Neven Mrgan's tumbl

A normal distribution.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:15:06 -0500

A normal distribution.

Yes, all brands, always. Calvin, don’t lie to me and say...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:54:40 -0500

Yes, all brands, always. Calvin, don’t lie to me and say they won’t roll up. Of course they will.

"Victorian naturalists were given to value judgments (…) in their books. My grandparents possessed a..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:13:51 -0500

“Victorian naturalists were given to value judgments (…) in their books. My grandparents possessed a bird book in which the entry on the cormorant frankly began, “There is nothing to be said for this deplorable bird.””

- Richard Dawkins, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’

Rotoscoping Prince of Persia. Man, I loved that animation when I...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:00:00 -0500

Rotoscoping Prince of Persia. Man, I loved that animation when I was a kid. It was so different from the chunky, broom-up-ass stuff you got in most side-scrollers.

It makes me very proud of my brother Vanja that gravitywins has...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:28:54 -0500

It makes me very proud of my brother Vanja that gravitywins has linked to his work. Excellent stuff.

All Clad 12"- The Fry Pan of The Gods

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:52:00 -0500

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Mt Rushmore, Fender Stratocaster, Moby Dick, iPod, Hercules, and Frank Sinatra of cooking vessels. The All Clad 12 Inch Stainless Steel Fry Pan - the single best workhorse of a pan. No kitchen in the world would be ashamed of it, and every kitchen could use it.

And so now you’re thinking, really, Neven? A $180 pan? Does it make that much of a difference? It does, it really does. This thing cooks evenly, thoroughly, and beautifully. You’ll never brown in a Target-bought pan like you will in an All-Clad. It’s also built like a damn anvil - no way will this ever warp, dent, or lose its handle.

But $180? Ok, fine - that is a lot of money. But you’ll save in the mythical long run, and in fact, I recommend you trash most of your current pots and pans. You need no more than, say, five. Next time you buy, skip the set and pick a few great pieces. The 12” should be your starting point (a Dutch or French oven should be your next piece, by the way.)

When America’s Test Kitchen puts cookware through its paces, you don’t even need to read to the end of their review to know that All-Clad will come out on top. It always does. It’s made here in the USA, and your dollars will go to well-paid workers with high standards.

But… one hundred and eighty dollars? Alright, alright, alright - what if I told you Amazon is currently selling this, the world’s best fry pan, for $90, lid included?

I’m not kidding - $90, free shipping.

P.S. This isn’t nonstick, you say? Look, for decades now, we’ve been told to buy teflon everything. This is mad; you need one nice nonstick pan, and that’s it. Much of the flavor of chicken, steak, potstickers, green beans, garlic, and apples comes from the very fact that they do partially stick to the pan. That’s how rich, caramely goodness is born.

Microsoft offers an early look at IE 9

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:59:30 -0500

Microsoft offers an early look at IE 9:

jimray links to an early look at IE9 and he says:

Amidst all the talk of hardware accelerated text rendering (seriously?) and javascript performance that’s no longer lags by an order of magnitude (seriously!) there’s nothing about fixing the glaringly broken rendering issues that continue to cost developers real time. PNG transparency anyone?

Right on.

To be sure, the metrics on the blog show progress. However, this progress is only making Microsoft’s last place in the browser race a little less last. I mean, look at this thing - they score 32/100 on the Acid3 test. That’s better than IE8’s 20, but it’s one hundred they should be shooting for.

Pocketball for iPhone

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:23:18 -0500

Pocketball for iPhone:

My good friend Matt has a new iPhone app out. It’s called Pocketball and it’s a physics puzzle in the style of The Incredible Machine and Enigmo. Like every good puzzle, it starts off easy and keeps getting more challenging. The rules are always clear, but you gotta get cleverer with each level to keep going. At a criminal $1.99, with no nickel-and-diming, and in this economy, you can’t afford not to buy it.

Context-free Wednesday.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:08:44 -0500

Context-free Wednesday.

"AT&T failed to invest adequately in the necessary infrastructure to expand its 3G coverage to..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:23:32 -0500

“AT&T failed to invest adequately in the necessary infrastructure to expand its 3G coverage to support its growth in smartphone business, and the usefulness of its service to smartphone users has suffered accordingly.”

- From Verizon’s legal response to AT&T’s lawsuit (The lawsuit claimed that Verizon’s depiction of AT&T’s network was misleading.) The quote above rings so true, my ears hurt.

The Daily Yay

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:06:00 -0500

About two years ago, I was walking the streets of Southeast Portland - my neighborhood at the time - when I noticed a giant banner on someone’s front lawn. It said:

KIDNEY URGENTLY NEEDED. PLEASE CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX OR COME IN.

That was a nice little how-do-you-do in my walk. There I was out to grab some late lunch, now made to ponder mortality, empathy, sacrifice, and desperation, as I walked on. I imagined the day when they’d take down the banner. How would that even feel, amid all the other practicalities that need to be dealt with when death is the one who called or came in?

Two years later, we’ve moved back to the same neighborhood. It’s a golden autumn day and we’re driving around, thrift-hunting for a dining set. The banner catches my eye once again.

“Wow,” I say, “they’re still looking for that kidney.”

But as we drive up, it becomes clear that this is a different banner. This one says - as afternoon light rains down on it through turning leaves - in bigger letters, with more dance in their curves:

WOOHOO! GOT A NEW KIDNEY! THANKS!

I don’t know how that feels either!

A dog welcomes a soldier coming back from Afghanistan. Go ahead,...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

A dog welcomes a soldier coming back from Afghanistan. Go ahead, cry some good tears today.

On Tumblr posts which look broken in the Tumblr Dashboard

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:23:00 -0500

(Hi, Tumblr Dashboard user!)

I love the Tumblr Dashboard, I hate the Tumblr Dashboard.

I love that it solves, in some way, the problem of RSS (said problem being, very few non-techies care or even know about RSS.) Anyone can easily set up their own stream of “what’s new” and read their friends’ streams, all with simple, mercifully restricted social features. It just nicely fills the gap between a Twitter account and a full-on website.

But I don’t like that the Dashboard strips away all the custom formatting and code in my posts. I know this helps keep things simple, but… I want my cake on the plate and in my tummy.

See, every now and then I’ll want to do a slightly more art-directed post, where the form matters, not just the content. Or perhaps I want to combine video with photos with audio files in a single post. This doesn’t fit any of Tumblr’s post categories, so it looks very broken when viewed in the Dashboard.

My solution has been to insert a hidden, Dashboard-only paragraph at the top of such posts, saying something like:

This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website.

Hidden how? Well, I edit the HTML code of the post and give this paragraph the CSS class dashboardonly. This class is defined in my Tumblr theme’s custom CSS as:

.dashboardonly { display: none; }

Since the Dashboard knows not of my custom CSS, the paragraph will be visible in it, but not on my website.

By the way, if you’re wondering how to get from the Dashboard to the post’s original website - and I recommend doing this, since a lot of people make their Tumblr websites real pretty! - mouse over to the top-right corner of the post, right above the little heart icon. See that page curl? Click it!

A refreshingly wholesome (and entertaining) look at auto-tune.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:54:00 -0500

A refreshingly wholesome (and entertaining) look at auto-tune.

I like Uggs and I cannot lie

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:04:00 -0500

I’m not sure what sparked my friendjimray’s rant this morning:

It’s not just that the Ugg boots you overpaid for three years ago continue to look hideous. The reason any man of character instantly finds you unattractive when he sees you wearing those stupid, stupid things is that you’re saying to the world “I bought into a fashion promulgated by the most shallow our generation had to offer.”

No one would mistake me for a fashionable man, but I will argue that I am not without character (Jim is fashion embodied.)

But here: I like Uggs. I think they’re cute. They’re from the snow-bunny universe and I can dig that. Big, goofy rain boots also speak to me; they’re jovial.

Full disclosure: I am currently wearing jeans, a white dress shirt, a blue&red-stripe tie, a gray-stripe cardigan, and running Reeboks.

Looks like someone’s been a bada little mobile platform...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:00:00 -0500

Looks like someone’s been a bada little mobile platform from Samsung.

A few days ago, I posted a shirt design inspired by 2009’s...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:05:58 -0500

A few days ago, I posted a shirt design inspired by 2009’s most beloved and hated news story, featuring a good little boy and two bad old fame-seeking parents. You can now buy the shirt and celebrate the spirit of America - the spirit of those who Did It For The Show.

High-quality flex print on AA shirt.
$24.40.
Buy it now

Top movie of the 2000s

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:38:56 -0500

Top movie of the 2000s:

The Times’ list of 100 top movies of the 2000s is long (about 100 movies long!) so there’s plenty to disagree with, but I’m in full agreement regarding the top pick. I saw Caché three times in three days when it came out. My eyes searched every frame frantically.

Number ten, Hunger, will also stay with me forever.

Slide Different

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:08:00 -0500

I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the n^th time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.

Is there an Internet rule yet stating that even the most obviously indefensible mistake will eventually be defended by someone somewhere? Awful marketing efforts get explained as genius viral campaigns, broken features become solutions.

So, several people wrote to yours truly picking on one single item from my post: the sliders’ deviation from OS X’s standard. The defense being twofold, it seems:

Photoshop’s sliders are different for a reason, and
Hey, Apple does custom controls too, so it’s alright.

To which I say:

No they’re not; not as a rule, anyway. There’s no reason for Memory Usage, Brightness, Pencil Width, Radius, and Scale to be different from each other. They all do the same exact thing: pick a single value from a range. (Needless clarification: yes, Scale has to be a bit smaller to fit comfortably in its window. Making well-fitting smaller versions of controls shouldn’t be rocket science.) These make up more than 50% of my examples. What’s the explanation for those?

As for the remaining custom controls, they do more than pick a single value, so they should be different. But… this different? Why are the Threshold and Color Balance sliders aliased when Layer Blending isn’t? Does anyone find these well-rendered?
When Apple deviates, they usually innovate. When they introduce a new slider (like the one in iTunes 9) it’s an improvement. It feels at home in its window.

However, Apple is sometimes wrong. Final Cut Pro - originally designed by Macromedia - is not Apple’s finest UI hour. Children learn at a young age that bad behavior isn’t excused by saying “Cathy did it too!”

(I have now written way too much about all this. Aren’t these flaws simply obvious?)

I’m not saying anyone at Adobe is evil or crazy. I thought it was, in fact, pretty clear why Photoshop’s sliders are an unappealing mess: they were designed by someone who shouldn’t have been designing, implemented by someone who should’ve been implementing better, skipped over by someone who should have been finding bugs, and approved by someone who should have had higher standards.

It’s not the end of the world that a thumb control is misplaced by one pixel. All software ships with bugs, or it doesn’t ship. But here we are, version 11 of the app, and one of the most-used standard controls in the app is broken.

And this is only sliders we’re talking about. If this dead horse needed any more beating, I’d put together a gallery of misaligned text labels, inconsistent popup buttons (often in the same window!), badly scaled controls, and nearly impenetrable UI bugs. (I mean, there’s a whole blog for these.) What’s the explanation there - is that innovation? Or is it simply the case that this doesn’t matter enough to Adobe?

I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.

Product placement

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:42:42 -0500

lonelysandwich has some examples of product placement in TV shows. Let’s not forget The Wire: