| Friday, June 15, 2007 |
19:50 - Cereal killers
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/advertising/goodbye-toucan-sam
|
(top) |
Wonderful. Looks like Kellogg's is bending to the winds of change and retiring its mascots.
See, this way you don't have to do tedious crap like parenting. It's like buying world insurance: everything's Safe™, or your money back.
You know, it wasn't that difficult for my parents to NOT buy me sugar-infused sugar cereal when I was a kid. Somehow I survived even after hearing the word "no" on occasion. Though that probably counts as "child abuse" in the modern age.
|
| Thursday, June 14, 2007 |
01:23 - Steam Trek: The Moving Picture
http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/brassgoggles/?p=523
|
(top) |
This is one of the all-time great things.
Via JMH.
|
| Wednesday, June 13, 2007 |
11:36 - Roamin' mouse
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,280753,00.html
|
(top) |
This is awesome. So why didn't they just do it in Google Earth SketchUp and make it available as a layer? (Assuming, of course, that that isn't already in the plans...)
Via JMH.
|
| Tuesday, June 12, 2007 |
20:04 - Let's not go overboard here
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/finder.html
|
(top) |
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it may be not quite the best thing ever for the Finder to morph into a simulacrum of iTunes.
It's well and good to have similar metaphors across applications, and iTunes is undeniably a good set of metaphors to emulate. But do we really want to have Finder windows that you have to peer at really carefully before you can tell if they're Finder windows or iTunes windows?
I mean, hell, one of the biggest gripes I have about Windows apps is their tendency to be designed around the "navigation tree in the left pane, icon-and-items view in the right pane" template. The iTunes template differs from it only in a few minutiae such as to what degree you can redundantly replicate the container-tree view in the left pane in the right one (in iTunes, thankfully, very limited—but the Finder sports the same potential pitfalls as the Windows Explorer does in that regard). I find myself worrying that the Steve might be so smitten with his beloved Cover Flow—first in iTunes, then in the iPhone, now in the Finder too—that he's starting to bend existing applications' metaphors in order to accommodate it, rather than allowing them to be true to themselves and present their contents based on their own most natural metadata, which was the whole basis of what made iTunes and iPhoto cool in the first place. Has Apple started to lose the plot?
|
|
18:27 - I turn my back for four days...
|
(top) |
Sheesh—I can't even go to Maine for a college friend's wedding aboard a Maine Windjammer schooner without Apple doing something wacky like releasing Safari for Windows.
Word on the grapevine is that the Windows version uses Mac-style antialiasing, which strikes me as a grand idea—every time I look at any Windows browser, whether IE or Mozilla, my eyes start to squirm out of my head (note: click "17" in the upper right) looking at the funky rainbowy subpixel rendering and the spidery non-WYSIWYG letter forms. Via David G., Joel Spolsky has some thoughts on why this is so:
Typically, Apple chose the stylish route, putting art above practicality, because Steve Jobs has taste, while Microsoft chose the comfortable route, the measurably pragmatic way of doing things that completely lacks in panache. To put it another way, if Apple was Target, Microsoft would be Wal-Mart.
Interesting. But I'll be looking forward to the days when I can write for Safari and not feel like it's just some set of ghettoized deviants who see my sites the way I intend, even if it's really all my fault if I don't test in IE and Mozilla and everything else anyway.
UPDATE: There's no way that I'm the only one for whom Windows does things to text like this (IE6):
Or this (IE7, and this is after running the ClearType Tuner thingy):
As opposed to, say, this (Safari, in which bold and italics actually work, antialiasing doesn't turn text into a painful blur, and it doesn't look like each word got a random kerning value picked out of a hat):
I mean, Windows habitually confronts me with stuff like:
And... everyone's okaaaaay with this?
UPDATE: Stephen Rider has thoughts.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
