Linked List: September 30, 2009

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Dan Moren on the Tweetie 2.0 Pricing Fuss 

The two key facts to keep in mind:

  1. The App Store does not support upgrade pricing.
  2. Many people are really dumb and/or really cheap.
New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective 

“Most graphic designers choose the fonts that best fit their projects. Brian Hennings does the opposite: he chooses the projects that best fit the fonts.” Great piece by in-house H&FJ graphic designer Brian Hennings on working with their newest family, Tungsten (which, by the way, I love — strikes me as the first great alternative to Compacta).

The Billion Dollar Gram 

Splendid infographic by David McCandless at Information Is Beautiful comparing the relative sizes of various multi-billion-dollar budgets/entities.

Instant Magazine: ‘Strange Light’ 

Belinda Luscombe writes for Time on “Strange Light”, a magazine of compelling photos from last week’s dust storms in Sydney Australia, assembled by Derek Powazek in just 48 hours.

Jeremy Bernstein’s Interview With Stanley Kubrick 

75 minutes of audio gold. (Via Jim Coudal, of course.)

Textorize: Sub-Pixel Font Rendering for the Web 

Mac-only Ruby script by Thomas Fuchs that leverages Mac OS X’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing to create bitmap headline graphics for the web from the command line. Here’s a case where Photoshop — which still can’t produce sub-pixel anti-aliased text — has been beaten by 114 lines of open source Ruby code.

There’s nothing wrong at all with the new one, but there’s nothing magic about it either. The Rand one was magic. (Via Jason Santa Maria.)

Bento 3 

Funny that this would ship this week. It occurs to me that Bento is a great example of the sort of thing I wish Adobe would do. FileMaker — the product, not the company — is old and big and cross-platform and there are tons of professionals who depend upon it. Bento isn’t a replacement for FileMaker; it’s a do-over alternative. FileMaker’s forte is in approachable visual database software. Bento is their answer to the question, “What would we do if we were starting over from scratch for the Mac today?”

Adobe shouldn’t scrap its existing software any more than FileMaker Inc. should scrap FileMaker. But where’s Adobe’s “Bento” for bitmap and vector image editing for the Mac? The Bentos in this space are coming from indie developers with apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, Lineform, and Opacity.

Fascinating trends from another non-Mac site that shows tremendous recent growth in Mac users. Also worth looking at the browser trends, where Safari and Chrome are gaining fast — another year like this one and Kottke will have more WebKit users than Gecko ones.

In a footnote, Kottke mentions search engine traffic:

Google is ruling the search space more than ever. 93.2% of the incoming search traffic to kottke.org comes from Google. That’s up from 91.2% a year ago and 83.7% two years ago (!!).

For DF it’s far more pronounced. For the month of September to date, Google accounts for 98.1 percent of my search traffic (and 16.8 percent of my total page views). No other search engine breaks the 1 percent mark.