Linked List: May 29, 2014

Thursday, 29 May 2014

The Internet With a Human Face 

Remarkably thoughtful piece by Maciej Ceglowski on privacy, memory, and more. Must read.

Kids React to Old Computers 

Our nostalgia is their “What?!”

Hopscotch: Coding for Kids 

I mentioned Hopscotch off-handedly during the latest episode of The Talk Show, while discussing iPad apps that allow you to program on the iPad itself. It’s really an amazing app — I recommend it wholeheartedly for anyone with kids, and quite frankly, it’s fun for adults too. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to see Hopscotch win an Apple Design Award next week.

Using Apps Side-by-Side on Windows 8 

Scroll down to “Using Apps Side by Side” and watch the video. It’s certainly interesting, and I can see how it’d be useful, especially on devices with larger screens like the new 12-inch Surface Pro 3.

But the interface for managing this is opaque, abstract, and complicated. You need to know how to do it before you can do it. There is nothing self-evident about it. If anything, it’s more abstract to manage side-by-side apps in Metro than it is in regular desktop Windows. With traditional windows on Windows and Mac OS X, you directly manipulate the window itself to move or resize it. In Metro, you need to memorize special edge gestures to enter different modes for rearranging, entering, or leaving the split-screen mode.

There has to be a better way.

Massimo’s Letters 

Julie Lasky, writing for the NYT:

“To see what people are saying, I cannot repeat it even, because I feel blushing,” Mr. Vignelli said that day, seated at a desk in his double-height living room next to a giant window of leaded glass. (Though he lived in the United States for 49 years, the Italian-born designer still spoke endearingly mangled English.)

Dressed in his habitual black, he had the same aquiline profile as always, the same irrepressible eyebrows. But he was as gaunt as a thin stroke of Bodoni, one of the few typefaces he used in his designs. (He famously confined himself to five or six out of the expanding font universe.)

Lovely video, too.

‘The Shawshank Residuals’ 

Great piece for the WSJ by Russell Adams on the lasting popularity of The Shawshank Redemption:

“Shawshank” was an underwhelming box-office performer when it hit theaters 20 years ago this September, but then it began to redeem itself, finding an audience on home video and later becoming a fixture on cable TV.

The film has taken a near-mystical hold on viewers that shows no sign of abating. Steven Spielberg once told the film’s writer-director Frank Darabont that he had made “a chewing-gum movie — if you step on it, it sticks to your shoe,” says Mr. Darabont, who went on to create “The Walking Dead” for AMC.