I mean it. Stop reading, set aside time, and go see Gravity in theaters before it’s too late. It’s a film best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. I’ve probably already said too much.
Should I See It In 3D Or 2D?
Regardless of your opinion of 3D technology, I encourage you to see this film in 3D. It takes place kilometers above the earth and to get even the slightest feeling for that distance adds so much weight to the story.
I don’t say this lightly, don’t wait for the Bluray or DVD. Gravity is a film best experienced in a cinema.
If, like me, you’re new to Xcode and working your way through iOS Programming The Big Nerd Ranch Guide1, a ton of handy shortcuts await you on the last page of the book.
My favourite is ^ + ⌘ + ▴, I it switches you between header and implementation files.2
Another great one is ^ + ▸, it advances the cursor by subword and is great for those compound variable and class names.3 It conflicts with Mission Control’s default keyboard shortcuts but those are easily disabled in the Mission Control section in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Get the muscle memory in there as soon as possible. It’s helped me considerably this summer.
I saw Avatar before I saw the original TRON and in fact, I wasn’t born when it debuted in 1982. Needless to say the effects in TRON look very dated. However, I have a soft spot for TRON and its modern day sequel Tron: Legacy.
In TRON Kevin Flynn enters the computer world and creates Clu, a likeness of himself embodied by a program. Clu, being a computer program, does not age while he governs The Grid in Flynn’s absence. The sequel, Tron: Legacy, takes place twenty years after the events of TRON and therefore the ageless Clu and the visibly aged Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) are required to share the screen.
Many people, including myself have criticized the substandard rendering of the young Jeff Bridges. After all Tron: Legacy was released a year after Avatar, a film famous for its excellent renderings of humanoid faces and expressions. Audiences get caught up on this and fail to see the beauty and intricacies that make up the world around the characters in Tron: Legacy.
For the entirety of 2010, Munkowitz led a black-ops team of GFX all-stars deep into the darkness at Digital Domain crafting over 12 minutes of holographic content for the feature film TRON: Legacy
The detail and beauty of what Munkowitz’s team created is staggering. The complexity of each of these shots is mind bending and any written description will not do them justice. It is a shame that people get caught up on the lackluster face double when real innovation and beauty is staring them in the face.
The effects in the original Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, and arguably the 1982 Tron were all barely possible at the time. The artists and engineers were pushing the boundaries of their field and their care, artistry, and want to inspire wonder in the audience is evident. I feel this artistry rarely shows through in current films. However, for me, these short clips confirm that the old school artistry is not dead in our present era of digital effects.
Be sure check out the of other effect breakdowns1. My next favourite is the clip of Flynn repairing Quora’s identity disc.
This small fix ensures Spearmint plays nice with changes Google has shipped in the latest versions of Chrome.
Ken Shirriff:
The charger does not need to be plugged in to the wall - and in fact I recommend not plugging it in - since one interesting feature of the 1-Wire protocol is the device can power itself parasitically off the data wire, without a separate power source.
Apple will be known for a few things in the history books but I think the most important bullet point should be their comprehensive care for thoughtfully crafted products, even their tiny parasitic plugs.
I’ve considered Instapaper to be dead in the water for months now. However, I’m really glad Marco knows when to step away from things.
Marco Arment:
A couple of months ago, at 1:30 AM, I suddenly realized who should take it over. I jumped out of bed, tiptoed downstairs (no parent wants to wake a sleeping baby), and sent an email. It didn’t take much convincing, because we both knew it was a great fit.
The Magazine must be very profitable if Marco feels he can walk away from a product perceived as valuable enough to be acquired.
Twitterific 5 is a beautiful looking app and its beauty is accentuated by a wonderful selection of font choices. My favourite of which is Signika because it comes across as professional but light and relaxed enough not to look dull. Amidst all my drooling over Twitterific 5 and Signika, it never occurred to me that it might be a viable font for this site.
Finally I searched around and found Signika in the typeface library of Google Web Fonts. Like Typekit, Google Web Fonts uses a small line of code to implement gorgeous looking typography on websites. I’ve used Typekit since the inception of the site but sadly Signika isn’t in their typeface library.
Google Web Fonts has its fair share of gaudy typefaces but it also has some beautiful gems too. Here are the fonts I’m using now:
Adding fonts to your site is easy. The code is generated for you, simply add it to the <head>…</head> of your site:
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Sans+Narrow:400,700|Signika:400,300,600|Inconsolata" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
Then you can reference it in CSS like you would any other font. For example:
body, #masthead h1.title {
font-family: Signika, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
header, article > h3 {
font-family: 'PT Sans Narrow', Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
I store drafts of my articles in Dropbox where my CMS, Second Crack, takes them and creates HTML previews that are also stored in Dropbox. Out of necessity Typekit’s functionality is limited to pages on your domain and can’t add custom fonts to these preview files because they’re either local files or stored on Dropbox’s domain.
Unlike Typekit, Google’s fonts will load on any HTML page allowing my previews to look just like the published article will.
Since Google Reader has been scheduled for termination I don’t trust Google with any of their “products” that aren’t showing or helping to sell ads. Lets just say my yearly subscription to Typekit isn’t going anywhere at the moment.
I’ve written about Fever before and I highly recommend it. One barrier to entry is the server required to install and run Fever, they’re supposed to be expensive right? Well, Cody Fink of MacStories has a solution:
We’re suggesting a cheap hosting solution you’ll have to pay monthly for. At minimum, about a dollar a month. You will not need to purchase a domain name.
That’s cheap considering most hosting plans start at $15-20 per month and a domain name is usually $15-20 per year.
Worried about configuring a server? Cody covers that too with step by step instructions designed with the less nerdy in mind.
Google Reader has been established as the near exclusive backbone for syncing RSS feeds and when the world - me included - finally realized that becoming evil is a rite of passage for all free services, I went looking for an alternative.
Fever is more than an alternative. It is a far superior solution because it takes a wonderfully different approach to RSS feeds. Important feeds are grouped into an area called Kindling and you can organize them hierarchically like you would in Google Reader. Everything else, high volume feeds for example, reside in a tucked away area called Sparks. Fever combs both the Sparks and Kindling feeds for popular links and topics and groups these articles into the Hot list. Anthony Drendel points out the genius in this system:
Everything else goes in Sparks. For me, that is the other 400+ feeds I subscribe to. I never read them directly. I only see their posts when they are promoted to the Hot list.
Anthony is the man behind Sunstroke, the best Fever client on iOS, and by that merit he is highly experienced with Fever and provides excellent advice for both new and seasoned users. More specifically he has some great tips and recommended feeds to keep your Hot list from becoming an echo chamber of likeminded articles. His idea to use Pinboard tags has made a night and day difference in the quality of my Hot list.
A gripping title sequence for an equally gripping film. Wired also has some details explaining its creation.