Linked List: July 7, 2008

Monday, 7 July 2008

House Industries: Studio Lettering ★

New family of hand-lettering style typefaces by House Industries’ Ken Barber. Check out the amazing OpenType substitutions and contextual alternates.

The Greatest Bug of All ★

Great debugging story from Wil Shipley.

The iPhone’s Gaming Mettle ★

Good overview of the iPhone’s hardware capabilities from Touch Arcade.

(Re-)Designing a Preferences Window ★

An interesting look at the iterative design process Christopher Bowns went through designing the preferences window for his aforelinked CPU History utility. It’s a good case study because the “before” design isn’t all that bad.

CPU History 1.1 ★

Christopher Bowns:

CPU History is an application that graphs your current CPU usage history in the Dock icon, and optionally in a floating window. You can customize colors, update frequency, and bar thickness.

I’m not sure I see the need for this instead of just using Activity Monitor, but it’s free.

Hazel 2.2 ★

New features for Noodlesoft’s $22 automated file organizer include pattern matching and better scripting support. I especially like that scripts (AppleScript or shell) can be embedded within a rule, obviating the need to create/save/locate/attach external script files.

The Tyranny of ‘Free’ ★

Dan Moren on Anita Hamilton’s aforementioned Time “why doesn’t Apple just make everything on the iPhone App Store free?” Time piece:

When it comes right down to it, what’s wrong with exchanging money for a product? It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for, oh, a few thousand years.

Butterflies Are Free, So Why Aren’t iPhone Apps? ★

The Macalope’s hilarious response to this asinine piece by Anita Hamilton in Time questioning why everything in the upcoming iPhone App Store can’t be “free” thanks to the magic of advertising.

I’ll just add one thing: There will be free-but-with-ads apps from the App Store, but the ads will be sold by the developers of the apps.

Unexpectedly Quit ★

Mike Essl:

Every time an Adobe application misbehaves I upload the error message.

(Via Jason Santa Maria.)

Teaser Trailer for ‘Rolando’ iPhone Game ★

Looks sort of like a cross between a platformer and Crayon Physics. (Via Andy Baio, who describes it as a clone of Loco Roco, a PSP game.)

The Nikon D3, D700, and Canon ★

Insightful analysis from James Duncan Davidson on Nikon’s resurgence, particularly with the introduction of the amazing D700.

‘Gonzo’ ★

Official web site for Gonzo, including a list of theater dates. (Here’s the trailer on Apple’s site.)

The Great Magnet ★

A placard in the lobby at the Ritz at the Bourse theater here in Philadelphia, where my wife and I saw Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Alex Gibney’s new documentary. The movie is terrific — if you can catch it while it’s in theaters, I highly recommend it.