05.16.12 |
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Shawn Blanc:
The idea of a Retina display on a Macintosh sounds fantastic. The words I’m typing at this moment are onto my iPad with its high resolution screen, and the text looks stellar. Retina displays rock. Sure, there are downsides and ugly bits that a Retina display Mac would bring with it — such as non-retina applications and websites — and Marco Arment does a good job of articulating those.
I have the good fortune of using applications on my Mac that are developed by bleeding edge developers. In addition to the native OS X apps I use (Mail and Safari), the 3rd-party apps like OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Coda, Transmit, MarsEdit, Byword, iA Writer, and others which are all run by developers which I have no doubt will be quick to update their Mac applications to support Apple’s new high resolution displays.
I need to link to Shawn more often. He’s a great tech writer and pretty level headed, as exemplified in this article. Yet I am more worried about websites with Retina displays than Shawn is; it’s a big development on the web development side and it’s going to take a while for the community to adapt.
05.16.12 |
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Mat Honan wrote a pretty incredible article yesterday on Yahoo’s floundering with Flickr over at Gizmodo:
“By the time we were looking at Flickr, Yahoo was getting the shit kicked out of it by Google. The race was on to find other areas of search where we could build a commanding lead,” says one high ranking Yahoo executive familiar with the deal.
Flickr offered a way to do that. Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable.
“That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn’t give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users.”
And that was the problem. At the time, the Web was rapidly becoming more social, and Flickr was at the forefront of that movement. It was all about groups and comments and identifying people as contacts, friends or family. To Yahoo, it was just a fucking database.
I rarely associate Nick Denton’s Gizmodo these days with in-depth sound, writing and reporting. But wow, they really rose the bar on this one. Perhaps I should give them another chance.
05.16.12 |
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This iPhone UI proposal is well thought out but it’s fundamentally too complex for most user needs. I found the extra bottom row of apps especially unnecessary; I’d bet if you were to look at user stats users rarely invoke the double tap app switcher for apps older than the four previously used.
However, major props for Verge forum user brentcas identifying two major problems with iOS 5. First, turning on and off WiFi, Bluetooth and brightness requires way too many taps in Settings given how in demand they are. In addition Spotlight searching should be more accessible; as users add more apps, sometimes an open ended simple keyboard search is ideal to cut through the complexity. I hope both issues are addressed in iOS 6.
05.15.12 |
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Another A List Apart, another strong article on CSS. Author Alan Stearns dives into “faux” font styles and why they should be avoided.
05.15.12 |
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More proof that small design changes deliver a big impact.
05.15.12 |
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Wired interviews Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz:
“We don’t know where we are in this cycle,” Hartz says from Eventbrite’s San Francisco headquarters. “We can’t know how much longer this abundance of capital will last, but I don’t want to be a part of it. When I see a massive number of new investors and carpetbaggers coming in, it’s time to get out.”
Hartz doesn’t use the word bubble; it’s more complicated than that for him as a guy who sits on both sides of the money equation as an investor and an entrepreneur. It’s more a winter is coming view of the startup world, especially for the consumer internet on which Hartz focuses. His advice: Get prepared for a chill to set in.
05.14.12 |
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Michael Lopp, writing for Rands in Response:
Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers’ livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe. In one universe, you sport a handheld Portal gun that cleverly allows you to interrupt physics. In a slightly different universe, you have this tool called a cloning stamp that empowers you to sample and copy any part of a photo.
Awesome article. If you love design, this is an really smart read, illustrating how the goals of game and application designers have so much in common.
05.14.12 |
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I read this article and found myself nodding along to much of what Nick Thompson had to say. It was a genuine surprise, given that the Condé Nast iPad and web apps are so poor. Then I read this:
The Verge: Magazine apps are often slammed for being slow, large, and kind of kludgy. Why is it so difficult to do properly? Who’s doing the best job?
Nick Thompson: New York has an excellent app, as does Wired. I’ve also been very impressed with Esquire and Vanity Fair.
TV: Why do you think The New Yorker has been so successful on the iPad, relative to other magazines?
NT: The main reason is that people genuinely like the magazine, and they like to read it. Also, we’ve, very deliberately, kept our iPad app very clean. There isn’t much clutter; it’s really just the stories, with some added slideshows, videos, and infographics.
Naturally, the guy singles out other Condé brands. Ironically, with potentially the exception of Wired, where the extra media content fits well, it’s a disaster everywhere else he mentions, especially Vanity Fair. Slow load times, gigantic downloads and extraneous videos that slow the experience.
And I’m sorry Nick, but when there’s a 200 plus MB download for each “clean” iPad New Yorker, I’m looking elsewhere. Love the content, and I read it every week…on my Kindle, which downloads in about 20 seconds.
05.13.12 |
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Michael Mirasol, IndieWire:
The last decade or so was a phenomenal time for the superhero movie genre, both thematically and financially…
But as the decade came to a close, the genre started to have less lofty goals. Since 2008, when the great pairing of Iron Man and The Dark Knight bookended that year's Summer Blockbuster season, there hasn't been a single worthy successor mentioned in the same breath.
Well written and observant opinion piece by Mirasol. An excellent seven minute video essay accompanies his writing.
05.12.12 |
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A supercut of just the kicks from Kickboxer. As the A.V. Club article notes, Jean-Claude Van Damme at his prime was pretty insane physically. It's very much a film relic of its time.