Urbit

Nutshell: Over the last year or so, Tlon's been in the position of taking an expansive vision of what urbit software looks like (digital basics), and converging onto a point where our core work is a lot simpler. 

"Digital basics" was a product of a time when Urbit (Foundation) and Tlon's concerns were one and the same

Now that we're distinct entities, we've taken a beat to really hone in own specific ideas for what "good software" is, regardless of it being built on Urbit.

Of course, the bet we're making is that Urbit as a "foundation technology" promotes superior software design practices, so our destinies remain intertwined.

A little bit before Assembly Lisbon, we were embarking on two branches of design development that expressed these thoughts. 

The first of these was the compression of Talk (a messaging app) and groups (a discord app) into a single mobile app, a move informed by observing these apps were the most widely used (and data)

The second of these branches was a desktop-focused interface code-named "Surface". Surface was primarily working through how to make multiple apps usable/linkable across a single space. 

While elements of it appeared to ref Grid, Surface wasn't really interested in the developer experience and app distribution problem

While in the last few months we've emphasized the continual simplification/honing of the mobile app, we're drawing on some ideas from Surface (and older ideas we hadn't been in the position to build) that will inform some novel experiences in the mobile app context soon

This resulted in a lot of creative tension in communicating what the "core" intent and audience of "Urbit software" was. I think a good amount of the UX issues people dealt with post-Grid release were mired in the push and pull of whether Urbit was a developer's technology, or a technology for everyday people