Koralatov

Fringe Typography Part 4: Brought to You By Nissan

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:20:24 +0000

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.

As Marco Arment notes, this rebranding effort is “just a coat of...

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:51:49 +0000

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.

Speaking in Tongues

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:15:00 +0000

Or, “Translations from Adobelish to English of Danny Winkour’s Official Announcement of the Discontinuation of Development of Mobile Flash”

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...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:37:36 +0100

My earlier post about Dennis Ritchie has been updated to include a few links I found since posting it originally.

Darker Lines

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:05:00 +0100

Darker Lines:

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, Grandfather of Your iPhone

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:24:00 +0100

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.

Goodbye, MobileMe

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:08:49 +0100

Goodbye, MobileMe:

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. ↩

Steve Jobs

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:33:47 +0100

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. ↩

The № 27 bus, Aberdeen Airport–Guild St., 2011/09/07 at 17:08.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:20:31 +0100

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

The № 27 bus, Aberdeen Airport–Guild St., 2011/09/07 at 17:08.

"Sometimes even my most compulsive phone-and-Internet behaviour (texting while driving, staying up..."

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:33:00 +0100

“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”. ↩

"We are having a problem with Mr. Computer again. It has totally spaced out. An hour ago it routed..."

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:42:50 +0100

“We are having a problem with Mr. Computer again. It has totally spaced out. An hour ago it routed all the whipples in New York across the same intersection. Loss of life was heavy. And instead of responding to the disaster with fire and police rescue teams it dispatched a circus troop of clowns.”

- Dick, Philip K., “The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree” in Dick, Philip K., We Can Remember It for You Wholesale: Volume Five of the Collected Stories (London: Millennium, 2000), p. 309.

Jim Whimpey: A month into Lion and I can say that my...

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:07:00 +0100

Jim Whimpey:

A month into Lion and I can say that my anticipation was well-founded, I love auto correct in Lion. Adium doesn’t yet support it and it’s hugely frustrating, I don’t know how I lived without it.

I’m the exact opposite. Of all Lion’s “innovative” features, autocorrect is one of the most aggravating. It’s intrusive, overzealous, at times erratic, and more often than not it auto“corrects” incorrectly.¹ On iOS, where the keys you’re pressing are 5 mm wide, it makes perfect sense — it compensates for the imprecision of hitting at such targets with digits that are much wider; on a real keyboard, it’s less necessary, and it encourages laziness and sloppy typing. Thankfully, it’s easily turned off.²

By far the worst sin, though, and the one that exposes just how poorly thought-out the backporting was, is the fact that it’s only partially controllable using the keyboard. A suggested autocorrection can be cancelled by hitting ⎋, but once the autocorrection has been made, you have to use your mouse to reverse it. When you’re touching a screen, this is fine, but when you’re using a keyboard, this isn’t an acceptable option.

In this, it joins Microsoft Office’s autocorrect feature, which has been aggravating people since its introduction, and is just as overzealous. ↩
And if you know your ⌥ modifier combinations, you can also turn off the “hold for alternatives” option. ↩

My response to the suggestion that I try iA Writer for Mac.

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:18:00 +0100

My response to the suggestion that I try iA Writer for Mac.

Fappy McFappins

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:54:10 +0100

Scene: The kitchen, whilst making tea.
Me: Fappy McFappins would be an awesome name for a kid.
Don: Or Dave.
Me: Sweetheart, I know what we’re going to call our next kitten! Fapper!
Emily: After his uncle Don.
Don: >shocked<

Keep Your Hands Off My Fucking Browser

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:51:51 +0100

David Kaneda:

What’s New in Lion’s Safari →

A few interesting items from a development point of view:¹

Not only does the browser go full screen, but there will be a JavaScript API for doing so

The mention caching audio/video in an HTML5 application cache — does this just mean the cache is larger than before?

“New process architecture” and Sandboxing — ie. WebKit 2

CSS3 auto-hyphenation

WOFF support

Numbers two through four are good.

Number one?

Fucking terrible. I already hate the idea of fullscreen windows, but when I get to choose not to use them, it’s fine. Fullscreen windows that obnoxious webdevs can control? That has to be one of the worst ideas I have come across in a long time.

Kaneda’s original list was unordered bullets; I numbered the items. ↩

Wonderful.

Sun, 29 May 2011 15:55:35 +0100

Wonderful.

That just about covers it.

Sun, 15 May 2011 11:34:55 +0100

That just about covers it.

About This Redesign…

Mon, 02 May 2011 19:51:25 +0100

It’s no secret that I’m almost impossible to please. The majority of my posts are eviscerating others when they don’t adhere to what I consider to be an acceptable standard. That’s just What I Do™.

With that in mind, it would take someone incredibly stupid, or incredibly confident, to voluntarily accept my ludicrously specific design brief and take on the project of redesigning this site.

In spite of my best efforts to put him off,¹ someone did take on the project, and his name is David Krauser.

And he didn’t just take on the project: he nailed it. He was a consummate professional throughout the whole process,² and didn’t once tell me an idea was stupid or bad; instead, he implemented them from my the crappy mock-ups I knocked together in MS Paint, and he made them work.

Any Shoop-powered idiot can work to a client’s specifications and demands, however demented or tasteless, but it takes a really, really good designer to work to instructions whilst simultaneously making them work.

David Krause is one such designer: fantastic at what he does, not afraid to take risks, and unbelievably easy to work with. All of that, and the job he did on my site, is why I can’t recommend him highly enough.

To quote directly from my opening email:
[T]he brief would be as follows:
- The colour scheme should be the same, or very similar to, the existing one;
- The lime colour is non-negotiable (the fact it’s my favourite colour ably demonstrates how little taste I have);
- It has to be completely Flash-free;
- It has to be fast;
- Ideally, it would be useable by those with poorer vision;
- Plenty of whitespace;
- Definitely not “Web 2.0ish”.
↩
He was even graceful in the face of increasingly arbitrary demands; when I asked for the design to use “as few images as possible … and minimal/no JavaScript”, he just went ahead and did it. ↩

Limitless Confusion

Sun, 01 May 2011 12:38:23 +0100

After an exam, which went quite well:
Me: You should see _Limitless_. It’s about a drug that makes you super-smart. Apparently, there are people in real life who take drugs to make them smarter. They’re called nootropics or something.
Sarah: Why didn’t you tell us about this *before* the exam?
Me: It’s got the guy from _The Hangover_ in it.
Sarah: Alan?
Me: I don’t know. The guy from _The Hangover_.
Sarah: Alan? The guy with the baby?
Me: No. The guy from _The Hangover_! The good-looking one.
Sarah: Bradley Cooper?
Me: The good-looking one.
Sarah: Bradley Cooper!
Me: Is he the good-looking one?
Sarah: Yes. I really want to see that film.

…and now I’m overhearing a pair of women on the bus, talking about their respective community...

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0100

…and now I’m overhearing a pair of women on the bus, talking about their respective community service terms and disclosures where “it came back saying I done attempted murder but it was reduced to advanced (sic) assault”. All whilst their children run around the bus shrieking.

Today is not a good day.

Koralatov

Fringe Typography Part 4: Brought to You By Nissan

As Marco Arment notes, this rebranding effort is “just a coat of...

Speaking in Tongues

Or, “Translations from Adobelish to English of Danny Winkour’s Official Announcement of the Discontinuation of Development of Mobile Flash”

Further Reading

My earlier post about Dennis Ritchie has been updated to include a few links I found since posting...

Darker Lines

Dennis Ritchie, Grandfather of Your iPhone

Further Reading

Goodbye, MobileMe

Steve Jobs

The № 27 bus, Aberdeen Airport–Guild St., 2011/09/07 at 17:08.

"Sometimes even my most compulsive phone-and-Internet behaviour (texting while driving, staying up..."

"We are having a problem with Mr. Computer again. It has totally spaced out. An hour ago it routed..."

Jim Whimpey: A month into Lion and I can say that my...

My response to the suggestion that I try iA Writer for Mac.

Fappy McFappins

Keep Your Hands Off My Fucking Browser

What’s New in Lion’s Safari →

Wonderful.

That just about covers it.

About This Redesign…

Limitless Confusion

…and now I’m overhearing a pair of women on the bus, talking about their respective community...