Fonts in use: Medium →
FF Meta and Myriad makes for a a pretty rare web pairing (for that matter, Myriad solo is pretty underutilized), but Ev Williams’ Medium does the job right.
FF Meta and Myriad makes for a a pretty rare web pairing (for that matter, Myriad solo is pretty underutilized), but Ev Williams’ Medium does the job right.
Excellent profile by The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. It’s behind The New Yorker’s usual paywall, but if you have access it’s a really engrossing read (admittedly as a huge NIN fan since my teenage years I’m probably a bit biased in this regard.)
There’s some interesting tech news here as well: Reznor is working with Beats Electronics on the design of a new music-streaming service that will compete with Spotify and Rdio. He argues Spotify is like “being on the web without Google” and he has a point. As noted earlier today, music curation is a huge challenge to crack. Will this new Beats offer anything really different? We’ll see.
Avand Amiri:
Perhaps the solution is more holistic. A great setlist takes into account when a song was played last, its popularity, how it relates to friends’ musical tastes, and similarity to music that’s currently playing. Rdio could compute a compound index, Play Strength, and expose it in the interface to help suggest the next tracks. You don’t have to explain how you computed the index, but the mechanics are interesting. Pandora does this when they explain why you’re hearing a particular song and it adds to the experience.
We need more people like Avand working in places like Spotify and Rdio. Great music curation is a huge design challenge.
As we delve more heavily into responsive imagery in my day job, production needs increase on an already overburdened staff. We needed a way to speed up PSD comp production work, and Mac app Slicy has been a great solution so far. Slicy is simple app that auto exports and slices out clean transparent pngs or jpgs of individual layers in a PSD file. Best of all, it auto exports 1x/2x images, essential for a responsive workflow. It’s developed by MacRabbit, the team behind CSSEdit and Espresso, so naturally the refinement is really high. Highly recommended for $29.
Substantial, excellent talk by Vimeo developer Jon Rohan on steps Github took to dramatically improve their CSS performance site wide. One thing Jon stresses that I’ve found has a huge impact is just the sheer number of HTML elements on screen. People spend so much time optimizing their Javascript and CSS selectors, when sometimes the root problem is just having way too many divs.
Designer Sarah Parmenter compiles a great list. Special props to the United Pixelworkers T and the A Book Apart collection set, both are great choices for any web geek during the holidays.
Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter:
In every COD game we’ve looked at since Infinity Ward’s groundbreaking work in the original Modern Warfare, we’ve seen an Xbox 360 advantage over the PlayStation 3 versions. Up until now, our supposition has been that the architecture thrives on the more powerful Xenos graphics core in the Microsoft platform. However, in Wii U we now find ourselves looking at a console with what we’re told possesses a significant bump in GPU performance over the old AMD design in the 360, and yet the veteran hardware still commands an easy lead. Lack of experience with the new console and work-in-progress dev tools will play a part in these results, but it could well be that the Wii U’s lackluster CPU is also a contributory factor.
Gaming is a lot more than sheer horsepower and tech stats (just ask Apple), but this is very bad news for the Wii U. How will it compete against new consoles from Microsoft and Sony next year?
As I’ve said repeatedly here, on Twitter and elsewhere, Alfred is simply amazing. I can’t really think of any other single app that has impacted my daily workflow so significantly for the better. Pedro Lobo over at Mac AppStorm goes over some of the baiscs.
Ben Kuchera writes a compelling argument for why select games should be considered art (though before I read this Rock Band was not necessarily in that list). This was my favorite part:
This is why you can’t argue for or against games as an art form without taking the time to play through the games themselves. I’ve seen clever people at cocktail parties claim that a few shapes on a canvas can’t be art, and this is usually combined with a sneering contempt for what passes for “art” in our modern times… although it seems like that argument has been going on for the past century or so. There is an intense difference between seeing an image of a Jackson Pollock painting in a book and coming upon a Jackson Pollock painting in a gallery.
From Mac/iOS app developer Bjango’s blog, a solid primer on why sub-pixel antialiasing – still fairly common on Chrome and the PC world – is on its way out. This part really surprised me:
WebKit on OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when animating, often resulting in a visual glitch when it starts and stops, unless standard antialiasing is set using CSS. OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when using CoreAnimation’s layer backed views.
Now I know why some of my CSS3 font animations can run a bit off; turns out it was for good reason.