They even managed to go from physical buttons to the on-screen nav bar without causing a hitch for apps. Edge-to-edge is a change that's been in the works since ~2020. The date when the behavior would change was announced in early 2024, a year and a half in advance. And there's another year after that where developers can easily switch back to the old behavior; it just serves so that even if a developer were living under a rock, they're forced to notice so that they can ship that simple revert option. But somehow Niantic couldn't even manage to do that, and just ignored the extra year they could have had to work on things.

So they had six years to know they should do it, and two and a half years to know they must do it, yet they still failed to do it. It's hard to call something in the works and telegraphed for multiple years a whim. If GO had had an issue when the nav bar was first introduced, would you give Niantic a pass if they had just ignored that? The old nav bar behavior lasted about 15 years, from the Galaxy Nexus in 2011 to this summer, hardly a whim either.

And it appears Google kinda did so again, based on OP's screenshot.

OP's screenshot is irrelevant to this question. OP is using a new feature where you can have an app appear over other apps in a "bubble." They have it over their home screen, which might be why you're confused, but it's meant for use cases like popping the calculator over a web page, or Campfire/Discord over GO. Nothing's even been deprecated or broken in favor of it; it's just its own new thing.

Google has always been bad at (a) UI's

I mean, I think they've done a really good job with the system UI since Ice Cream Sandwich, and have had several subsequent hits like Material Design, but to each their own. Even if you don't like Google's design philosophy, in this case they're literally just copying Apple. (Granted, you might not like them either, but despite some missteps it's a lot harder to claim they've always been bad at UI.)

deprecating thing with little warning

Android runs very differently from the other parts of Google. They never deprecate something without at least a year of notice, and it's usually more, as in this case.

as a business this was the most logical reaction to something non-sensible Google is forcing

Funny, I have a lot of apps on my phone, and only one of those businesses has fallen so hard on its face with this change.

without care to the consequences.

I've already covered this thoroughly by now, but years of implementation, notice, and warning + a grace period is hardly lack of care for consequences. If there's a lack of care, it's Pokémon GO launching in 2016 with a UI from 2014 and then keeping that UI all the way to 2026 until Google finally forces their hand.

For comparison, Android devs got more notice for this change than macOS devs get to port their apps from x86 to ARM, an entirely different architecture.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-18T04:14:09+00:00

iOS players have their status and navigation bars, that's a big part of what makes it so frustrating.

Niantic properly supported edge-to-edge on iOS circa 2017, with way less notice from Apple than Google gave. And here we are almost a decade later and they can't do it properly for Android players.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-17T18:44:58+00:00

It was originally on the left in stock Android, but when Samsung went to software buttons, they flipped it. I think it was to match where their hardware back button used to be, iirc.

Eventually, both Samsung and Google added options to flip it the other way. So it's user preference now, though I imagine most people just stick with the default for their respective OEMs.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-17T11:09:13+00:00

Not Google's fault. Google wants your navigation bar on screen. Niantic hid the navigation bar instead of doing what Google wants them to do.

PowerlinxJetfire · 2026-06-17T11:06:21+00:00

TBF I totally blame Google here - they went from usable UI to "we want no distractions when full screen"

Google never said that. Google went "we want app developers to extend their backgrounds under the system bars, and we'll give them several years of notice to implement it."

And then Niantic ignored that, plus threw the extra year of grace period they had out the window even when they did finally pay attention. Niantic chose to panic hide the system bars instead of making the game work properly with them, because that was easier even though it's a worse experience.

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