Linked List: August 17, 2007

Friday, 17 August 2007

Ten Days With Lightroom 

Rui Carmo on Adobe Lightroom and iPhoto ’08:

[…] the bottom line, as far as editing is concerned, is that Lightroom’s Tone Curve and its other tools are light-years ahead of anything that iPhoto is able to do.

He did, however, find Lightroom to be slow with a 3,000-photo library. I’ve got about 1,700 in mine so far, but haven’t seen any noticeable slowdown.

2007 PMC Software Auctions 

Seth Dillingham is auctioning off some great bundles of Mac software, with the proceeds going to cancer-related charities.

Cover Pessimism 

Rands on the cover design of his new book, Managing Humans:

Since I signed the contract, I’d pessimistically prepared myself for the fact that I had no idea how much work I was signing up for, I’d end up hating some of my favorite chapters via the editing process, and that the initial covers would suck. I knew they’d suck because I knew the cover had to be great. Knowing that nothing is great in its first iteration meant I didn’t think twice about moving on and calling in reinforcements.

I love looking at rejected designs, especially when they’re rejected because they don’t feel right even though they look good.

We’re in This Together 

Great piece by Daniel Jalkut on the indie Mac developer community:

Consider the most popular, trendiest retail district in your town. There are many shops whose target markets overlap, and to some extent each shop is competing with the others to attract customers through their doors. But the district wouldn’t exist at all without the collective commitment to quality.

Pogue on iMovie ’08 

David Pogue:

Most people are used to a product cycle that goes like this: Release a new version every year or two, each more capable than the last. Ensure that it’s backward-compatible with your existing documents.

iMovie ’08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.

George Ou, Jackass 

Windows Vista’s ClearType sub-pixel anti-aliasing is indeed very good, and noticably different than Mac OS X’s. Which you prefer is clearly subjective.

But only George Ou would compare Windows’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing to Mac OS X’s non-sub-pixel anti-aliasing and declare that it puts it “to shame”. One minute of Google searching would have shown him that there was something wrong with his example rendering from Mac OS X.

Prototype 1.6.0 Release Candidate 

Huge improvements to event handling.

The Software Awards Scam 

Do-nothing text file renamed with .exe extension garners a slew of “shareware awards”. The best part is that the readme file specifically admitted that the “program” did nothing and wouldn’t even launch.

These sham awards are one of the big cultural differences between the Mac and Windows indie software worlds.

Woz and Kathy Griffin, Sitting in a Tree 

I believe this is the first romantic gossip item to appear in Daring Fireball. (Via Andy Ihnatko.)

Litmus 

My thanks to Litmus for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Litmus is a terrific new browser (and email client) compatibility testing service. (It’s a much-improved service from the gang that previously offered a similar service called SiteVista.)

How it works: You give Litmus a URL, and a few seconds later it shows you exactly how it renders in a slew of different web browsers. If you’ve ever tried testing a web site for compatibility against multiple versions of Win/IE alone, you realize how useful this could be. Multiple browsers, multiple OSes, all at once.

Check out the tour and don’t miss the limited edition special offer.

RSS Behavior for Link Blogs 

Interesting theory for why some DF readers prefer the “point back to daringfireball.net” style for Linked List entries: It works better with NewsFire that way.

New Apple Keyboard Compared to Older Ones 

Photo comparison of the new flat Apple keyboard next to others, dating back to the Lisa’s. (Thanks to Chris Pepper.)

What Is Art Direction (No. 9) 

Jeffrey Zeldman:

That connection is content. And the non-verbal information that triggers that content in the viewer’s mind is art direction.