Linked List: June 1, 2009

Monday, 1 June 2009

Star Wars: The Old Republic 

New Star Wars video game trailer. No idea if it’s a good game, but it’s a hell of a trailer.

Paper Towels 

“Now you got a crapload of squares.” I’m sold. (Via Mike Davidson.)

iTunes 8.2 

Another set of amazingly-detailed release notes from Apple:

iTunes 8.2 now supports iPhone or iPod touch with the iPhone 3.0 Software Update.

iTunes 8.2 also includes many accessibility improvements and bug fixes.

Quicktime 7.6.2, too.

What’s Wrong With Apple TV 

Macworld reprints an interesting (and apt) criticism of Apple TV’s menu design from MacJournals:

iTunes is about your music and video, with the easy option of obtaining more. Apple TV is about Apple shoving new, mostly-paid content down the Internet onto your television. The Apple TV should be iTunes for the television; instead, it’s the iTunes Store for your television.

Lou Romano: The Art of ‘Up’ 

Development and production artwork for Up from Pixar designer Lou Romano. It’s staggering how much work goes into Pixar’s films, but the results are worth it. I love this bit:

After returning from the trip, we were inspired to illustrate what we saw. A challenge in film is conveying how something feels, not how it exists in reality. Research trips can be a blessing and a curse: the blessing in that visiting an actual place surpasses what you can get from video and photos alone, the curse in being too much a slave to the actual place. Imagination and feeling should dictate everything, not reality.

Reminds me of one of my favorite Stanley Kubrick quotes: “Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.”

Pixar Character Design for ‘Up’ 

Production designer Ricky Nierva and director Pete Docter discuss the major character designs from Up.

Black Wire 

Amy Gardner reports in the Washington Post on the perils of construction digging in the D.C. metro area:

This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there. This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, “You just hit our line.”

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn’t say.

Bing 

Microsoft’s updated search engine launches. Not bad. Not really seeing how it’s any better than Live.com was, though, either.

I wish Bing well, though. If not Microsoft, who else will even try to compete against Google?