Modern Hollywood blockbusters have one thing in common: lots and lots of guns. The New York Times talks to The Specialists, the largest East Coast supplier of prop movie weapons in the East Coast. It’s crazy there’s over 5000 prop weapons in a bunker somewhere in the middle of Soho.
Dropbox has unveiled a new competition for this year:
Dropquest is a multi-step scavenger hunt that has you solve a series of puzzles (inspired by the likes of MIT’s mystery hunt or notpron [though not nearly as time/effort-consuming]). Everyone who completes Dropquest will get at least 1 GB of space (even if you participated last year). Also, everyone starts at the same time, but the questers who finish the soonest get amazing prizes!
Cool. Late at night after work I might tinker with the objectives here. Get cracking if you’re interested as the deadline to finish is June 2nd.
TUAW’s Steven Sande wrote an article early this month on how the Brooklyn Tap House has adopted iPads for its point-of-sale system:
The main attraction for the POSLavu system, according to restauranteur and co-owner Hugo Salazar, was the price. Many restaurants use systems from Micros or Aloha that can sport price tags of US$20,000 or more; the bottom line for the devices and software at the Brooklyn Tap House was about $7,000.
Crazy to think how Bobcat Goldthwait, probably best known as Zed in the Police Academy series, has evolved into a independent (and very dark) film director. A wide ranging interview with Goldthwait appears on a recent Vice post, where he gives frank advice:
My point is this—if you want to be happy in showbiz (or any creative field), listen to that voice inside you. Even if it says “Fuck it” sometimes. Work with your friends. Avoid chasing fame or money. Just do what you want to do, when and how you want to do it. And if it’s not making you happy, quit. Quit hard, and quit often. Eventually you’ll end up somewhere that you never want to leave.
Slick buying guide from The Verge. Especially nice work on the info graphics measuring set top box versatility.
Tracey Lien for Polygon on the indie gaming studio Capybara:
Vella says that the main thing they got out of their film school education was the ability to critique their own work – a skill that has played a crucial role in shaping their award-winning games.
“We’re a ruthlessly self-critical studio,” he says. “Our studio culture is: If you have an opinion, say it. Don’t be afraid to critique yourself. One of my favorite things is sitting in a meeting with programmers and artists and sound designers and producers, and going from visuals to audio and having meaningful conversations from every discipline, rather than just saying ‘OK, you’re an artist so you just do art and that’s it.’
Tight collaboration and T-shaped employees make all the difference. I still haven’t gotten around to Sword & Sworcery, but Capybara’s Critter Crunch is a great game.
The Interate podcast gets some big names in the app design world to pop on their show. This week was exceptionally big with Tweetie creator Loren Bricher. The episode touches on a lot of interesting subjects: the conservatism of Apple’s iPhone UI, Bricher’s preferred design tools, Blackberry 10 and more.
Co-founder of Hunch and startup investor Chris Dixon:
The key question when trying to value Facebook’s stock is: can they find another business model that generates significantly more revenue per user without hurting the user experience? (And can they do that in an increasingly mobile world where display ads have been even less effective.) Perhaps that business model is sponsored feed entries, as Facebook seems to be hoping (along with Twitter and perhaps Tumblr). The jury is still out on that model. Personally, I have trouble seeing how insertions into the feeds aren’t just more prominent display ads. You still have to stoke demand and convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents.
Chris nails it here. In other advertising models, users have purchasing intent, while that’s generally not the case on Facebook. Less intent translates into ineffective ads.
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.
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.