I’ve lately been giving the cross platform to-do list app Cheddar a run through it’s paces. Bottom line, it’s a well built app, one I’ll write more about in the future.
For now though, if you use keyboard launcher Alfred, there’s a new Cheddar extension developed by Chris Vaughn. It’s simple but solid and should make entering new list items much faster in my workflow.
Web sites depend on a lot of images, and with higher resolution displays, their size will only increase. Yet website performance is critical as well; you want a great looking image in as small a file size as possible.
That’s where TinyPNG comes in handy. Cut your png of choice and use the site’s drag and drop uploader. TinyPNG will strip colors and compress pngs down to 8 bits while still retaining 100% transparency. I’ve used it on a few recent projects, and every thing I send to it reduces the file size by at least 50% with no noticeable image degradation.
Andy Greenwald, writing for Grantland:
What would it take to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface? What separates Breaking Bad from everything else on TV is this relentless focus. Every season has improved on the one that came before precisely because Gilligan is telling a single story, start to finish. His microscopic glare is as exhausting as it is exacting. In comparison to some of television’s more humanist and highbrow hours, Gilligan’s master class can occasionally seem cold. But it’s a seminar well worth taking. Breaking Bad is more than science. It’s intelligent design.
The season five opening was great. Can’t wait to see how this series wraps up.
I love keyboard shortcuts but adding them to web sites and web apps can be painful. Different browsers handle slightly different syntax, and the process of looking up key codes can require some trial and error. Enter Mousetrap, a tiny (3kb minified) Javascript library where you invoke natural syntax (e.g. ‘4’,’command+k’) for keyboard bindings. No external library dependencies either.
Nice article over at Webdesigner Depot that presents the a common design debate for a potential client: do you go with an entirely separate mobile and desktop site or a responsive design with a single combined view?
I enjoy the style used here: lots of mini interviews with developers across multi web agencies across the country. There’s not a clear consensus among those interviewed, and I tend to agree. You can’t be black and white about responsive design, much as there’s no silver bullet design solution for any one client.
A wonderful look at the title sequence from Se7en. I still remember my experience in the theater with the film rather vividly; that staccato-edited macabre opening was amazing, dare I say influential later on when I started designing at work. Just look at the detail noted here:
The typography itself – which would likely break several guild legibility rules in modern times – was hand-etched into black-surface scratchboard and manipulated during the film transfer process to further smear and jitter it. This transfer was then cut up and reassembled during post production to add a final layer of temporal distress.
Author Rowan Kaiser, writing for Gameranx, breaks down the plot holes and inconsistencies of Blizzard’s flagship game. I agree; the dialog is often atrocious. That said, complaining about plot in Diablo 3 is pretty well beside the point; it’s still an extremely polished, addictive loot game.
(As an aside, if you’re into gaming news you should be following Rowan on Twitter. Good source.)
Very solid interview with Oliver Stone by Matt Zoller Seitz on his new film Savages. I really liked this back and forth:
Seitz: There’s a scuzzy little character moment between John Travolta’s DEA character and Del Toro that’s like something out of seventies drama. Lado drops in on Dennis. Dennis has just made himself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. Lado takes the sandwich away from Dennis, but before he eats it, he takes the tomato slices off and tosses them away.
Stone: [Laughs.] Yeah, that’s Benicio. Only Benicio could come up with a detail like that. He’s that way, very instinctive. To take the sandwich was probably enough, but Benicio pushes it further and makes it funny.
Seriously, having seen Savages over last weekend, Del Toro just rocks. That little Travolta/Del Toro scene was easily better and more natural than pretty much anything either actor has done for years. Overall, Savages is more than anything else a great showcase for 90s talent making a comeback: Travolta, Del Toro and Salma Hayek all nail their roles.
Joseph Lawrence, sound designer for Diablo 3, interviewed by Kill Screen Daily, talking about the recording process:
Yeah, just moving it [bowl of peanuts, yogurt, spaghetti] around, squishing it with your hands, hitting it with something else. You experiment until you find something that’s really interesting. Usually we’ll have two people in a room, because once your hands get completely covered in goo then you don’t want to be touching a recorder. So we have one guy running the recorder and the other one doing the goo-mangling. You’ve got to always be open to experimentation, because there’s really no book you can open that says: “How to manipulate yogurt to make interesting sounds.”
Having played Diablo 3 for a few weeks now and now reading this interview, I can see how smart sound design plays off. As Lawrence points out himself, given the repetitive hack-and-slash nature of the game, varied, distinctive sound design really enhances the experience.
Gimme Bar takes various media you find online – photos, audio, video, text – and saves it to a cloud based library. Yes, been there, done that to some extent (e.g. ZooTool). But Gimme Bar has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. First, it’s more inherently private than public. The last major bookmarking/tagging app I’ve seen do that is Pinboard, which I love.
Then there’s the extra features: a full API, optional auto backup of items to a Dropbox folder. The interface looks nice as well.
It’s free right now in beta. I plan on giving it a proper spin over the next few weeks.