A comprehensive look at the evolution of Windows over the years, starting way back with Windows 1.0 back in 1985. Ars Technica already is my “go to” place for extremely in depth hardware and software features, but they’ve really outdone themselves here. Reporter Peter Bright deserves major props for his research and organization.
Casey Muratori writing for Gamasutra:
Experimentation on open platforms is one of the primary sources of innovation in the computer industry. There are no two ways about that. Open software ecosystems are what gave us most of what we use today, whether it’s business software like the spreadsheet, entertainment software like the first-person shooter, or world-changing revolutionary paradigms like the World Wide Web…
…With Windows 8, Microsoft is in a pivotal position to help make this future a reality…Or, Microsoft can ship Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows 8 Pro with their current policies in place, and be just another player in the touch device space, with their own set of ridiculous hurdles that severely constrain software possibilities and waste developer time with ill-conceived certification processes.
Many fair points made here, but I wonder if the author is confusing the far more restrictive Windows RT – which is very akin to the closed iOS model – with Windows 8 as a whole.
Matt Zoller Seitz for Press Play:
When we finally see Marsellus’ face 95 minutes into the movie, Tarantino instantly demystifies him as a burly man standing in a crosswalk holding a box of donuts—whereupon Butch runs him over. Marsellus’ first close-up represents Pulp Fiction’s storytelling strategy in microcosm: after all that advance press, he’s just a stranger bleeding on the street, his face framed upside-down as if to certify what we already suspected, that his mythology has been suddenly and violently flipped.
Check out the full seven minute video essay here or on Vimeo. Great work.
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.