09.10.12 |
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Excellent extended interview between Indiewire‘s Peter Labuza and Michael Slovis, director of photography for Breaking Bad. The show is already very cinematic with a film-like look, but this little exchange was a surprise:
[Show creator Vince Gilligan] said, “If you want to know where I’m coming from, and where my sensibilities lie, you should watch ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,'” which I’m incredibly familiar with and love as well.
Vince loves that movie so much that he and I, between seasons three and four, made a pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot the series in widescreen like a Leone movie, in 2.35 or what would be called Cinemascope. We wanted to do the whole series in that size frame. The two of us were arguing, saying, “If you want to be noticed, if you want people to see what’s going on, we’ll be the first! Everybody will see!” But they didn’t let us do it.
Breaking Bad in 2.35? The implications of that on TV would have been huge.
09.10.12 |
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In a small amount of shameless self-promotion, I’m teaching a course over at General Assembly starting tonight on core front end web development: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you’re in NYC and looking to bolster your skills for web, design, back end development, startup management, and many other tech skills, browse through General Assembly’s site for other courses. They’ve got everything from quick, 90 minute one-off classes to multi week intensives. Excellent staff and two nice spaces in the Flatiron district.
09.10.12 |
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Software developer Reginald Braithwaite on Twitter likely killing off updates for their Mac client:
Even if they have a new version “in the can,” releasing it today means people falling in love with its features and being even more resistant to using the web. It means support costs. It means sending a mixed message. If the web’s the place, why not go “all in” on it now? Why wait for tomorrow if it’s the right decision today?
And why wouldn’t it be the right decision? The web is the ultimate write-once, run-everywhere platform. Why incur the additional expense and headache of maintaining multiple, heterogenous development platforms unless a vendor forces your hand by selling a gajillion devices that don’t have a decent web browser?
I tend to agree with Reginald here. Granted, I, like almost everyone else, is pissed about Twitter’s recent antagonism toward third party clients. Yet Twitter’s own official app has to support a huge number of platforms, especially when considering the global marketplace. The web in this context makes sense.
09.07.12 |
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(Spoiler warning, this linked video has footage through Season 5’s midseason finale “Gliding Over All”, so don’t watch if you’re not caught up.)
This eight minute tribute to Walter White’s evolution is expertly edited by YouTube user UltraBrawl. I can’t think of a better way to mark Breaking Bad‘s epic four and a half seasons. It only adds to my anticipation for the series finale next summer.
09.07.12 |
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If you’re a web designer, developer, work in a web company or are just curious about the industry in general, ALA‘s annual survey is essential reading. It’s pretty heavily favored by responses from developers (39.4%) and designers (25.1%) yet pretty indicative of the industry as a whole.
09.07.12 |
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Excellent performance tips from the HTML5 Rocks team. I especially like the graphs that compare core rendering performance between the most popular web browsers. IE 10 has some impressive numbers here.
09.06.12 |
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Foggy is an interesting jQuery plugin for blurring page elements. Yet I can’t help but be concerned about the performance implications for browsers that don’t support the native CSS3 blur (-webkit-filter: blur) attribute. Making several copies of an HTML element to be reinserted in the DOM is often costly.
09.06.12 |
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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.
09.05.12 |
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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.
09.05.12 |
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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.