I read all the time how the cable, TV and movie industry will collapse under the weight of the internet and other new tech…but, as analyst Dan Frommer writes, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. (It’s all about who holds the content.)
Tim Stevens likes it, but there’s a problem:
The primary Apple apps — Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. — have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.
Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges.
This is a serious issue, one I hope Apple makes easily correctable for Mac developers. A even bigger issue is web imagery; i’m seeing many designers on my Twitter feed complain about the sharpness of web images up against well defined text.
Tech news moves fast but some discussion topics are timeless. Copyright and digital ownership is one of them and the Vergecast podcast covered it in depth on their episode two weeks ago. I really enjoyed listening to hosts Josh Topolsky and Nilay Patel break down where the movie, TV and music industry have to move to stay competitive. It’s all clustered at the beginning of the episode through roughly the first half hour.
Great creative commons licensed icon font. I can see this really coming in handy on some future side projects.
While on the subject, if you’re in the market for web page icons (with flat colors and no fancy treatments) bundling them in a single font is often the best way to go. Fonts are vector based, making them infinitely scaleable for multi-resolution displays and you get a single http request to pull in the full icon list. This really played out well with the Climacons Font on my Blue Drop web app.
Famed game designer Peter Molyneux:
You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube. If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.
As you’re doing that, these words will come up: ‘Curiosity, what is inside the black cube?’ That’s when you realize it’s not just you tapping away at that black cube, it’s the whole world. The whole world is tapping away is revealing layers of this cube.
So so Molyneux to run a project like this. Here’s hoping it translates into a kick ass game.
Pay what you want and get four highly regarded games – Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, Limbo, Amnesia and Psychonauts – for Mac, PC and Linux. Pay a bit more (about $9 at the time of this writing) to unlock four more games, including Bastion and Super Meat Boy. If you’re at all vaguely interested in PC or Mac gaming you’ve probably heard about this. It deserves the hype. I’m generally not much of a Mac gamer, but the chance to catch up with Limbo, Braid and Super Meat Boy for bit more than $10, much of which goes to charity, is a no brainer.
Act soon – there’s only one day left in this offer.
The Verge’s Paul Miller wrote a solid article on how the big three console companies will evolve:
In the game world, where the topic of “casual” vs “hardcore” gaming is still a hot-button issue, Microsoft has side-stepped and pulled its chips off the table: it’s just mainstream. When Microsoft and Sony built Kinect and Move, respectively, to compete with the then-dominant Wii, they were both making a casual play. When the backlash came a year later, as hardcore gamers felt like they were being abandoned, Sony was quick to shore up that fanbase, but Microsoft kept it casual.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as saying Microsoft is “just” mainstream but Paul is on the right track. You can substitute ‘mainstream’ here with ‘evolving’; Sony is steadfast on 3D and the hard core market while Nintendo has a multiplayer network out of the 90s and regurgitating IPs from the 80s. Only Microsoft acknowledges the mobile elephant in the room.
Looks like a very slick, compact plugin to generate CSS3 transitions with jQuery calls. Part of me naturally questions why to not just write the CSS3 transitions directly, but this could work well with some sort of Modernizr-esque graceful browser degradation. Browsers that have CSS3 animations rely on jQuery Transit while legacy browsers get more traditional jQuery-based animation methods.
There are many (too many) tech articles that summarize this year’s WWDC keynote news. If you read only one, check out The Wirecutter roundup first. All killer, no filler.
John Gruber on the new “next-generation” MacBook Pro:
The catch is that it’s expensive. That’s why it debuted alongside a brand-new update to the 15-inch non-retina MacBook Pro, rather than replacing it…surely we’re going to see displays of this caliber roll out across the MacBook line, one by one, as soon as it becomes economically feasible.
Best to compare it to the original MacBook Air from 2008. The first Air was expensive and not for everyone, but it showed the future of Apple’s (and, really, the industry’s) portables. That’s what the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is: the future of portable Macs.
I have decidedly mixed feelings on Gruber’s usual opinions but he really hits it dead on regarding the new high-end Macbook Pro. I’d predict by next year’s WWDC retina display tech will reach the Macbook Airs.