Breaking Bad vs. feature length films →
Really interesting discussion over at Reddit on the evolution of long form TV narratives (e.g. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and how they may “challenge” the power of a 1.5 to 3 hour movie.
Really interesting discussion over at Reddit on the evolution of long form TV narratives (e.g. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and how they may “challenge” the power of a 1.5 to 3 hour movie.
I first heard about this new minimalist text editor over at the Systematic podcast. Yes, there’s too many minimal text editors out there, with WriteRoom, ByWord, and iA Writer – my current choice – all being well developed options.
But FoldingText is a bit different. FoldingText reminds me a bit of iA Writer with its lack of a preferences pane and font customization, opting for a soft Courier New. But FoldingText balances it out by adding a lot of power user features: auto Markdown conversion as you type, text folding and focusing and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Then there’s this crazy todo list, Taskpaper like outline and timer functionality, all set and evaluated with plain text.
I can’t say that this will be my new default writing app, but I’ll keep an eye while the app remains in beta.
TechCrunch posts a fairly troubling article on what’s become commonplace in Facebook land: UI slickness to make it more likely that you’ll allow apps to access your personal information.
David Fincher, interviewed by Art of the Title:
I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick. The notion that 24 still photographs are shown in such quick succession that movement is imparted from it — wow! And I thought that there would never be anything that would be as interesting as that to do with the rest of my life.
Read the whole interview, it’s great. Art of the Title also delivers their usual top notch video excerpts alongside the article text.
I’d be remiss of me to not include at least one recap reference to this week’s tense Breaking Bad mid-season episode finale (brief spoilers below). The A.V. Club‘s Donna Bowman says it best here:
The most tragic outcome, it turns out, is not that the world comes apart when you’re at the top. It’s that the soft landing you’ve engineered, after everything has been taken care of and made right, refuses to materialize. It’s that you are your own loose end.
I found the revelation in the episode’s last few moments a bit forced. Yet the idea that Walt’s sheer arrogance sets off his downfall makes a lot of sense.
Designer Lukas Mathis:
Lots of designers seem reluctant to rely on buttons when designing user interfaces for touchscreens, opting to go with more unusual interactions instead. Sure, gestures are sexy. They’re also easy, allowing you to remove clutter from your user interface.
But buttons are discoverable. They can have labels that describe what they do. Everybody knows how to use them. They just work. It’s why we use them to turn on the lights, instead of installing Clappers everywhere.
Exactly. When I developed my little web based weather app Blue Drop gestures were tempting. But when you want something as straightforward as possible, it’s hard to beat simple button taps.