05.13.13 |
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iOS developer Dave Addey:
Apple’s iOS hardware business model – currently its largest revenue stream – is based on making a large margin from a premium hardware product. Their trick is hiding this fact from customers, and selling the iPhone and iPad not on their hardware specification, but on what you can do with them. And that, in every Apple advert, is all about the apps…
…This business model means that it is in Apple’s interest for the hardware to be as expensive as possible, and for the apps to be as cheap as possible.
True, and Dave has a lot of smart suggestions. But I don’t expect Apple to offer much of anything in terms of change, especially when iOS is still the considered the premier platform for third party developers. The numbers of the tech savvy begging for paid upgrades and trial periods are dwarfed by those that rarely make big purchases on the App Store.
05.13.13 |
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Well researched analysis over at Ph. D student Yossi Oren’s blog which compares the physical battery drain of running HTML5 video versus Flash. The post recently ranked high on Hacker News and deservedly so; the graph shows a remarkable difference between the two video delivery methods.
05.03.13 |
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Legendary game designer Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island) on modern adventure gaming:
The focus is more on making the games themselves enjoyable. I think that is a place adventure games are going. The Walking Dead is a great example of really great games that have no puzzles. The puzzles that are there might as well not be. You just want to get on with the story. I think we should stop thinking about them as adventure games and start thinking about them as just games, or ways of telling stories.
05.02.13 |
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I hadn’t heard of Twitter Design Director Martin Ringlein before this talk, but regardless of his exact background, he’s a natural speaker, and I loved his frankness when it came to worker capacity prior to burning out. It’s really a talk that can apply to almost any fast paced/startup profession, from producers to designers to web developers. Martin goes off on some tangents near the beginning which pad out the length of the talk, but I’d still recommend it to almost anyone.
05.01.13 |
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Very well edited “back to the camera shot” montage, covering everything from Sunshine to Gone With the Wind.
04.30.13 |
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Even with a split second pause for the Ruby based gem to kick in, it’s awesome typing ‘gs’ into Alfred and getting back inline Google results. Author Aviv Kiss notes its a “hacky attempt”, but for version 1.0 it’s smart workflow, one that makes me optimistic on more complex upcoming Alfred workflows.
04.26.13 |
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Really interesting article by self-described fitness geek Maroun Najjar. There are insights on differences between light, deep and REM sleep, caffeine, napping and more. It’s a pretty quick read but I learned a lot.
04.25.13 |
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Taffy Brodesser-Akner, writing for The New York Times:
Why did he turn into an action star at all?…with each of his three Oscar nominations, there was a sense that he was achieving great things despite the hindrance of his handsomeness. “Can you believe that Tom Cruise was nominated?” Like he had to overcome a great handicap.
So maybe it makes perfect sense that he leapt into action films and thrillers, with the rare foray into something like “Lions for Lambs” or “Rock of Ages.” Finally, here was a genre where his good looks didn’t require explanation, were not presented as an impediment, where he didn’t have to worry about being too pretty for the position…
More than that, here was a genre in which he could outdo anyone.
As much as Tom Cruise’s presence in many movies can drive me crazy, the man’s work ethic is undeniable. From the Mission: Impossible franchise to Minority Report, Cruise’s skill as an action star elevates many of his choices from merely watchable to enjoyable.
04.24.13 |
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An hour long talk by Google web developer and evangelist Paul Irish at a recent HTML5 developer conference. Some great tools and ideas here, from shell customization to SSH and Chrome DevTools tricks.
04.24.13 |
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This is a pretty brilliant tool for anyone maintaining larger sets of CSS. The little Ruby gem parses any passed in CSS files and finds duplicated rule sets. I’d recommend using it with the -n flag to only include duplications with a minimum number of matches (in the case of my current day job, eight or more.) The savings were significant: after some cleanup I saved several hundred lines of CSS, a big win for performance and organization.