February 2012
15 posts
Book covers
Here are some covers of Ira Levin’s 1970 book This Perfect Day:
And here’s the current Pegasus cover:
As the ancient Chinese proverb says, “may you live in times of computer-aided design.”
An unskilled factory worker
The Washington Post ran a very good piece on US manufacturing. The gist of it is that there are factory jobs but they’re hard to fill. Among other reasons, there’s this:
“It’s a glamour issue,” said Dave Van Dam, 37. “The kids come in here and see a dirty, loud place. We get oil on ourselves. Then they go upstairs and they see the designers in their cubicles with two screens and...
The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store →
Impending, a newly formed software company with a solid pedigree, writes a bit about App Store scams. (Yes, their post title is jokey hyperbole.) It’s a subject you may have seen me whine about on Twitter.
Every morning I wake up and check the App Store to see what’s up. I do this because I’m a software developer and I like staying on top of the latest trends and news.
Perhaps...
Easy with the alerts
Amazon Mobile is among my most used apps. This is mainly due to my heavy use of Amazon as a store, and the fact that their main website is rather bloated. The app generally provides a better use experience. It is, however, not stellar.
Let me use it again as an example of a pattern I’ve noticed in some iOS apps. When you view an item in the Amazon app and tap the button to add it to your...
Playfic →
Andy Baio made a new thing. You should stop reading here and click on the link, but I’ll keep typing for some reason. Playfic is a website where you can play, make, and remix interactive fiction games, a.k.a. text adventures. This stuff is the grandpa and grandma of every story-oriented game you’ve played since, and it hasn’t lost any of its charm or magic. For more info, read...
No such thing as a quick adventure
Excepting some extreme and rare circumstances, it is difficult to make a friend, fall in love, or change your heart in two to five minutes. What’s much more common is to have these experiences unfold over the course of several hours: a road trip, a dinner that never ends, a sleepless night. And so it is with works of art, and so it is with games.
Who killed the graphic adventure game?...
Peanuts
Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts. Ingredients: peanuts, sea salt, spices (contains celery), dried onion, dried garlic, paprika, natural flavor, sugar, gelatin, torula yeast, cornstarch, dried corn syrup, maltodextrin.
Planters Dry Roasted Lightly Salted Peanuts. Ingredients: peanuts, sea salt, maltodextrin, cornstarch, corn syrup solids.
Planters Cocktail Peanuts. Ingredients: peanuts, peanut...
Astral Projection
If you could fly, how high would you fly?
Before I answer that, let’s look at the Maps app in iOS. It currently offers two perspectives:
1. Flat overhead
This is a utilitarian, well organized, metadata-heavy view. It reveals the city grid and contains a lot of non-visual data about nearby businesses, landmarks, and locations of interest.
2. Street-level
This display, currently...