Linked List: December 3, 2015

Thursday, 3 December 2015

Farhad Manjoo: ‘Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Marissa Mayer’s Inability to Bet the Farm’ ★

Farhad Manjoo, writing for the NYT:

Yet the initial success followed by recent sluggishness is beside the point. The larger story of Ms. Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo is one of a transformation so modest it borders on stasis. Over all, Yahoo remains much the same business it was three years ago. It is a far-flung collection of news, entertainment and communications destinations supported by ads. Ms. Mayer was hired to build something novel. Instead, at best, she appears to be building a better Yahoo — with debatable results.

“Inability” to bet the farm might be the wrong word — it could just be “unwillingness”. But I agree with his main point — Yahoo needed a major shake-up, and thus far it hasn’t happened.

New Typeface From Tobias Frere-Jones: Mallory ★

First font from his new foundry:

Mallory began as an experiment in mixing typographic traditions, building a new design with British and American traits. The family offers a broad range of voices, from the prim and austere Thin to the loud and gregarious Ultra.

Strikes me as a friendly-feeling modern take on Gill Sans — I see the British traits more clearly than the American ones. (I do see it in the lowercase “g”, though.) Hard not to compare Mallory to Hoefler and Co.’s Ideal Sans, which, I’ll admit, is my favorite new workhorse sans of the last 15 or 20 years.

Colin Nissan: ‘It’s Rotting Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers’ ★

Colin Nissan:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get these decorative gourds the fuck out of my house. The clock expired on these goofy goose-necked bastards about six weeks ago, but I pushed it and the shit got real on me. It’s Autumn overtime up in here and these fuzzy fuckers need to go. When my guests come over I’m gonna be like, SORRY! My bad on all these rancid ornamental vegetables, you guys. I really should have stayed on top of this perishable shit.

The rare sequel that lives up to the original. (Via Kottke, of course.)

Study Finds Quitting Facebook Makes You Happier and Less Stressed ★

Jack Lowe, writing for Huh:

Researchers at the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen (yep, that does exist) decided to find out. They took a group of 1,095 Facebook users and split them into two groups. The first group were allowed to continue using the social network on a daily basis, while the other group were forced to go completely cold turkey, staying off the site for the duration of the experiment.

The results were incredibly revealing — after just 7 days 88% of the group that left Facebook said they felt “happy” as opposed to 81% in the group still using the site. They also felt less angry, less lonely, less depressed, more decisive, more enthusiastic, and enjoyed their lives more. Ditching Facebook also appeared to reduce stress levels by as much as 55%. They’re some pretty strong results…

As time goes on, I feel better and better about never having signed up. (Via Michele Seiler at Coudal.)

Twitter Announces Digits for tvOS, to Simplify Signing In to Apps ★

Chris Oryschak, Twitter’s product manager for Digits:

Using Digits’ device authorization, your app on the Apple TV will show a short alphanumeric code. Your user then simply enters the code on digits.com/appletv via their laptop or smartphone to authorize the device to their account. Once that’s done, the TV device receives a Digits session for the user’s account which you can use to instantly identify your user and personalize their experience.

This follows hot on the heels of Facebook’s tvOS SDK with login support.

This is a problem that Apple should have solved (and still should solve, as soon as possible).

Craig Federighi Talks Open Source Swift ★

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

In open-sourcing Swift, Apple has two main goals in mind. The first and most obvious is to make Swift code more portable and versatile, enabling its use in projects outside of apps for Apple’s platforms.

The company’s long-term vision is even more ambitious. “We think [Swift] is how really everyone should be programming for the next 20 years,” Federighi told Ars. “We think it’s the next major programming language.

“A number of developers, including enterprise developers like IBM, very early on as they began developing their mobile applications in Swift, really wanted to be able to take the talents that their developers were developing and even some of the code and be able to deploy it in the cloud, for instance,” Federighi continued. “We thought the best way [to enable that], ultimately, was open source.”

Update: Nate Swanner at TNW has an interview with Federighi, too:

“In terms of where we hope the open source project will take Swift, it comes back to the original goals of making Swift the language you learn to program in from the outset, and know that when you learn it you’ll be able to use it to accomplish everything you want to accomplish, all the way from building mobile applications to cloud development. Open sourcing it creates a really clear path to what was already starting to happen.

“If a university wants to revise their core curriculum and start teaching programming in Swift, it being open source really makes that an easy decision for them to make.”

Apple TV Ad Campaign Harks Back to Classic Six-Color Logo ★

Great concept. Love the billboard campaign too.

Swift Goes Open Source ★

Back at WWDC, Apple promised Swift would go open source by the end of the year. Today’s the day. The website has been overwhelmed most of the day, so if you can’t reach it, you can peruse Apple’s GitHub project.

A lot of interesting reading, including this page on the evolution of the language. For example, Swift 3.0, scheduled for late next year, will eliminate the ++ and -- operators.

Also interesting: Swift 3 is set to include a parallel implementation of the Foundation framework:

This project provides an implementation of the Foundation API for platforms where there is no Objective-C runtime. On OS X, iOS, and other Apple platforms, apps should use the Foundation that comes with the operating system. Our goal is to abstract away the exact underlying platform as much as possible.