Linked List: July 27, 2018

Friday, 27 July 2018

The Talk Show: ‘Cut That Mustache With Scissors’ ★

Special guest Marco Arment returns to the show for a brief discussion about the new MacBook Pro models and the state of Apple’s MacBook lineup.

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Ken Kocienda’s ‘Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs’ ★

Ken Kocienda:

I wrote a book about my Apple career. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. It’s coming out on September 4. You can pre-order today.

In the book, I tell stories about developing the original iPhone, iPad, and Safari web browser, and I give my personal view on what made the Apple product culture special.

I’ve read an advance copy of the book, and for now I’ll just say this: it’s extraordinary. Take my word for it, go ahead and pre-order a copy now.

‘The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow’ ★

I did not expect to get far into a feature story on Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle company Goop, but I found this piece utterly compelling. Well-observed and incredibly well-written story by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for The New York Times Magazine. If you’re looking for weekend reading material, queue this one up.

Different US Election Maps Tell ‘Different Versions of the Truth’ ★

Issie Lapowsky, writing for Wired:

Conservatives replying to Yingst’s tweet interpreted the expanse of red as proof of their party’s dominance throughout all levels of government. Liberals viewed the map as a distortion, masking the fact that most of that redness covers sparsely populated land, with relatively few voters.

In reality, both sides are right, says Ken Field. A self-proclaimed “cartonerd,” Field is a product engineer at the mapping software company Esri and author of a guidebook for mapmakers called Cartography. The problem, he says, isn’t with people’s partisan interpretation of the map. The problem is believing that any single map can ever tell the whole story. “People see maps of any type, and particularly election maps, as the result, the outcome, but there are so many different types of maps available that can portray results in shades of the truth,” Field says. “It’s a question of the level of detail that people are interested in understanding.”

Really interesting examples of data visualization in this piece.

MoviePass Couldn’t Afford to Pay for Movie Tickets on Thursday ★

CNN Money:

Helios and Matheson, the parent company of the popular movie subscription service, said that it had a service outage on Thursday because it couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets. The company borrowed $5 million in cash Friday to pay its merchant and fulfillment processors, according to a regulatory filing.

Helios and Matheson missed a payment to one of its fulfillment processors, and that contractor temporarily refused to process payments for MoviePass.

Next idea for Helios and Matheson: First CityWide Change Bank.