Linked List: July 18, 2017

Tuesday, 18 July 2017

Gus Mueller, Flying Meat Software:

What’s new and awesome?

For a number of years, text on a path has been our number one feature request and we finally got to deliver it with version 6. Acorn has always had great text support; it handles unicode effortlessly, and you can have multiple font faces and weights in a single text block. You can even have emoji as part of your text block. All of these same features work perfectly with text on a path. Inline editing, selection, etc- it just works. And it was a ton of fun to code on as well. Buy me a beer someday and I’ll spill the details on how I coded it.

We also implemented our number two feature request, clone tool improvements. You can now select any layer as a clone source (bitmap layers, a group of layers, even shape layers) and then clone to any other layer, or even another image. We also added stamping to the clone tool, which works by holding down the shift key when you click on your image.

Another excellent update to another one of my favorite and most-depended-upon apps. Compared to the old days of “Photoshop or bust”, we Mac users today have a veritable cornucopia of excellent image editing apps to choose from. Acorn just best fits my needs and my way of thinking about how a Mac image editor should look and work. On sale for just $15 — that’s 50 percent off — for a limited time.

Transmit 5 ★

Cabel Sasser:

Seven years after the first release of Transmit 4, our well-loved and widely-used macOS file transfer app, we sat down with an incredibly exhaustive list of ideas, and — this’ll sound like I’m exaggerating but I’m mostly sure I’m not — we did it all.

With one massive update we’ve brought everyone’s favorite file-transferring truck into the future with more speed, more servers, more features, more fixes, a better UI, and even Panic Sync. Everything from the core file transfer engine to the “Get Info” experience was rethought, overhauled, and improved.

A tremendous update to one of my very favorite and most-depended-upon apps. Worth checking out just to see the 3D rotating truck icon on their website. On sale for one week only for just $35.

The Return of Google Glass ★

Laura Stevens, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Google parent Alphabet Inc. is relaunching Glass, its head-worn computer, targeting corporate customers after its initial version flopped because of privacy concerns.

Dubbed Glass Enterprise Edition, the product has been in testing at about 50 companies, including Boeing Co., General Electric Co. and Volkswagen AG, Alphabet said Tuesday.

The new device, which is designed to snap on eyeglass frames and display information, videos and images in the line of a person’s sight, allow workers to see instructional content. They can also use the device to broadcast what they are viewing back to others for real-time instruction.

Still looks goofy (in fact, it pretty much looks the same), but I can see how it could prove popular in work environments so long as it’s useful. People ranging from mechanics to surgeons have long worn industrial-looking eyewear on the job.

Jonathan Chait: ‘Trumpcare Collapsed Because Republicans Cannot Govern’ ★

Jonathan Chait:

In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

The Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, and cannot pass health insurance legislation. One can argue about why this is so, but I think Chait nails it: they can’t square their anti-government dogma with the need for the government to play a role in any humane health care system.

Garry Kasparov on Trump and Putin ★

Garry Kasparov, in a column for The New York Daily News:

For autocrats, angry denial is the first phase of responding to accurate charges against them. “No! Never! A complete fabrication!”

As evidence accumulates, this shifts to feigning ignorance and claiming misunderstanding, along with attempts to distract by slandering the accusers, blaming others for similar sins and discrediting the concept of knowable truth. “I didn’t know it was wrong! The media is out to get me! Others have done worse! Who knows what really happened?”

When even this proves insufficient, it’s time for the final step, confession. Not the kind that is said to be good for the soul, but the aggressive, defiant boasting of someone who is sure that they won’t be punished in this life or the next for the crime they denied for so long. “I did it, but so what? There’s nothing wrong with it! What are you going to do about it?”

After many months of denials, lies and distractions in an effort to dismiss the mounting evidence that the Trump campaign knowingly worked with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, the Trump train is approaching the final station.

It’s not like Kasparov knows anything about strategic thinking or Vladimir Putin.

Only 45 Percent of Trump Voters Believe Don Jr. Met With the Russians, After Junior Admitted It ★

John Aravosis:

Public Policy Polling has a new poll out that’s depressing as hell, and a sign of just how fact-deprived Trump voters truly are.

Among other findings, only 45% of Trump voters think Donald Trump Jr. met with Russians last year to discuss their offer to help his father win the election. And 32% say it didn’t happen at all.

This is after Donald Trump Jr. already admitted publicly that he met with the Russians, and Donald Trump Sr. tweeted the fact that his son met with the Russians. After all that, only 45% believe it.

He not only admitted it, he publicly released the emails documenting it.

Dov Charney’s 2.0: Los Angeles Apparel ★

Matthew Townsend, reporting for Bloomberg:

But American Apparel’s 2015 bankruptcy wiped out most of his net worth, so where would he get the money? Didn’t his tawdry past of sexual harassment allegations make him radioactive? And shouldn’t American Apparel’s collapse prove that making clothes in the U.S. is a fool’s errand?

Yet here he is, at 48, overseeing a startup with seamstresses and fabric cutters and boxes of T-shirts waiting to be shipped across the country. He’s on, he’s riffing, he’s explaining the benefits of immigration, he’s envisioning a company that will someday hit $1 billion in revenue. (American Apparel topped out at $634 million in 2013.) “We’re building, grooving, growing,” Charney says.

His new company, Los Angeles Apparel, was launched late last year as a wholesale business — just like American Apparel’s origins in 1989 — selling blank basics such as T-shirts and sweatshirts.

Very similar brand aesthetic to American Apparel, too, but with Microgramma subbed in for Helvetica Neue as the company typeface.