Linked List: May 13, 2014

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

The Subway Map That Rattled New Yorkers ★

Regarding this week’s episode of The Talk Show:

After all, there were other problems with the System Map. Mr. Vignelli had modeled it on the hugely popular 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground designed by Harry Beck, a freelance draughtsman who compiled it in his spare time. Beck’s “diagram,” as he called it, applied similar organizational principles, arguably with even greater rigor. Unlike him, Mr. Vignelli had included some geographical references, by identifying Central Park and areas like Manhattan and the Bronx. He has since regretted doing so, arguing that the map should have been wholly abstract, devoid of such distractions. But Beck’s design was gentler in style, particularly in its choice of typography, while Mr. Vignelli used the searingly modern font Helvetica.

Mark Gurman: Split-Screen iPad Multitasking in iOS 8 ★

Mark Gurman:

In addition to allowing for two iPad apps to be used at the same time, the feature is designed to allow for apps to more easily interact, according to the sources. For example, a user may be able to drag content, such as text, video, or images, from one app to another. Apple is said to be developing capabilities for developers to be able to design their apps to interact with each other. This functionality may mean that Apple is finally ready to enable “XPC” support in iOS, which means that developers could design App Store apps that could share content.

Sounds cool. I’m very curious to see how you get into (and back out of) this mode, though. It’s easy to say you want to see two apps side-by-side on the iPad. It’s not easy at all to implement such a feature without losing the wonderful can’t get lost/can’t get confused about where you are or how you got there simplicity of the iPad today.

MG Siegler on Instagram Switching From Foursquare to Facebook for Geolocation Data ★

MG Siegler:

I get that Facebook owns Instagram and so they want to bring the geo functionality in-house as well. But the product is worse because of this change. Facebook place database is a nightmare of mislabeled and mislocated geo-barf.

‘Design Is a Job’ Audiobook ★

Speaking of the sweet dulcet tones of Mike Monteiro’s voice, the audio book edition of his excellent Design Is a Job is out. Highly recommended.