Linked List: June 19, 2013

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

Remembering James Gandolfini and Tony Soprano 

Alan Sepinwall:

And his work on the show made possible Vic Mackey, Al Swearengen, Walter White, Don Draper and every complicated, riveting anti-hero (or worse) who followed him. “The Sopranos” was an enormous hit, and told the business that the old rules need no longer apply.

WSJ: Microsoft Was Close to Acquiring Nokia’s Mobile Phone Business 

Sharon Terlep, Dennis Berman, and Shira Ovide, reporting for the WSJ:

Microsoft Corp. was recently in advanced discussions with Nokia Corp. about a purchase of the Finnish company’s device business, according to people familiar with the matter, in a marriage that could have reshaped the mobile-phone industry.

The talks have faltered, they said. One person said talks took place as recently as this month but aren’t likely to be revived.

(More coverage from Techmeme.)

On Arguing ‘Wrongness’ Based on Intuition 

R.E. Warner:

I do not mean to imply to that Neven Mrgan is either foolish or possessing of a little mind. This is not a straw man argument. I mean to say that it is foolish for a designer to rely on intuition to inform design because it yields repetition and blinds them from new opportunities. A small mind is a limited mind and using intuition as a guide will yield nothing new, only that which “feels right.” Or to put it another way, what “feels right” is what your mind is used to.

Gus Mueller on WWDC 2013 

Gus Mueller:

Apple is going to let OS X be itself, and let iOS do the same. Multiple times during the keynote we heard an exec say “ten years” — in reference to needing a new case design for the Mac Pro or in coming up with names for OS X. This is awesome news for Mac developers and what we’ve been wanting to hear for a long time now. Apple still cares about the Mac and you really felt like they meant it this year. From the session content to talking with employees about OS X issues to parity between new frameworks introduced on iOS and OS X- the Mac is still getting a lot of love down in Cupertino.

One of my key takeaways from last week is that it’s not just user interface design where Apple has increased collaboration under its post-Jobs/Forstall management structure, but they’ve increased engineering collaboration too. There was far less “iOS this”, “OS X that”, and much more “here’s how you do this on Apple platforms”.

Multiplane 

Interesting iOS 7 association from Manton Reece.

HBO Go and WatchESPN Come to Apple TV 

Apple:

Apple today announced that HBO GO and WatchESPN are now available directly on Apple TV joining the great lineup of programming offered to customers. iTunes users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date, and they are purchasing over 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day.

Not bad for a hobby.

A small bit of code from Vesper. More open source coming soon.

Great Basin: The Stars and Their Courses 

Field Notes:

The idea was fairly simple, though complex in the making: for those of us in big metropolitan, light-polluted areas like Chicago who can’t see the night sky very clearly, we wanted to travel to this beautiful, dark section of rural Nevada and then bring the stars back with us, capturing a full night sky to be played back, in real time.

4K resolution — twice that of most movie theaters.

I need a bigger display.