This typographic blog post has already been passed around tech and design circles, but it’s absolutely worth a look if you haven’t seen it. The subject matter is 2009’s Moon and it’s cool to see a lot of futuristic fonts in discussion. You’ll probably learn something about Eurostyle; I had no idea there were variants (like Microstyle) that deviated slightly from the original typeface.
Six minutes of Criterion Collection staff making classic films gorgeous? Sold. Keep your eye on the whole Gizmodo video collection on Vimeo while you’re at it; it’s uniformly smart content.
Major props to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann for keeping the hype meter in check and not giving a final review of an entirely online-only game yet. And if there’s any commentary that stands out about one of the most anticipated games of this year, it’s this:
Titanfall doesn’t have time for that nonsense; it’s way too focused on being a great multiplayer shooter for people who already enjoy them. That leads to an interesting conundrum and a package that manages to be laser-focused on a specific type of gameplay, which can make it also feel a little too small. It all comes down to how much you already enjoy these games and how badly you want something that updates the Call of Duty formula in some new, exciting ways.
That’s a great summary. A significant evolution of the traditional first person shooter genre but it’s not necessarily going to convert the unconverted.
It feels like it’s rare to wait more than a few weeks before another JavaScript-powered open source MVC framework comes along. That’s exactly why Lauren Orsini’s article on ReadWrite is so helpful. She goes over the strengths and weakness of the three most popular frameworks. For me, especially coming into a Ember.js completely fresh, it’s an excellent starting point.
Damon Houx of Badass Digest, describing the plot of Knock Off:
Marcus has to confront Eddy about the nanobombs in the knockoff product, and it gives Van Damme his finest acting moment to date, where he tells his semi-brother that he made a deal for him with the feds as he’s threatened with a gun. Sure, you could compare it to the “pull the strings” speech in Ed Wood, but Van Damme is fully committed. That scene then ends with Eddy being targeted by a missile which sends him flying outside, to die in a green flame explosion. It’s followed by an action scene starts where Van Damme and Schneider must escape from a fruit warehouse, which is a stunning set piece of claustrophobia as most of the fruit workers have long but dull knives, and the fruit around appears to be spiky pineapples (it doesn’t have the stems so I’ve never been sure) which makes even the fruit hreatening. The sequence ends with Schneider and Van Damme escaping and mumbling “Hoola, hoola hoola. Hoola hoola hoola.”
Completely unavailable via streaming rental. I’m not spending $8 to buy this one either. Unfortunate.
Mike Barthel, writing for The Awl:
These are the lines on which the critical battle-lines have been drawn: narrative-heavy AAA games get pushed to a mainstream audience as breathtaking advances in realism and size; critics respond by championing the difficult and the handmade. Each side represents a competing argument about how games can justify themselves as art. AAA games, and consumer game reviewers, use the logic of Hollywood blockbusters: big budgets, big successes, big names, big pictures…
…Indie games, on the other hand, are justified in the same terms as mid-century modernist art, especially poetry. They are not for the masses, but for a discerning elite. They are intentionally out of step with current trends. They are by single creators, generally, and those creators are lauded as heroic…
…Both of these approaches feel incomplete.
Great, thoughtful piece.
Author, manager and developer Michael Lopp:
This morning I realized I might have a productive way to twist status reports into a useful exercise. Let’s call them context reports. A status report documents actions both completed and planned. A context report documents the reason why (and to a lesser extent how) you’re completing these actions and I suspect this information is far more useful to everyone involved.
Being in a job where I’m rarely physically present in most meetings, it’s annoying when I see bullet after bullet point of exactly what happened. The why is so much more important.
The new minimal text editor Writer Pro is a worthwhile upgrade over its predecessor, iA Writer. It’s a very polished product with useful features like multiple writing modes that each have their own custom font. There’s also Syntax Control, a tool that highlights select parts of your document for easier revisions and edits.
Admittedly I didn’t expect to have such a positive experience; Writer Pro launched in a crowded field of already well made, minimal text editors. There’s Information Architects’ own iA Writer, which already shares the core Writer Pro feature set. And Byword is an editor with exceptional Markdown support, keyboard shortcuts and exporting options.
Yet Writer Pro distinguishes itself over the competition with subtle yet important design details:
Writer Pro doubles down on its existing design strengths with its new writing modes: Note, Write, Edit and Read. You can jump between modes at any time; switching from one writing mode to another changes the font and cursor color to optimize for the task at hand. Content remains unchanged.
Because content is static, Writer Pro’s mode switching can feel superfluous at first; negative reviews on the Mac App Store harp on this a lot. However, after switching between modes for several weeks, the feature has a positive effect on my writing. Note mode utilizes a thin, ultra clean sans serif that pairs well, to quote iA, with the “clean and pristine” nature that notes tend to have. The typography here pushed me in the direction of shorter bullet points over long, rambling sentences.
Write mode retains the monospaced Nitti font from iA Writer. It’s blockier and inherently easier to flow from sentence to sentence, better for uninterrupted writing. Edit and Read modes use Tiempos, a higher contrast serif. This font corrects one of my complaints about the original iA Writer; Nitti was awesome for actual writing, but for editing long form pieces, Nitti’s fluid structure wasn’t ideal (there’s a reason you rarely see idiosyncratic sans-serifs like Nitti used for long reads.) Tiempos is a far better reading and editing choice.
Just to make sure I wasn’t buying into empty typographic fluff, I used Writer Pro’s modes against their suggested intentions for several days. To the program’s credit, writing was more difficult: long form pieces in Note node were written decidedly slower than average. And editing paragraphs in Write node felt awkward with too much space between characters.
Writer Pro’s other significant new feature is Syntax Control. With a click or keyboard shortcut, most of the document fades out, highlighting only the sentence you’re on or just a document’s adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs, prepositions or conjunctions. It’s effectively iA Writer’s “focus mode” on steroids.
Unlike writing modes that I use throughout the writing process, I only found Syntax Control useful for final edits and draft revisions on longer pieces. That slightly dulls this feature’s impact but it’s still useful to cut down on verbiage. Those who need absolute focus on what they are writing will likely appreciate Syntax Control on the current sentence (identical to iA Writer’s focus mode.) I rarely use Syntax Control this way but it’s helpful when you’re having trouble putting together a troublesome sentence.
While overall Writer Pro is impressive, there’s a few small issues that need work. The Markdown preview window has poor styling with a font size that’s too small and lines that stretch out as far as you resize the window; it feels like an afterthought feature. It’s also odd iA doesn’t automatically covert Markdown syntax (e.g. headlines, bold text, links) when you switch to Writer Pro’s Read mode. Given that iA already went far enough to make this the one mode with a change in functionality (you can’t edit, the cursor and misspelling highlights are removed) they should go all the way to maximize the reading experience. And, unfortunately, this lack of Markdown syntax conversion extends to PDF exports too. It makes PDF exports useless for Markdown writers; get a copy of Brett Terpstra’s excellent Marked 2 as a workaround for now. Additionally, as a writer who’s often typing away emails and blog posts late at night, Writer Pro could really use a “night mode” with light text on a dark background. It would violate Writer Pro’s general lack of customization, but adding the feature would enhance readability and lower eye strain in dark environments, two big wins.
I’m also seeing performance problems with Writer Pro every so often; the CPU usage suddenly spikes and you’re left with an unresponsive, sluggish program, usually after I have the program active for an extended period. It’s rare but annoying when it happens.
Over the past year I’ve written mostly in Byword on both on iOS and the Mac, with occasional forays into iA Writer when I’m in the right mood. Now, after weeks of heavy Writer Pro usage, it’s my main writing choice on the Mac going forward. That said, with its strict minimalism and higher cost, Writer Pro isn’t for everyone. If it’s your first look at a plain text writer, Byword is a more well rounded, cheaper alternative. Nonetheless, if Writer Pro’s visual mode changes and Syntax Control sound compelling, or if you’re a typographic geek like me, give Writer Pro a try.
The sound and picture quality isn’t pretty, but it’s wonderful seeing Spielberg and a much younger Harrison Ford make history. It’s an hour filled with interviews and behind the scenes footage. Speilberg’s direction bits to the actors is especially interesting (via Jason Kottke.)
Ask almost any developer: we’re picky about our color schemes in our text editors. I see a lot of suggestions online, but many are poorly thought out or don’t have decent coverage among multiple programming languages. But Lavavel developer Dayle Rees really outdid himself with this package. It’s available across several of the most popular editors (Sublime Text, Coda, VIM, XCode) and he provides 50 plus variations, in both subtle and more high contrast forms. Best of all, I couldn’t find one that isn’t well designed.
Generally I’m a die hard fan of Solarized Dark out of the default Sublime Text 3 setup. But Dayle’s color schemes are tempting; I’m running a few test development days with some of the darker variations that match my style.