Digital Parsimony

I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you).

via jtnimoy – Tron Legacy (2010).

I’m so glad I’m not alone.

I sold [MicroSolutions] after 7 years and made enough money to take time off and have a whole lot of fun.

Back then I can remember vividly people telling me how lucky I was to sell my business at the right time.

Then when I took that money and started trading technology stocks that were in the areas that MicroSolutions focused on, I remember vividly being told how lucky I was to have expertise in such a hot area, as technology stocks started to trade up.

Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time reading software manuals, or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

— Mark Cuban

via Quote: I sold [MicroSolutions] after 7 years and… – (37signals).

I really feel the same way. People have said I’m lucky to be at the place I work, I’m lucky that I’ve got an eye for design and a technical side, I’m lucky to get into the stock market at the right time, I’m lucky to have a place to call my own right now.

No one talked about how lucky I was to finish writing my first program when others went to their first high-school football game.

Thought this was a rather neat list.

Top companies from the “Specialty Retailers”, “General Merchandisers”, and “Food and Drug Stores” industries in the Fortune 500, listed in alphabetical order.

via Fonts In Use – The Typographic Monotony of American Retail.

Didn’t Sony offer an option to install Linux on your PS3 and do what you want with it? How is that different than installing home-brew applications?

“Anonymous” attacks Sony to protest PS3 hacker lawsuit.

I just learned something new today. I’ve been using Quartz filters in OS X’s Preview for the longest time to reduce the file size of PDF presentations. My only gripe has been that the image quality is significantly reduced and visible.

The built-in “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter can take a 10.2mb presentation down to 0.6mb in a flash. I’ve always wanted an in-between; something that can take 10.2mb down to 3.0mb or so and still look nice. To do this, you use a little built-in utility called ColorSync.

ColorSync allows you to create your own Quartz filters.

1. Open ColorSync (Applications > Utilities > ColorSync Utility)
2. Hit “Filters”
3. Hit the arrow to the right of the “Reduce File Size” filter and select “Duplicate Filter”
4. Double click on the new filter “Reduce File Size copy” and rename it to something like “Reduce File Size HQ”
5. Hit the drop-down arrow next to “Reduce File Size HQ”
6. Hit the drop-down arrow next to “Image Sampling”
7. Fill in the following options:

   Scale: 80%
   Resolution: <leave blank>
   Max: 768
   Min: 128
   Quality: High

8. You’re done! Now open any PDF, and select File > Save As…
9. Select your newly-created Quartz filter under the “Quarts” drop-down menu, and save your new PDF.

Mimsy: Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview.

Android Honeycomb (for tablets) launched with 15 native apps. iPad launched with 1000. A month later, Honeycomb still only has about 50.

Big problem.

Ars Technica

Jim Dalrymple: ‘No iPhone, iPad, or Mac Hardware Coming at WWDC’

Surprising, yes. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jim Dalrymple’s sources at Apple are gold.

via Daring Fireball Linked List: Jim Dalrymple: ‘No iPhone, iPad, or Mac Hardware Coming at WWDC’.

Well, this is the only guy I believe when it comes to Apple news, and even he confirmed it. No iPhone in June – I really did feel that something like this was going to happen. It felt too soon, I still haven’t lost my original lust towards iPhone 4 and June was quickly approaching. iPhone 4 is still so competitive with the rest of the Android line-up, I really don’t think the hardware needs an update until at least the end of this year.

Even today, the iPhone 4 screen is bar-none the best feature of any smartphone. It’s simply stunning.

People generally leave reviews to vent their frustrations if an app doesn’t work for them or because they failed to read the description and it’s missing a feature they had hoped would be there. There are those good hearted souls who do take the time to leave positive reviews on products they love, but they seem to be outnumbered by those who would rather leave 1 star and emoji poop in the subject line.

via Why I Don’t Do Sales On The App Store « carpeaqua by Justin Williams.

I think what would really help is a better rating system for comments, similar to Amazon. It would also be great if my friends from Ping or Twitter/Game Center had promoted reviews which show up first.

I’m talking about you Ovi, Nokia’s new app Store.

Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

[Ovi, Nokias New App Store, Off to Rocky Start | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD]

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