Linked List: February 6, 2015

Friday, 6 February 2015

Comcast Customer in Chicago Area Receives Bill Addressed to ‘Super Bitch‘ ★

I’m starting to feel left out that I don’t have a fun Comcast name on my bills.

Matte Shot on the Visual Effects of ‘2001’ ★

“With only a single key light source and everything needing to be pin sharp, continuous camera speeds of 4 seconds per frame were usually called for, with the scenes taking from four to six hours to shoot. The mattes shots took upwards of eleven hours to shoot and complete.”

Worth every second. Simply astounding how well the visual effects of 2001 hold up today.

Tesla Has Hired Over 150 Apple Employees ★

Tim Higgins and Dana Hull, writing for Bloomberg Business:

As cars become more like computers, and traditional U.S. automakers struggle to attract Silicon Valley talent, Tesla’s ability to lure people from Apple gives it an edge in developing cars of the future. “It’s almost an unfair advantage,” says Adam Jonas, an auto industry analyst at Morgan Stanley. “As software goes from 10 percent of the value of the car to 60 over 10 years, that disadvantage [for traditional carmakers] will intensify.”

Employees who have worked at Apple say their decision to join Tesla was based on its cars and its CEO. Musk has a reputation, like Steve Jobs did, for a mercurial temper and an obsessive attention to detail. A former Tesla worker who didn’t want to be named says that Musk is enamored with Apple and relishes comparisons between himself and its co-founder. Tesla, says one Silicon Valley recruiter who asked not to be named, attracts the same kind of employees that Apple does — driven, hard-charging, and drawn to a strong leader.

Cue Guy English’s three-year-old observation that retention of talent is one of the biggest challenges Apple faces.

Bill Simmons’s Super Bowl 49 Retro Running Diary ★

Bill Simmons, writing at Grantland:

Super Bowl XLIX was like the last episode of The Sopranos (and I’m not the only one who thought so). I will always remember watching it, I will always be dumbfounded by the ending and I needed 48 hours to figure out what I thought happened. What was Bill Belichick doing? What was Seattle doing? What was EVERYONE doing? This isn’t a retro diary, it’s a retro retro diary. It’s time to relive, regurgitate, recelebrate and re-heart-attack the final 12 minutes of Super Bowl XLIX.

Bill Simmons at his absolute best. The insanity of the final minute made it easy to forget just how crazy and how exciting the entire fourth quarter was.

Recovering the Doves Type ★

Rachael Steven, writing for Creative Review:

The Doves Type was commissioned by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson as a bespoke typeface for the Doves Press, the London printing company he co-founded with Emery Walker in 1900. A modern take on a Venetian serif, it took two years to create and was used in all of the Press’s publications, including books of verse by Shakespeare and Milton and the Doves Bible, which featured drop caps by Edward Johnstone.

After falling out with Walker, however — their partnership was legally dissolved in 1909, after the business encountered financial troubles - Cobden-Sanderson spent nine months tipping 2,600lb of it into the Thames in secret, ensuring that if he couldn’t use it, nor could anyone else. Disguised by darkness, he made around 170 trips to the Hammersmith Bridge to tip small parcels into the water at night, the splashes concealed by passing traffic, before announcing that it had been “bequeathed’ to the Thames.

A beautiful typeface, and an amazing story.

UXKit Skepticism ★

Brent Simmons:

I doubt this will ever be available outside Apple as a framework that’s meant to replace AppKit.

A thought that occurred to me: Wouldn’t an AppKit replacement wait until Swift was established as the primary language? In the big picture, looking at the next decade, it would make more sense for an AppKit successor to be designed Swift-first, as a primary goal, rather than making it UIKit-like as a primary goal.

So if this UXKit is not Swift-only, I don’t think it’s something we’ll see outside Apple. And given that Photos for Mac started life inside Apple long before Swift was announced, that’s unlikely, to say the least.