‘Indie Game: The Movie’
I’m very excited for this upcoming film. It’s going to give some interesting insight on the minds behind such brilliant games as Braid, Fez, and other popular games in the indie culture. Read Joshua Kopstein’s coverage over at The Verge for some good info on it while you’re waiting for your preorder to be fulfilled. There are even some screenings of it through May 24th if you live in New York City, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, so check those out as well.
May 18, 2012 Leave a comment
Microsoft takes Aero Glass out of Windows 8
Andrew Webster, reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft has revealed that it has made some big changes to its desktop UI for Windows 8, which includes moving away from Aero Glass — the UI first introduced with Vista. According to the company, this means visual changes that include “flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients.”
Even though Aero Glass was first introduced in the dismal Vista, it’s one of the best elements that Windows has had in it for a while. Now it’s going away and its replacement is far from worthy of such high praise; it’s achromatic and downright grotesque. What a shame, Microsoft, what a shame.
May 18, 2012 Leave a comment
‘The Story of Send’
Google has put together a nice little story of how sending email through Gmail works. It’s actually rather interesting, so take five minutes out of your day to watch The Story of Send.
May 16, 2012 Leave a comment
Netflix Web player redesigned
As I began to watch my daily dose of Scrubs on Netflix this afternoon, I noticed something different in the service’s Web player. Instead of seeing all the buttons around the interface, they now only appear upon hover-over — just like the old fullscreen mode. You can see an example of the new user interface above.
Important: Some users have been experiencing issues with the new interface in Google Chrome. If this is happening to you, then it’s likely that your browser is out of date, so go update it and try again.
I also noticed that when the player is left inactive and paused for about ten seconds, it will display the media’s title and description, along with the episode number if there is one. Very nifty redesign, Netflix. I actually like it a lot.
The Web player still uses Microsoft’s Silverlight engine for playback, but it has much fancier buttons with little animations that give it a bit more flare than before. They also inform you of things. For example, hovering over the next (->) button will tell you what the next episode is and give you a brief description of it.
I really like how it takes up the whole browser window now instead of being confined with padding on the top and bottom. As for the interface as a whole, it’s clean and has good taste — much better than that of the previous design.
One last little find is the new episodes button that can be hovered over to reveal other episodes in the season that you’re currently watching, along with an option to move to another season. This is actually really nice if you watch lots of TV shows because there’s no need to go back to the Watch Instantly page and then to the TV show just so that you can find a certain episode you want to jump to.
May 16, 2012 Leave a comment
On plagiarism and TNW
Update: It’s interesting that Gross should have such an issue with The Next Web. The funny thing is that I had great relations with their news and Apple editor, Matthew Panzarino, just today (May 16th). I can’t say they don’t plagiarize, but I can say that some — Matthew, at least — of them are willing to work with the original publishers of content well.
Yesterday, The Next Web‘s design editor Harrison Weber blatantly plagiarized an article written by freelance web designer and developer Joshua Gross. The article’s main topic — of little importance to the point, but still mentionable — was on how the New York City taxi cab service took in a good $144,146,165 in extra tips just from introducing a new system that had three buttons to choose whether the passenger would like to give a 20%, 25%, or 30% tip to the cabby. Anyway, on to the important part.
Joshua Gross was the original author of this piece — he gathered all the information and made the calculations himself. Weber of TNW then thought he could simply take this information, say that Joshua found it, and paste it into his own article without any sort of quotations. Yes, he did give reference, but he didn’t do a blockquote or anything of the sort to show that it wasn’t written by him; it was an exact copy of what was written on notes.unwieldy.
While Gross was right in saying that this was plagiarism, the whole thing got taken way out of proportion. After gaining lots of recognition on link-based blogs like that of Daring Fireball, many readers began to say they were removing The Next Web from their reading list forever due to such fear of plagiarism.
Okay, that’s just going too far.
You don’t need to leave a website because one thing happens. If you do, then you aren’t thinking about the situation at all. It’d be one thing if they were known for such appalling plagiarism, but they’re not. In fact, I don’t remember them ever being criticized for such a thing, so there’s no reason for readers to just leave the site because of one single incident.
What Weber did was wrong and Zee Kane — CEO of TNW — defended him because it’s his responsibility to. However, if he were any sort of honorable man, he’d think for just a second and say “Yes, it was a mistake and I’m sorry — we’ve fixed it”. He did no such thing and rather made matters worse.
May 15, 2012 Leave a comment
Apple asserts that Siri is ‘cutting edge’
Joe Palazzolo, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple, which hired Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP to fight the claims, said in a recent court filing that Siri may not be perfect — in fact, she is a Beta release, something the company has been upfront about — but she’s still “cutting edge.”
Now that’s amusing. I’m sorry Apple, but Siri is far from “cutting edge”. In fact, the technology is full of flaws.
May 15, 2012 Leave a comment
Trashed
Candida Brady’s upcoming film gives deep insight on what a large impact waste has on this world.
May 15, 2012 Leave a comment
Owl City’s new EP
I listened to all the tracks from Owl City’s new EP “Shooting Star” this afternoon as four different well-known celebrity publications posted the private SoundCloud files. When I finished, I wasn’t all that impressed. “Dementia (feat. Mark Hoppus)” was probably the best track in this EP — the rest being just okay. They’re not terrible, but I feel as if Young is transitioning to a more pop-ish style and that kind of makes me sad.
If you listen to such a track as “Shooting Star“, you’ll notice that the synths and song in its entirety is very mainstream and doesn’t have all that much originality in the beat or melody. If the lyrics were to compensate, that’d help, but they don’t. I like the intro, but when he starts singing the chorus the song really loses its overall appeal.
Maybe I’m looking for too much in this EP. I know it can’t be another “Galaxies” single, but I still hope for something less mainstream with lyrics speaking of “tonight”. I hear this every day in every other pop song out there and thus far, Adam Young has successfully set himself apart from this. Today, I sit disappointed, yet I still have hope that the album itself will be better.
Other tracks include “Gold“, which began with the classic Owl City synth and then transitioned into a completely-mainstream melody, and “Take It All Away“. In “Gold”, Adam began with what I just described and then utilized a gate on his voice, which really hurt the song. As a whole, it sounded like every other pop release out there with some okay lyrics. The pre-chorus was pretty good, but I still couldn’t bring myself to like it.
As for “Take It All Away”, the loud bass and clap just give it that mainstream feel. However, just a little bit in there’s a redeeming quality of Young’s famous synth — I think it’s a triangle or square, but I’m not quite sure. The chorus of the song is boring and sounds like the rest of today’s music — unoriginal. The lyrics are good, but I just can’t stand to hear such music with them. When you get to the bridge, it’s a bit repetitive and just reiterates the qualities that are in the beginning of the song.
The EP isn’t bad, it’s just not the Owl City I once knew. It pains me saying that because Owl City is one of my favorite artists out there.
May 10, 2012 Leave a comment
Grammar is vital to the next generation
I dislike it when people communicate like they have a second-grade education, their words not having any sort of meaning. It makes me think that this generation — the teenagers, college students, and even some adults — simply don’t care about quality colloquy any longer. Instead, they’d prefer to throw away all the grammatical things they learned in school to make their lives just that much easier.
But things don’t need to be easier — that will just ruin us, especially in this case.
Indolence is the excuse for this. Most of the “educated” population doesn’t even care to communicate in an educated manner, but would rather do what’s more convenient and fast for them. People even neglect to use spellcheck, not thinking of any consequence to the decision.
The ellipsis has become omnipresent and now represents something as ridiculous as being too lazy to use a period. Other reasons could be that the person simply does not know how to construct a simple sentence and just wants to leave you guessing.
Another example of such grammar crimes would be that people don’t even use the original ellipsis — they use something like “…….” for added drama. The worst adaption of an ellipsis is the “..” solution. If you even respect the English language at all, you’d hate this.
What is this language? Netglish? Neglectish?
These users of what used to be slang have destroyed the English language. (I say English only because I don’t know how bad others have become on the Internet.)
So who’s responsible for this atrocity? Is it the academic system? If that, is it the teachers or the students? Is it the process by which they learn? Is it the ADD the Internet has given younger people? I could ask these questions all day; I only have one answer though.
I think it’s a combination of the students and teachers’ fault. The students just need to start caring more about what school is for and the teachers need to care more about the students. There’s a lot more than this and it really varies on the person, but students really do need to understand why learning proper communication skills is so valuable.
This is the time of such great achievements in technology and communication, but we’re redefining communication. People don’t care about grammar on the Internet anymore — they’ll just use it in school when they have to.
If this continues, could real grammar be lost? Has technology, which we’ve come to know for so many things, become our worst enemy, hurting our communication skills? We can improve in one area, but there will always be something that we left out.
Science, history, mathematics — none of these are as important as basic communication is. If our children grow up thinking that this Netglish — or whatever you wish to call it — is our language, then we’ve done something terribly wrong.
It’s just something to think about.
May 7, 2012 Leave a comment
RIM to launch LTE PlayBook
David Pierce, reporting for The Verge:
Evidence has been piling up that RIM is preparing an LTE version of its PlayBook tablet, but rumor no longer: CEO Thorsten Heins let us know this morning at a press briefing at BlackBerry World that there will indeed be an LTE-capable PlayBook “later this year.”
Instead of buying this when it launches, I’ll wait for RIM to put the tablets on a fire sale.
May 2, 2012 Leave a comment
Motorola lost $86 million in the last quarter
Dante D’Orazio, reporting for The Verge:
Motorola Mobility, which is still awaiting approval to be acquired by Google for $12.5 billion has just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2012, and the company continues to lose money. The handset and cable box manufacturer posted a $86 million loss for the quarter on a GAAP basis, led by a $121 million dollar loss from the mobile unit.
Google, you made a terrible mistake.
May 1, 2012 Leave a comment
On fullscreen apps for Mac
When OS X Lion released last year, one of the features that Apple put a lot of emphasis on was the fullscreen apps that would be coming to the OS. Since then, many apps on the Mac App Store have been updated to support this special display mode. My question is, do people actually use them? continue reading »
April 19, 2012 Leave a comment
What about iCloud sync for media playback times?
As I listened to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin’s The Talk Show podcast on my iPhone this morning, I was struck by an idea. What if Apple were to use iCloud to sync the playback times of all your iTunes media? I’m not just talking about podcasts here — I’m talking about everything from music to videos. Just imagine being able to pick up one of your other Apple devices and start playing something where you left off without needing to sync it with iTunes first — this would be great.
The idea sounds great on digital paper, but how would it actually work? Let me explain. continue reading »
April 14, 2012 Leave a comment
Now this is a clock
Behold, the QLOCKTWO. When I become that man who sits behind a fancy glass desk and writes, I will purchase one of these to really give it some extra style.
April 13, 2012 Leave a comment
How you end up wasting time
You know how sometimes you’ll do something because you think you have time for it? Well, most people think that they have five minutes to do something really quick and then they just complete that extra task, taking five minutes out of their day. This can become a problem because it leads to doing one five-minute task after another until they add up to a full hour or more.
However, I’ve been doing things quite a bit differently and my productivity has gone way up lately. Why not try to schedule these little tasks into your day as “Miscellaneous duties” instead of doing them at random times throughout the day? That way you don’t destroy your day with random stuff that wasn’t supposed to be in it. Try it sometime, it really works.
April 12, 2012 Leave a comment
Amazon Prime’s video library isn’t really that large
Harrison Weber, reporting for The Next Web:
It’s simple: Amazon counts every single episode for every TV show. For example, Amazon does not count 24 as one TV show; rather, it counts every episode in all eight seasons toward its library of 17,000 movies and television shows. So, according to Amazon’s logic, Kiefer Sutherland stars in 192 TV shows.
That’s not just “disappointing”, as Weber says later on, it’s also deceptive.
April 12, 2012 Leave a comment
Stop over-editing your photos
I know some very talented photographers, and some of them spend hours pouring through images on their Macs trying to weed out the best one. And once they find it, they tweak it for hours until everything is just right. But what they’re creating is not a true representation of what actually happened, it’s an idealized version of what could technically never be. They’re swapping out the sky for one that’s more appealing, or putting on arbitrary filters to sharpen up problems that could’ve been solved in the field. I look at it almost like cheating; like you should’ve taken the time to do things right from the start instead of manipulating the picture to within an inch of its life just to make it print worthy.
Don’t get me wrong, I do use Photoshop, I just use it differently. I’ll use it to adjust a few levels if things are off a touch, to erase a dust spot on the lens, or an errant leaf that I didn’t catch during the shoot. But I never spend more than 10-20 minutes editing any one picture, because if I do that, then I didn’t do my job when I had the chance. I’m taking the “easy” way out.
That’s not how I roll.
I must agree with Whipps’ entire article. Too many people think they can take okay photos and turn them into something great — it’s just not that simple. All the work of photography should go into taking the shot, not the post-processing. The only exception to this would be if you are doing an HDR through Photomatix or another processing program, which does take some time. Other than that, start thinking about the photo before you take it and stop wasting hours on it afterwards.
Just appreciate the photo for what it is, not what you can make it.
April 11, 2012 Leave a comment
Why I don’t use Clear for tasks
On February 16th, Realmac Software released a whole new way to manage daily tasks — Clear. It actually looks really nice, but I’ll never use it to manage the tasks in my life because it lacks one simple feature: multi-platform support. If I am to rely on something as my task manager, then it needs to be available everywhere, not just on my iPhone. What if my iPhone’s battery dies or I don’t have it with me when I need to check the task list? There’s no way to do that unless I have an iPhone available.
It’d be great if Realmac at least had a Mac or Web app available to manage the list anywhere, but they don’t. This isn’t one of those articles that argues the app should come to Android or something, it’s an article that argues such an app should be available somewhere all the time in case something happens to the one device that it works on. There are such emergencies and I can’t risk all my tasks disappearing.
So until Clear is brought either to the Web or something close, I’ll continue using Apple’s Reminders that’s built-in to the iCloud Calendar since it’s a much more sensible solution and can be accessed anywhere.
April 11, 2012 Leave a comment
Springpad 3.0
Jamie Keene, reporting for The Verge:
Web clipping and note-taking service Springpad has just launched a major update that brings a number of new features, a sharp new look, and an increased emphasis on sharing and context-awareness. Import a movie into a ‘favorite films’ notebook, and the service will automatically flesh out the entry with ratings from review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, along with local showtimes. Add an album and Springpad finds the best place for you to buy it, along with offering tour dates for the band so you can go and see them in person. There are a number of different note types that help to categorize each entry, be it a product, place, or bookmark.
It looks really nice, I think I’ll try it out.
April 11, 2012 Leave a comment
Facebook and Instagram, sitting in a tree
Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram:
Today, we couldn’t be happier to announce that Instagram has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.
[ ... ]
It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.
Too bad.
Also, a bit of good insight by Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web:
Facebook has the ad power to do what Instagram couldn’t: make a cent.
But that’s not really the point. Facebook has to keep growing. It has to get to one billion active users in a hurry, as its public offering looms, and investors are going to demand growth. And it can’t have a pesky gnat like Instagram take any of its user momentum, user-engagement momentum, or content (photos) potential from its platform. Facebook has to be totalizing, essentially, to command the valuation that it wishes.
April 9, 2012 Leave a comment