Linked List: April 12, 2019

Friday, 12 April 2019

Neue Haas Grotesk, the Other New ‘Helvetica’ 

Following Monotype’s marketing, yesterday I described Helvetica Now as “the first new version of Helvetica since Helvetica Neue 35 years ago”. As a few type-minded readers pointed out, this ignores Christian Schwartz’s 2010 Neue Haas Grotesk, which is a modernized Helvetica in everything but name:

The digital version of Helvetica that everyone knows and uses today is quite different from the typeface’s pre-digital design from 1957. Originally released as Neue Haas Grotesk, many of the features that made it a Modernist favorite have been lost in translation over the years from one typesetting technology to the next.

Type designer Christian Schwartz has newly restored the original Neue Haas Grotesk in digital form — bringing back features like optical size variations, properly corrected obliques, alternate glyphs, refined spacing, and more.

Many similarities to Helvetica Now, including separate text and display versions, and alternate glyphs such as a straight-legged ‘R’.

Jackassery Never Goes Out of Style 

Daniel Newman, writing for MarketWatch, with “7 reasons investors should worry” about Apple:

3. Apple has an identity crisis. When Apple was a challenger brand, it disrupted. It innovated. It had to “think different” and be a rebel. The moment Apple became the incumbent, it lost its identity, its sense of purpose and its vision. That’s why Apple is trying to be everything now: a credit-card company, another Netflix, the Reader’s Digest of news (leading HSBC to downgrade the stock), maybe an AR company, maybe a car company… Worst of all, Apple keeps looking to the past for ideas instead of the future. Steve Jobs had vision. Tim Cook has spreadsheets. Spreadsheets don’t make great Apple products. Vision does.

I read this piece a few hours ago and decided to ignore it. But this one paragraph kept gnawing at me. In one paragraph Newman argues that during Apple’s good old days, it disrupted and innovated. And then one sentence later he’s arguing that the company is lost because it’s entering the fields of AR and cars. And how are AR and autonomous vehicles “the past”? It’s one thing to contradict oneself paragraphs apart, but it takes quite a mind to contradict oneself so completely in a single short paragraph.

In for a penny, in for a pound, so let’s look at Newman’s next “reason” too:

4. Apple keeps missing the boat on innovation. Steve Jobs was a market-creator. His model was to build entirely new markets out of new product categories with potential. Apple’s success was predicated on a mix of calculated risk and impeccable timing. Today, Apple no longer seems able or willing to create new markets in which to grow. It should have been the smart home company, not Amazon or Google. It should already be the Mixed Reality (XR) company, but for all the rumors, Apple has yet to produce a revolutionary XR product leaving the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, and Magic Leap to lead in this category.

To write this paragraph, Newman had to ignore Apple Watch, which is now a bigger business than the iPod ever was — and is still growing. AirPods are another ignored hit. With the “mixed reality” stuff I guess he’s talking about headsets, which, yes, Apple doesn’t make. But it’s not like Microsoft’s or Facebook’s VR headsets are hit products. And I guarantee there are more people using AR thanks to ARKit on iOS than on all other platforms combined.

And Magic Leap? Really?

CoreAnimation Bug in MacOS 10.14.4 

Ken Case, writing on The Omni Blog:

It’s incredibly rare for us to have to do this, but I need to let our Mac customers know that the 10.14.4 version of Mojave which shipped a few weeks ago (on March 25, 2019) has a drawing bug which makes windows with large CoreAnimation layers fail to draw. In particular, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan customers have been telling us that since upgrading to 10.14.4, they will open some documents and end up seeing… nothing. Perhaps some empty borders around the window. (Or if another window is dragged over the space where that window should be drawing, they’ll see a trail of its old pixels.) This is most likely to affect customers who are using older hardware, but it also affects large documents on newer hardware.

We’re working with Apple to get this resolved as soon as possible, but for now it appears there’s nothing we can do to resolve this on our own.

Bugs happen, but with all the ongoing consternation regarding Apple’s (and particularly the Mac’s) software quality, it’s a little worrisome to see this in a .4 release. A .4 release of the OS should be peak stability.

And the big problem for Omni Group customers hit by this is that there is no easy way to revert from 10.14.4 to 10.14.3, and Apple has encouraged users to turn on auto-updates to new OS releases.

‘Foxconn Says Empty Buildings in Wisconsin Are Not Empty’ 

Nilay Patel, on Foxconn’s response to The Verge’s investigation into their Wisconsin scam:

Today, Foxconn responded to that piece by… announcing another innovation center in Wisconsin, this one in Madison, the state’s capital. The building, which currently houses a bank, actually sits directly across the street from the Capitol building, and it will continue to house the bank because Foxconn did not announce when it would be moving in.

Here are some other things Foxconn did not announce: how much it had paid for the building, how many floors of the building it would occupy, how many people would work there, or what those people would be doing.

It did announce that it would be rebranding the building “Foxconn Place Madison,” however.

It’s like Foxconn is a stage magician, and Wisconsin paid $4.5 billion to see an elephant disappear from the stage. But two years later, there still is no elephant, it seems ever more clear that they never had any intention of even showing an elephant, let alone making it disappear, and now that people are calling them on it, they’re like, “We are definitely going to make an elephant disappear from this stage, but hey — how about a card trick?”

The Verge Digs Into Foxconn’s Wisconsin Con Job 

In-depth investigation by Josh Dzieza for The Verge:

The secrecy and vagueness are frustrating to critics. How do you prove that Foxconn won’t build an enormous LCD factory during an industry glut or create a research campus larger than MIT in rural Wisconsin other than by pointing out that experts — and even, occasionally, Foxconn executives — say it makes no sense?

State House Minority Leader Gordon Hintz recently appointed himself to the board of WEDC, and Foxconn’s continued promises of 13,000 jobs make him palpably furious. Speaking in slow, measured tones in his Madison office as he packed for a trip, he said the state needs to “right-size” the project to something realistic, likely a few hundred research jobs, and that Foxconn needs to be honest about its plans. “For something that had a 25-year payback, building a factory because the president wants you to for reasons that have nothing to do with market viability is insane.”

Hintz believes Foxconn is trying to slow-walk the project until 2020, continuing to use it to win Trump’s goodwill in the trade war and waiting to see who’s elected.

Foxconn scammed Republican officials, pure and simple — local, state, and federal. The LCD factory that President Trump declared “the eighth wonder of the world” still doesn’t exist and likely never will. It’s a scam Foxconn has played around the globe.

Previously at DF:

Julian Assange, Houseguest From Hell 

BBC News:

More details emerged later, when Foreign Minister José Valencia told Congress that Assange had been using a mobile phone not registered with the embassy, repeatedly insulted the mission’s workers - reportedly calling them US spies - and damaged the facilities by riding his skateboard and playing football, despite being told not to do so.

Cleaning staff, Mr Valencia said, had described “improper hygienic conduct” throughout Assange’s stay, an issue that a lawyer had attributed to “stomach problems”. One unnamed senior Ecuadorean official told AP news agency that other issues included “weeks without a shower” and a “dental problem born of poor hygiene”.

Interior Minister María Paula Romo then complained that Assange had been allowed to do things like “put faeces on the walls of the embassy and other behaviours of that nature”.

Sounds like a lovely fellow.