Linked List: September 19, 2016

Monday, 19 September 2016

Remember Flag? It was a Kickstarter project from two years ago, where the idea was they’d make high-quality photo prints for you for free, with advertisements on the back of the prints. They’re back with a second Kickstarter campaign:

Huge demand for premium free prints means access to Flag is constrained by our limited production capacity. Back us now to help us purchase the equipment we need, lower costs, and deliver to more free prints, to more people, more effectively.

Free with Flag means no printing, shipping or handling fees. […]

Archival quality printers deliver eight times more detail using inks that won’t fade for up to 300 years. Flag prints on real German photo paper and doesn’t compress the images you upload in any way. Every Flag print is gallery ready.

Seven colors of ink, specially formulated eggshell paper, and 2,400 dpi print heads deliver deeper blacks, brighter whites and a wider range or rich color than the best traditional wet-chemistry lab prints.

The Kickstarter campaign is already fully funded, and the funding tiers are filling up quick. The “earlybird special” tier only has 21/1000 spots remaining, for example.

I still think the basic idea is genius: the ads allow the prints to be free of charge, but don’t distract from the prints at all because they’re on the back.

Dan Golding: ‘A Theory of Film Music’ ★

Remember that episode of Every Frame a Painting I linked to the other day about the unmemorable scores of the Marvel universe movies? Dan Golding has responded with a video of his own, and it is amazing. (Among several things I learned: Hans Zimmer was in The Buggles!)

Very Important Update: Hans Zimmer was not a member of The Buggles, he simply appeared in their video for “Video Killed the Radio Star”.

Bloomberg: ‘Rush to Take Advantage of a Dull iPhone Started Samsung’s Battery Crisis’ ★

Yoolim Lee and Min Jeong Lee, reporting for Bloomberg:

Few things motivate Samsung employees like the opportunity to take advantage of weakness at Apple Inc.

Earlier this year, managers at the South Korean company began hearing the next iPhone wouldn’t have any eye-popping innovations. The device would look just like the previous two models too. It sounded like a potential opening for Samsung to leap ahead.

So the top brass at Samsung Electronics Co., including phone chief D.J. Koh, decided to accelerate the launch of a new phone they were confident would dazzle consumers and capitalize on the opportunity, according to people familiar with the matter. They pushed suppliers to meet tighter deadlines, despite loads of new features, another person with direct knowledge said. The Note 7 would have a high-resolution screen that wraps around the edges, iris-recognition security and a more powerful, faster-charging battery. Apple’s taunts that Samsung was a copycat would be silenced for good.

This was miscalculated on several fronts, starting with the fact that the iPhone 7 is not dull.

Twitter Changes Character-Counting Rules for Tweets With Links and Attachments ★

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories:

Twitter began rolling out changes that take back space for text in tweets. As Twitter has gradually become a multimedia experience full of images, GIFs, videos, quoted tweets, and other things, each has encroached on the 140 character limit of a tweet leaving less room for text. That just changed.

Good news too: third-party clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot will be able to support this.

Punching Down ★

The Macalope, on Dave Gershgorn’s argument that Apple is “punching down” by competing against smaller companies like Fitbit and Spotify:

Inasmuch as Apple is the largest tech company in the world depending on the day and what measure you use, yes, it’s almost always competing against a company that’s smaller than it is. So, all the golf claps to you, you’ve created Apple’s Kobayashi Maru. The only way for them to win is to lose a lot of money and market value. […]

Fitbit is a publicly traded company with a market cap over $3 billion. Sure, it’s no Apple — as the Macalope said, no one is — but it’s not exactly two hard-working nerds in a garage. Spotify, meanwhile, has 100 million active users and half a billion registered users. Apple Music has 17 million subscribers.

A much better example than Fitbit would be Pebble. That’s a true David to Apple’s Goliath. The whole argument is nonsense though. There’s only one way for Apple to operate, and that’s full steam ahead.

In the 1992 Olympics, the U.S. men’s basketball “Dream Team” played their first game against Angola. At one point they went on a 46-1 run, and that 1 point was a free throw after Charles Barkley was called for throwing an elbow at a player for Angola. After the game, Barkley faced criticism for playing too aggressively. His answer was, more or less, that he only knows one way to play: as hard as he can. Whether he was playing against the Angolan national team or the mighty Chicago Bulls, he played the same way.

Austin Mann’s iPhone 7 Camera Review: Rwanda ★

Whole thing was shot on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus cameras. If you can, look at his example photos on a display with wide color gamut. Mann on the 7 Plus 56 mm camera:

It works exactly as I hoped. It is super quick to switch between lenses, even while you are rolling video. As seen in the video above, jumping from 1× to 2× while recording can be a great way to punch in and emphasize a detail.

In terms of quality, I found the 2× zoom lens to be equally as sharp as the iPhone wide-angle we’re accustomed to. However, I do not recommend the digital zoom beyond 2×. The quality of digital zoom degrades quickly and I find it unusable for photography (although it’s actually kind of nice as an animal spotting tool).

The 2× works in ALL modes (photo, video, time-lapse, slo-mo, and even pano), which surprised me. I didn’t expect it in each mode, and I really enjoyed shooting 2× panos, capturing extra detail in the area of the landscape I found most interesting.

And on search, which truth be told I’ve not played with yet:

Shooting photos is one thing; finding them and sharing them is another. The new Photos app in iOS 10 has a great search feature (the magnifying glass at top right) that hasn’t been talked about much.

I’ve found this feature to be very powerful and way beyond what I expected. For starters, I can search for a location like “Lake Kivu” to see all the photos I took on the lake. But going further, I can search for “tree” or “mountain” and immediately see all images containing trees or mountains. Even further still, I can search for “palm tree” and it accurately displays palm trees I’ve photographed in the last week.