03.28.13 |
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Film critic Karina Longworth, writing for Slate:
Pacino’s career has long seemed to run on a parallel track to that of Robert DeNiro, and while there’s no shortage of apparent money-grubbing laurel-resting on the young Vito Corleone’s resume, De Niro has shown more agility with reinvention. His recent return to Academy approval, cultural vitality, and general respect via his supporting role in Silver Linings Playbook suggests a kind of savvy that it’s hard to imagine present-day Pacino exhibiting, as well as workmanlike humility. DeNiro’s work in Silver Linings proves that he can take and play a role that a lot of other actors could play. When was the last time Pacino played anything but Pacino?
03.27.13 |
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A super cut of Steven Soderbergh’s work as cinematographer throughout his films. Almost everyone knows Soderbergh as the indie breakthrough that’s made many very well constructed films of the past two decades, from Traffic to the Oceans Eleven series. Yet many forget he often serves as DP on his own films under a Peter Andrews pseudonym. There’s a certain aesthetic look of his that has slightly changed over the years; in more recent years he has favored very shallow focus, tighter closeups and less camera movement.
03.27.13 |
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If you’re a web developer you’re invariably spending a lot of time in browser development tools, be it Chrome’s DevTools, Safari’s web inspector or Firefox’s Firebug. I find that Chrome really leads the pack with its DevTools, and this awesome, free interactive online course by Code School and Google can take you from newbie to expert. I considered myself pretty solid with DevTools knowledge, but with a quick review through the lessons I learned a lot of little tricks as well.
03.26.13 |
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Well known designer Craig Mod shares an interesting solution for revamping the default Twitter.com look with a combination of a Fluid app instance and lots of custom CSS. There’s a chance that Craig broke down and settled on a native app like Tweetbot or Twitterrific since his post; I doubt any power user (including yours truly) would ever be fully satisfied with what the plain site has to offer. But for casual users it’s a really simple workflow, one that’s especially appealing to those that already mostly view Twitter through the website.
03.26.13 |
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I enjoyed reading this extended interview with frequent Grantland contributor Tom Bissell, now a writer on the just released Gears of War: Judgement. Tom’s statement here on why first and third person shooters are so popular was especially interesting:
If combat has any positive attributes, it’s that, for a lot of people, it forms the most intense emotional relationships they will ever have with human beings for the rest of their lives. So I think a shooter, which is what Gears is, can awaken some of those borderline—I don’t want to say positive attributes of combat, but it does touch on some of the exhilaration of combat. I’m not the first person to suggest that, within the horror of combat, there is something beautiful and exhilarating. The reason shooters are so popular, I think, is that we all want to touch that fire. We want to put our hands in just far enough to feel the heat without actually burning ourselves.
03.22.13 |
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An excellent deep dive by developer/designer Paul Stamatiou regarding his approach to handle images that looks great on both normal and HDPI (a.k.a. ‘retina’) devices. Pay special attention to his work on how to effectively cut 1x and 2x sprites, he includes useful screenshots.
03.21.13 |
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As usual, Chris Coyier over at CSS Tricks writes a fairly comprehensive post on the pros and cons of using SVGs. I’m generally a fan of the format – for my day job we tend to use a mixture of both 1x + 2x pngs and svgs to serve up retina-friendly images.
03.21.13 |
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Louis Lazaris offers a fairly novel approach for trying to write more modular, SMACSS like CSS code with media queries. Louis pushes for a lot of small, repetitive media queries that can be paired visually close to the original non-media declaration. I see what he’s after, though I still think in the end I favor the more traditional move to keep all the media queries shoved at the bottom. The article is still worth a read and may click with your workflow better than mine.
03.20.13 |
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A great central repository for alternatives to Google Reader. It’s a smart concept: people vote on Twitter for their favorites and the list is generated accordingly, with the most popular options listed at the top. So far I’ve been heavily testing Feedly, with planned later forays into Newsblur and maybe Bloglovin.
03.20.13 |
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Engineer Lara Swanson writes an excellent article for A List Apart on how overall UX design can be greatly improved with some performance optimization. It’s true some of her suggestions should be obvious (e.g. sprites, cutting down on HTTP requests), but there’s still real insight here. It’s an especially important read for designers: I’ve seen way too many beautiful designs that have way too many requests and inefficiently load imagery.