Linked List: May 15, 2014

Thursday, 15 May 2014

Fun new SVG-powered typographic examples from Hoefler & Co. Be sure to play with the size sliders.

The New York Times’s Innovation Report ★

Khoi Vinh:

It has become increasingly clear that we are not moving with enough urgency. That’s been true for years, and it was exactly my experience while employed there. To be sure, for a company founded in 1851, The Times has done a remarkable job navigating the turbulent digital landscape, but there’s no prize for best 19th Century enterprise still operating in the 21st Century.

Art of the Title: The Rockford Files ★

Will Perkins on the opening credits of The Rockford Files. Guaranteed to evoke vivid memories for anyone who was around in the 1970s.

Military Infographics ★

Paul Ford:

Part of what makes military diagrams so fascinating is that they look a lot like the images civilians use to do their regular workaday jobs. It’s just software and hardware, after all, and there are only so many ways to draw a network diagram. Yet the scale of these systems is immense; the lines being drawn are between jets and satellites, not between a couple of web servers. You can smell the money burning.

Good thing Edward Tufte is alive and well; otherwise he’d be rolling over in his grave.

Mac OS X 10.9.3 ★

Josh Centers, writing for TidBITS:

Apple has released OS X Mavericks 10.9.3 Update, which brings a pixel-doubled Retina mode to external 4K displays and restores contact and calendar syncing between Mac and iOS devices in iTunes. The Retina mode makes content much sharper, rather than just using all the pixels to create a truly huge desktop.

iMac with Retina Display, please.

Polygon Reviews Mario Kart 8 ★

Speaking of Nintendo, Philip Kollar reviews the new Mario Kart 8 for Wii U:

While the intricacies of drifting and boosting are rote by this point for long-time Kart players, Mario Kart 8 drives home the brilliance of this system. It’s simple — you’re just pressing one button and adjusting your angle to make sure you don’t run off the track — but it looks cool and made me feel skillful when I pulled it off. It also forced me to constantly be engaged with a track. I couldn’t just memorize a layout and be safe; I was constantly tweaking and improving my approach to each lap.

Can’t wait for this one.

‘Intelligent Details’ Commercial From Bentley, Shot Using iPhone 5S ★

Crazy that something like this could be shot using a phone camera. Stick through to the end to see behind-the-scenes footage. (Via Phil Schiller.)

If Internet Providers Ran Public Services ★

This is the question at the heart of the net neutrality debate: is the Internet a public service? I say yes, very much so.

The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits ★

Fascinating excerpt from Blake J. Harris’s new book, Console Wars:

With so much invested in this game, the last remaining hope was for a designer in Japan to quickly create a game and send over processors with that new game to America, where NOA employees could swap out the motherboard and then repaint the arcade cabinets. This task was given to Shigeru Miyamoto, a floppy-haired first-time designer who believed that videogames should be treated with the same respect given to books, movies, and television shows. His efforts to elevate the art form were given a boost when he was informed that Nintendo was close to finalizing a licensing deal with King Features, enabling him to develop his game around the popular cartoon series Popeye the Sailor Man. Using those characters, he began crafting a game where Popeye must rescue his beloved Olive Oyl by hopping over obstacles tossed in his way by his obese archenemy, Bluto.

Shipments containing the code for Miyamoto’s new game began to arrive. Due to last-minute negotiation issues with King Features, Nintendo had lost the rights to Popeye, which forced Miyamoto to come up with something else. As a result, Arakawa, Stone, Judy, and a handful of warehouse employees didn’t know what to expect. They inserted the new processor into one of the thousands of unsold Radarscope machines and then watched the lights flicker as the words “Donkey Kong” came to life on the arcade screen.