07.28.12 |
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Developer/Karbon founder Garrett Murray:
The app landscape will improve with time, but the internet is a different story.
Going forward, hopefully, most thoughtful folks will make new websites Retina-ready from the start. When I created the site for Scratch, I did just that, and it looks amazing on this new rMBP. But for the most part the internet will look relatively crummy on Retina displays for quite a while.
Very true. In short, there’s no magic bullet yet for effective, responsive images that scale to both retina level and “standard def” displays. Fascinating to see how this will all play out in the web dev and design community over the next few months.
07.26.12 |
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Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Vulture:
“Madrigal” is a housekeeping episode, mainly concerned with setting up future events and clarifying old ones. While it checks in with Walt, Skyler, Jesse, and Saul, its spotlight is on a glorified supporting player, Jonathan Banks’s security guy–hit man, Mike. But I’d still put it on a list of Breaking Bad’s best episodes, because it’s perfect, and because it underlines the show’s distinguishing characteristic: a commitment to clarity.
I couldn’t agree more. Breaking Bad is an already consistently excellent show, but “Magrigal” was a standout, mostly due to Jonathan Banks’s work. Generally I’ve found the episodes near the end of each season to be the strongest, but “Magrigal” is only episode two of this truncated 2012 run. I can’t wait for the remaining six this summer.
07.26.12 |
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Blockr is a new Chrome extension that blocks you from the internet until you’ve reached some writing or coding goal. A bit draconian perhaps, but for easily distracted workers, this may be worth investing time into.
07.25.12 |
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If you’re a Growl user upgrading to Mountain Lion, this little app forwards Growl messages to Notification Center. I haven’t tried it out yet, but post upgrade I’ll give it a try – it looks interesting.
07.25.12 |
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I’m very, very late to the party on this one, but this is a great jQuery plugin from CSS guru Chris Coyier and the web design shop Paravel. If you dig fluid width video embeds – something becoming fairly essential with modern responsive design – it’s worth giving this plugin a look. I recently incorporated FitVids.js into an experimental Tumblr theme I’m working on as a side project. Worked great and implementation was straightforward.
07.25.12 |
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As is the case with any major Mac OS X update, third party apps may have to be updated for compatibility with Mountain Lion. The best resource, recommended all over my Twitter stream and various tech blogs – is RoaringApps. Type in an app name and see if it’s confirmed ready for the 10.8 switch.
With the last few Mac OS X releases, I’ve gotten progressively less and less worried about app compatibility; when in doubt, it works. That said, for critical apps, a quick check over at RoaringApps is well worth your time.
07.25.12 |
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John Siracusa just posted his (canonical?) review of Mountain Lion to Ars Technica twenty minutes ago. Based on his past work, it’s going to be exhaustive, amazing, and well worth it for any Mac geek who wants to learn what’s different about the 10.8 release today.
07.24.12 |
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Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland:
Not only does going through Microsoft Studios mean keeping your game exclusive to Xbox Live Arcade for a certain period of time after launch, but the outfit also takes an additional percentage of a game’s revenues on top of the standard cut taken for all Xbox Live Arcade titles, Carmel said. “That’s why we see savvy console developers like Supergiant [Bastion] and Klei [Shank] go through third-party publishers—those publishers get better terms from XBLA (directly) than a small developer could get from Microsoft Studios, and they can launch the game simultaneously on multiple platforms.”
Steam and iOS are clearly leading the pack here. Will the traditional consoles have a better solution for more open game distribution when the PS4/Xbox 720 are released next year? I hope so, but I have my doubts.
07.24.12 |
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LiveReload is an app that does exactly what it sounds like: Apply CSS edits and image changes in your web work live; no annoying manual reloads of your web page any more. I while ago I gave an earlier version of this tool a whirl, but it was hard to set up; lots of command line calls and Ruby gems.
Not anymore – one $10 Mac App Store app and a simple Chrome extension and I’m ready for business. I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t discover and start using this tool earlier; I’d highly recommend checking it out if you’re a web developer.
07.23.12 |
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Nice open debate thread over on Stack Exchange regarding developer attitude and work ethic in the office. A lot of interesting and helpful replies here.