The fourth, and probably final, instalment in the Fringe Typography series.
Episode eight of season four starts out normally enough, floating some polymer Helvetica above a motorway…
…then treating us to a lingering, slightly pervy shot of the back of a Nissan Leap…
…before finally delivering the gratuitous money-shot we’ve all been waiting for:
And then finishing up with a loving shot of the dash-mounted GPS/entertainment system, just in case we still had any doubts that we were doing something other than watching a car ad:
To say that I was disappointed that Fringe had stooped such egregious product-placement wouldn’t be true. It became apparent some time back that the show’s primary concern wasn’t artistic integrity, and I suppose if you’re not doing it for the art, you may as well be doing it for the money.
(Source: twitter.com)
As Marco Arment notes, this rebranding effort is “just a coat of paint”, but it certainly is a nice coat of paint. Sometimes, a new haircut can do more than just freshen up a tired image: occasionally — very occasionally — the external change can catalyse larger internal changes in an organisation. The act of altering the image can free them from the inertia of previous decisions and allow them to make the radical changes they need to make to remain relevant. In effect, the act of changing the cover can, when everything goes right, change the book contained within.
Then again, sometimes a new haircut is just a new haircut.
Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology.
Adobe is all about bilking a couple of grand out of designers and developers every year or two by flogging badly designed, performance-hogging applications that do not much more than the version you learned in design school a decade ago.
For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML.
Over the last ten years, people have, with a few exceptions, used Flash to shoehorn “rich”, print-like design onto the web, as well as kludging video support into it in the ugliest way possible.
Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.
We’ve spent the last couple of years trying to prove Steve Jobs wrong, and we have failed miserably.
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
We’ve thrown in the towel, and we’re finally going to just go along with what everyone else has been doing for a while now.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.
We surrender.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 …
We’re finally going to put our effort where it always should have been directed.
… and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection.
Flash now does high-definition without totally crippling your computer. It’s still locked-down with DRM, but hey, it’s high-definition! Oh, and by “console quality”, we mean Playstation 2 quality, only with six times the processor requirement and fans going crazy.
Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.
And better yet, out appliations are still going to create tools to help the unscrupulous and lazy try shovel crap into App Stores for all platforms!
We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences. We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.
The ship is sinking, but we reckon we can shake a few million more out of the passengers as it goes down.
We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash. Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices. There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!
Please keep buying our stuff.
My earlier post about Dennis Ritchie has been updated to include a few links I found since posting it originally.
Stephanie at Rhodia Drive:
Every now and again we receive a letter asking whether or not the signature Rhodia violet lines have become darker. Rob Morrison sent us the photo above and said that the seemingly darker lines “really disguise the writing.”
The lines on the new pads do appear darker because Rhodia is now using a 100% natural ink as opposed to a chemical one.
Little posts like the above on their own are largely inconsequential, but they serve to reinforce a person’s relationship with the manufacturer of their tools.
Rhodia care about a rapport with their customers, value their feedback and engagement, and actively seek input. They want to build a relationship with you, however small, in a way that certain other, more fashionable companies wouldn’t even dream of doing. And they want to build that relationship with more than just the contents of your wallet, and their customers as something more than mere “consumers”.
This sweating of the details, their tree-to-pad traceability, and above all, their bullet-proof quality is what separates Clairefontaine from all the lesser stationery companies whose products I’ve ever bought. I know when I buy a Rhodia pad or notebook, that I’m going to get Rhodia quality; I know what to expect. Something as simple as consistency in your supplies can make all the difference between getting your work done and not getting your work done.
And at the end of the day, that’s what’s important to me.
Dennis Ritchie died Saturday just past. He isn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, but his work has ended up in just as many hands. He didn’t invent the iPhone, or the Mac, or the iPad, but as the man who created the C programming language, and one of men responsible for the creation of Unix, his contribution to these devices is almost as big as Steve’s.
His work, ten years before the first Mac was even released, became the foundation of the OS that made it possible for the Mac, and Apple, to survive. Apple then took that OS and created the first truly popular smartphone, then the first truly popular tablet. Without his work to build on, it’s likely that Apple wouldn’t have survived the last decade, and that we’d never have had these wonderful toys.
As Tim Bray says, we’ve “been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years”, and it’s infinitely better for his work.
I won’t miss iDisk (Dropbox always did it better1), but I will miss the Keychain, Dock items, and Mail settings syncing.
I imagine it’s safe to say that they weren’t wildly popular, but they were extremely useful. Need to use another Mac for a while? Create an account, punch in your MobileMe user and pass, and voilà!, it’s almost your Mac.
You can quickly and painlessly install all your (App Store) apps using just a few clicks and sync your contacts, calendars, and photos, but the things that really make your Mac your Mac — the Dock items, the Mail settings and rules, and most importantly, your Keychain — are left stranded on your other machine. Removing this functionality during the transition to iCloud is a retrograde step in Apple’s “iCloud is the One True Platform” strategy — it removes a huge part ease of moving between machines in the way Apple seems to be trying to encourage.
And what grates the most? The fact that it feels like such an un-Apple-like change.
That’s not a referral link, just a regular one. ↩
Larry Ellison in an interview with CNN Money1:
I remember when Steve was my neighbor in Woodside, California, and he had no furniture. It struck me that there wasn’t furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He’d rather have nothing if he couldn’t have perfection.
And I jokingly said, “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.” And if you look at how he tackles building a phone, or building a laptop, he really is in pursuit of this technical and aesthetic perfection. And he just won’t compromise.
But he’s never been motivated by money. Once we were hiking, and Steve looked at me, put his right hand on my left shoulder and his left hand on my right shoulder, and said, “Larry, that’s why it’s really important that I’m your friend. See, you don’t need any more money.”
When I first read this interview, not long after it started doing the rounds, I remember thinking that it was one of those rare quotes that manages to capture someone almost perfectly; to distill someone’s essence into a soundbite without diminishing that person.
Today, a few years later and a few days after Steve Jobs passed away, I still think that. No matter how good his forthcoming autobiography is — and he was heavily involved in its writing, so it will be good — I can’t help feeling that it won’t capture the Steve Jobs that we knew quite as well as a hundred and fifty words from Larry Ellison.
I might not always agree with the direction Steve Jobs took Apple in, but I still admire him, and consider him an inspiration: proof that, sometimes, doing what you know to be right is the best thing, “common wisdom” be damned.
Tip of the hat to Steve Kinney for reminding me of this quote. ↩
[video]
“Sometimes even my most compulsive phone-and-Internet behaviour (texting while driving, staying up too late on a school night for a Mad Men marathon) feels justified because of the career I’ve chosen — and in some cases, because of the personality I happen to have.” —
Nona Willis Aronowitz, being a smug, self-absorbed, reckless, Generation Y asshat in a piece entitled “Internet Anonymous: Isn’t Everyone a Little Cyber-Addicted?”.
At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous, nearing-retirement-and-why-yes-my-pension-is-higher-than-your-salary-probably-ever-will-be-thankyouverymuch Boomer, the above is one of the stupidest, most self-congratulatory excuses for utterly reckless behaviour that I have ever seen. There is absolutely no excuse for texting whilst driving. None.
You’re (supposed to be) in control of a half-ton-plus of powered machinery, under moderate-to-high velocity, not organising your latest tofu-and-smugfest. It’s pretty hard to concentrate on what you’re doing when you’re battling your phone’s overzealous autocorrect, or telling your husband-for-healthcare which brand of organic coffee to buy.
We already face an engrained stereotype that we’re narcissistic with a massive sense of entitlement and absolutely no work ethic whatsoever. Aronowitz claims one of her primary goals in life is to teach us “how Gen Y can get through the recession without getting screwed”, but posting stupid shit like the above categorically does not do that; instead, it reinforces the stereotype that we’re shiftless, self-absorbed, and totally solipsistic. That makes it harder, not easier, for us, as a generation, to “get through the recession without getting screwed”. You help to reinforce the prejudice that we’re stupid, self-centred navel-gazers.
When your goal is to help people, like Aronowitz claims she wants to do, primum non nocere1 absolutely must be your guiding principle. You’re setting yourself up as both a teacher and a rôle model, so you have to be beyond reproach in what you teach and, more importantly, in how you act. You have to lead by example. Talking the talk is not enough.
“First, do no harm”. ↩