I saw this originally over at Craig Mod’s Twitter stream. I agree with his take: even though the Iconfactory normally does excellent work, there’s something about the default Sublime Text 2 icon that doesn’t quite click. I like this smooth pure black square alternative by designer Dan Perrera more.
I’ve already linked to a few of these extended back and forth conversations between NYT critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis; they are uniformly excellent. This week’s topic adds optimism to what tends to be a sore spot in the summer movie season: diversity. We’re finally seeing a lot more films this summer that appeal to multiple tastes, not just the hyper violent, lightweight teenage segment. I especially liked Dargis’s indie funding idea:
If I were running a studio (ha!), I would take the money that I’d set aside for the next bad idea (like a remake of “Total Recall”) and give a handful of directors, tested and less so — Todd Haynes, Barry Jenkins, Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Aaron Katz, Benh Zeitlin, Damien Chazelle — $10 million apiece to make whatever they want, as long as the results come in with an R rating or below and don’t run over two hours.
I like Pixelmator as a lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It’s perfect for a quick resize on an iPhone photo or Tumblr snippet before uploading or sending somewhere else. Yet I greatly dislike the Lion preferred auto save/versioning that comes with Pixelmator out of the box. It’s unnecessary and adds bloat to my throwaway, multi MB files.
After a few google searches, there’s actually a really simple solution buried in the support forums. Just one line in the console. Scroll to the thread buttom.
Startup exec Josh Kerr:
Dalton claims that developers are frustrated with Facebook and Twitter’s ad revenue driven platforms that don’t do enough to cater toward developers. He is right, and there are plenty of examples of the pain that goes with trying to build on those platforms, but there just isn’t enough pain to support a completely new product like App.net.
App.net’s current appeal touches more on the anger in the developer community toward Twitter and Facebook and less on the need for another social platform. Once those two companies get their act together and improve their developer programs, the market will quickly loose interest in App.net.
Gamer Hazzen on Ouya, the red hot Kickstarter funded gaming console:
I could go on and look at the other realities of this project, but I won’t. I don’t even care if the thing succeeds or not. I’m just sick of the breathless enthusiasm for a complete unknown in an exceedingly difficult industry.
Agreed. Hazzen goes on to rip apart the economics of this new gaming platform. Be it for big releases or even indie hits, the financial implications don’t seem sound. I don’t see this taking off. I’d expect a more integrated Mac/PC/iOS to TV gaming solution as a much more viable option.
Speaking of Breaking Bad’s Hank Schrader, check out this 40 minute interview with actor Dean Norris on a recent episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. Excellent and revealing. (As a warning, there are some pretty **major spoilers** for the whole Breaking Bad series very early into the interview.)
Seitz, as mentioned here before, is one of my favorite TV and film writers. He takes a bit of a departure with this week’s Breaking Bad episode recap, focusing more on the big picture and where the series is heading.
More than anything else, I loved this observation (major series spoilers ahead):
Walt’s actions in season two sparked a rampage by the Cousins that ultimately landed Walt’s brother-in-law Hank in a wheelchair and turned Hank’s wife Marie into his stressed-out nursemaid. And yet, perverse as it may sound, Hank’s journey is ultimately an example of positive change coming from trauma…He’s more observant, a better listener, and seems to have lost most of his arrogance. He’s smoother. He has gravitas.
This, more than anything else, makes me think it’ll ultimately be Hank who catches or trips up Walt: There’s an odd but pleasing symmetry to their stories.
I had fun listening to hosts Tyler and David run through Nolan’s entire career. Look for some solid insights into the generally overlooked Insomnia and plenty of rants that pit the three Batman films against each other.
Social news site Hacker News has come a long way from its modest roots in 2007. It has diversified its subject matter (though tech and startups still dominate) and in the process has become essential reading for developers, designers and entrepreneurs. I scan HN headlines regularly, at least once every day. Unfortunately, the site’s design is a total eyesore. There’s inadequate line spacing, poor use of typographic hierarchy, little contrast, and comments that stretch out too much – it’s better on the eyes to read on narrower columns.
A simple Chrome or Safari extension that restyles HN’s look is an obvious choice and there are many popular options out there. Yet few address how I tackle HN so I decided to create my own: You can download the Chrome variant at the Chrome Web Store and the Safari extension is available as a direct download on Cloud. You can find downloads and source code for both at my GitHub.
I like to make Hacker News as scannable as possible; I usually ignore comments, point totals and other article stats. To emphasize this I adjusted typography; headlines are bumped up to 24px Helvetica. All other text is secondary and set to 14px or smaller.
Many other extensions are minimal to a fault; there’s little contrast or division between headlines. That cuts down on scan speed as you scroll down a web page. So instead I went in the opposite direction: I added extra white space between articles along with soft gradients to emphasize splits between headlines. I also shifted HN’s color palette away from sepia and oranges to neutral, soft whites. Branding aside, neutrals are just more comfortable to browse through for longer periods.
Note that while I’m not so much into HN article stats, they do help measure “hotness” and article popularity. It’s a lot easier to scan these stats visually instead of deciphering HN’s default view with several tiny numbers crammed next to a headline. To achieve this I swapped out the numbers and replaced them with multi-colored, CSS3 based bar graphs. They automatically appear when mousing over an article and display points (red), comments (yellow) and article age (green). To get a quick snapshot of what’s hot you can tap ‘s’ to turn all article graphs on at once.
Overall, my extension is a slightly different slant on Hacker News than what’s already out there. It’s not for everyone, but if you read HN I encourage you to check it out.
File this under the “why didn’t I discover this earlier?” department. Instacss is a very straightforward, super quick CSS documentation repo. Up till now when I had to cross reference a CSS property, I usually ended up running a Google search with the term and ultimately navigating over to W3 Schools. W3 is still a sold resource, but Instacss is far more useful. It’s super fast with live examples and clear browser compatibility charts.