Linked List: July 8, 2013

Monday, 8 July 2013

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, featuring special guest star Christa Mrgan. Topics this week include iOS 7, typography, App Camp for Girls, and more.

Brought to you by two outstanding sponsors:

An Event Apart: The design conference for people who make websites.
MoneyWiz: Premium personal finance app for your Mac, iPhone and iPad. With automatic sync.

Kit FUI ★

Great idea:

Fantasy User Interfaces, Fictional User Interfaces, Fake User Interfaces, Futuristic User Interfaces. Regardless of what the F stands for, they all represent the same thing, the user interfaces and heads up displays found in many popular movies and television shows. […]

Kit FUI is an IMDb-like database that makes it easy to find screenshots, videos and the designers of these FUIs.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt: How Wrong-Headed Can One Apple Analyst Be? ★

Pretty damn wrong-headed, when the analyst in question is Trip “Claim” Chowdhry.

Guillermo Del Toro and Charlie Kaufman to Adapt ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ ★

This could be great.

The Apps That Get Featured on the iOS App Store ★

Dave Addey:

Over the past few months, I’ve been researching the kinds of apps that get featured on the iTunes App Store home page for different countries around the world. Here are my initial findings.

Interesting analysis and presentation.

Speaking of iOS 7 and Fonts ★

Today’s beta 3 release of iOS 7 changes the system text font from Helvetica Neue Light to Regular. Light and Ultra Light are still used in the system in certain places, but more sparingly and appropriately.

This all comes back to Dalrymple’s plea one week after WWDC. All betas are works in progress, but iOS 7 is far more so than usual. They’re still playing with this stuff.

The Real Story Behind Fonts in iOS 7 ★

Jürgen Siebert and Maurice Meilleur, writing for Typographica:

Typographic aesthetes will be happy to learn that support for kerning and ligatures (Apple calls these macros “font descriptors”) will be turned on throughout iOS 7, effortlessly accessible even over very advanced visual effects like the deceptively real-looking handmade paper texture. […]

But the hottest typographic number in iOS 7 is Dynamic Type. As far as I know, Apple’s mobile products will be the first electronic devices that will by default consider a quality of type that hasn’t been given so much attention since the age of letterpress. That’s right: we’re talking about an operating system, not an application or a layout job. It’s true, optical sizes were tried in photosetting and desktop publishing — but they weren’t really automatic, and some of the attempts turned out to be blind alleys (like Adobe Multiple Masters). And yes, there are any number of displays in industry products that use different ‘grades’ of text for smaller and larger settings. But optical sizing in iOS builds on these earlier attempts and offers astonishing possibilities.

Text Kit makes me very happy.