Linked List: December 3, 2007

Monday, 3 December 2007

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers to Play at Super Bowl Halftime ★

With one of my favorite bands playing, it’s good to know I’ll enjoy halftime, too, while savoring the Cowboys’ victory over the Patriots in the game itself.

Understanding Sub-Pixel Anti-Aliased Font Rendering ★

Darel Finley has a nice explanation and example photos taken with a microscope of how sub-pixel font rendering works.

Joe Maller on Sub-Pixel Anti-Aliasing With Rotated Displays ★

Joe Maller:

That is just preposterous. Aside from his observation being completely wrong, he also revealed a bug in OS X: The current system doesn’t recognize rotated pixel orientations, sub-pixel rendering on rotated screens should probably be disabled automatically.

It’s hard to photograph individual pixels, but Maller does a pretty good job proving that sub-pixel rendering definitely looks different on a rotated display. Garrett Murray concurs. [Update: Fixed link.] So I stand corrected: if other factors weren’t enough, the iPhone’s rotating screen probably does rule out the use of sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

Syphone ★

Freeware app from Micromat that lets you view and archive your iPhone SMS messages. Not an iPhone hack — it apparently just reads the backup data iTunes puts on your Mac when you sync your iPhone. (Via Om Malik.)

SixApart Sells LiveJournal to Russian Company ★

To me at least, it seemed like Vox was too competitive with LiveJournal for the same company to nourish both products.