Lauren Brichter:
The first thing will be an app and that app will be a game. Can’t wait to share it with you.
Lauren created the popular iPhone Twitter client Tweetie, one of the most influential, slickest made apps I’ve ever used. His company Atebits was acquired by Twitter in 2010, but eventually they parted ways.
Now he’s back, but with a game? Bit of a surprise choice, but I can’t wait to see what it looks like.
This is awesome idea: take the already sound idea of throwing a bunch of icons and symbols into a single web-friendly font set and then make them easy to use by invoking the symbols with common terms (e.g. an HTML list item with the word ‘home’ gets replaced by a home icon.) Perhaps most importantly, every set on the site looks great. At $30 to $60 each, it’s a pretty affordable option as well.
The always reliable design firm Teehan+Lax have released a new psd that contains all core elements from iOS 6 along with a great looking iPhone 5 shell. I’ve used Teehan+Lax’s work repeatedly in the past for my own design ideas. They are always very well organized, critical for psds of this size.
Excellent long read over at Fast Company on the rise and fall of the iPhone photo filter app Hipstamatic. It’s focused almost entirely on the startup’s work culture and changing focus over time. There’s a lot of issues noted here that I’ve seen or heard about at other companies, most notably:
But despite the external success of the product, internally, tension had reached a boiling point, and demonstrated Buick’s growing disconnect with Hipstamatic’s developers, in terms of both product development and company direction. The tension spoke to a larger divide between the company’s designers and engineers, an obstacle that most startups face at some point. As [Hipstamatic CEO] Buick tells me, his founding team, which was composed mostly of designers, “never operated [Hipstamatic] as a software company. As we started building that type of company, we ended up with really talented engineers who were not used to our creative process. There was tension. There was separation on the teams.”
Tech companies are increasingly defined by their designer/developer relations. A lack of solid, tight collaboration between the two groups can easily kill company momentum.
A common scenario for me is having a bunch of Safari tabs open and then closing them rapidly before I shut down. Safari saves your previous browser state, but often there’s a lot of good tab nuggets that I’ve closed individually but get lost in the shuffle.
Alternatively I open a lot of tabs from my RSS reader, but because I’m looking to save memory or focus in on work, I want a quick way to save my tab state and get rid of them.
Chrome has had this slickly built in for a while, but no dice on Safari. Enter this simple plugin from Pinboard. You’ve got to be a user, but with one click you can quickly save your tab state and reopen later. Works great.
Great back and forth between BP hosts Tyler, David and guest Scott Nye on the filmography and impact of Tony Scott on modern studio filmmaking. It’s long at two and a half hours but well worth it, especially for some of the insights on Top Gun and Man on Fire, two Scott highlights.
Developer Myles Recny:
My workflow is something like this.
write some code
run the code
get an error message
find the error and back to step 1
Hour by hour, day after day, I do this. Always searching for what’s wrong with what I’m creating, rarely thinking about what’s good about it. It’s a negative reinforcement feedback loop.
Insightful.
I’ve written off most tech opinions on the new iPhone 5 camera because they aren’t written by photography professionals. Granted, it’s clearly better than the 4S, but how does it realistically stack up against a dedicated point and shoot? That’s exactly why DP Review’s recent look at the phone’s camera matters: you get their usual rigorous studio tests and the attention to detail you rarely find elsewhere. (There’s a reason that when it comes to new DSLR releases DP Review is pretty much the review benchmark.)
PTA on shooting with 65mm:
It’s a different film, so it’s a different feeling. It’s really that simple, but ultimately … you know a 35mm camera, they’re small. I mean you can be as small as a little speaker that I’m looking at here, sort of no bigger than a laptop. Some of these cameras are teeny. And with 65mm cameras you are limited, because they’re incredibly large, and they’re loud, and you can’t fling them around or put them on a Steadicam. You can put them on your shoulder if have a really good chiropractor or masseuse.
So they’re limiting in that way, but that was good for us. We were trying to be straightforward and simple and old-fashioned. And loud — they’re very loud. You can hear bzzzzzzz.
Cliché aside, Paul Thomas Anderson embodies the definition of a modern film auteur. He’s not super chatty with the press either so an extended conversation with NPR is a nice find.
Listening to this fun episode only confirmed what I’ve been ranting about for years: why doesn’t Hanks just make another flat out comedy? Post Oscars he strikes me as a funny guy who’s been trapped in serious work for at least the last decade.