Linked List: April 22, 2015

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Natalie Kerris, Veteran Apple PR Director, Announces Retirement ★

Interesting sign of the times: she announced it on Twitter.

Reporting at Recode, Dawn Chmielewski presents Kerris’s decision as a result of Steve Dowling being named Katie Cotton’s successor:

Kerris sought to succeed longtime Apple PR head Katie Cotton, who retired last year. Corporate public relations chief Steve Dowling was formally named vice president of communications last week after a period of serving in the role on an interim basis.

The timing is certainly suggestive — Dowling’s promotion was made official a week ago. 

Apple Posts Final Three Guided Tours for Watch ★

Apple Pay, Activity, and Workout.

MLB Won’t Ban Fans From Using Periscope Inside Ballparks ★

MacTrast:

In an on-air interview with CNBC earlier this month, Bowman said The Wall Street Journal was wrong when it suggested the league would actively work to prevent fans from streaming the games live to their followers.

“I don’t know how The Wall Street Journal got that story. I’ve been dealing with them for 30 years. They just got it flat out wrong. That’s called an error,” he told CNBC. “I spoke to the reporter. I have no idea how that conclusion got reached.”

I periscoped a few times from Yankee Stadium during the epic 7-hour 19-inning game against the Red Sox two weeks ago. It was fun. It’s absolutely no replacement for a legitimate telecast of the game, though, so I’m glad MLB is not treating it as a problem.

Cameron Moll on Proxima Nova ★

Cameron Moll:

A brief visual history of Mark Simonson’s iconic typeface, a few of his thoughts, and my encounters with it along the way.

As Cameron recalls, we chose Proxima Nova as the original identity typeface for Joyent back in 2005. To me, it felt perfect for the Joyent brand: a balanced combination of friendly and serious.

Unicode Symbol as Text or Emoji ★

Helpful post from Matias Singers on how the new skin tone variant emoji work, as well as how to force certain Unicode glyphs to render as text instead of emoji — a problem I ran into here on DF recently, when iOS 8.3 started rendering my footnote return markers as “↩️” instead of “↩︎”.

Skipping the Web ★

Eugene Wei:

People often write of countries like India or Africa bypassing landlines or PCs to skip ahead to technologies like wireless or smartphones, but I haven’t heard of countries treating the web as one of those intermediate technologies to be hopped over.

Having spent lots of time working out of China, I see the sense in it. Internet connection speeds are really slow there, and loading the web can be painful. Even with an upgraded pipe into the building, when I worked out of Hulu’s Beijing office, I found myself browsing the web a lot less simply out of impatience.

The web is great. I love the web. I continue to publish my life’s work on the web. But what the web is great for is only what it was designed for: publishing HTML pages. For everything else, the web is a kludge, and native apps provide a superior experience.

How WWDC Became the Heart of the Apple World’s Calendar ★

Jason Snell, writing for iMore:

If you had told me in the mid-90s that Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference would end up becoming the social event of the season, I would have laughed long and loud. And yet this highly technical convention has, unconventionally, become the beating heart at the center of the Apple universe’s year.

Marques Brownlee Reviews the Samsung Galaxy S6 ★

Great perspective on the state of the art in the Android world.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: Patents ★

Great segment on patents and patent trolls.

Apple.com Through the Years ★

Amazingly thorough Flickr album of Apple.com screenshots, by Florian Innocente.

(Thanks to Phil Dokas. “Holy shit”, indeed.)