Linked List: May 25, 2021

Tuesday, 25 May 2021

Dolphin is an emulator for GameCube and Wii. Their team ported Dolphin to the M1 and compared it to a high-end PC gaming rig:

The efficiency is almost literally off the chart. Compared to an absolute monstrosity of a desktop PC, it uses less than 1/10th of the energy while providing ~65% of the performance. And the poor Intel MacBook Pro just can’t compare.

And, as the Dolphin team points out, Apple still hasn’t shown its silicon cards for high-end Macs. The M1 is the consumer Mac chip.

Unexpectedly ★

Stéphane Sudre:

Unexpectedly is a Mac application that lets you browse and visualize the reports from crashes that happened on your Mac or, more probably, another one.

Unexpectedly knows how to parse macOS crash reports. Unexpectedly processes the crash reports to display them as text with colored syntax and hyperlinks or as outlines. A broad range of options are available to let you customize how and what to display.

Looks like a great idea, well done. But what a fantastic name “Unexpectedly” is. A perfect “One More Thing” at the bottom of the product page, too.

The Talk Show: ‘Obviously Tier One’ ★

Marco Arment returns to the show to talk about the new Apple TV remote control. (Also, the new M1 iMacs and iPad Pros.)

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Finding Microsoft’s Next Default Font ★

The Microsoft Design Team:

Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve. To help us set a new direction, we’ve commissioned five original, custom fonts to eventually replace Calibri as the default. We’re excited to share these brand-new fonts with you today and would love your input. Head over to social and tell us your favorite.

Asking users for input on which font should be their next default is perhaps the most Microsoftian thing in recent memory.

Donald McNeil on the COVID Epidemic: ‘The End Is Near’ ★

Donald McNeil — the science reporter who was unceremoniously run out of The New York Times a few months ago — now writing on his oddly-named Medium blog:

Herd immunity is not a moment in time. President Biden is never going to say: “Today, at 9:04 A.M., on the deck of the U.S.S. Moderna, the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 signed our general terms of surrender.”

Instead, this virus is slowly becoming endemic: something we live with.

We will probably have bad seasons and good seasons, as we do with flu. We may have annual shots with a blend of the South African, Brazilian, Indian or whatever variants are circling the globe that year. Luckily, because coronaviruses mutate more slowly than influenza viruses, they will probably be better matches than flu shots are.

I was out to eat last night, indoors, for the fourth time since hitting maxination (two week post-second shot). It’s still exciting.

Washington State Has Sued a Patent Troll for Violating Consumer Protection Laws ★

Joe Mullin, writing for the EFF:

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a lawsuit claiming that Landmark Technology has violated the state’s Patent Troll Protection Act, which bans “bad faith” assertions of patent infringement. Following a widespread campaign of patent demand letters, more than 30 states passed some kind of law placing limits on bad-faith patent assertions. […]

The Washington case reveals just how widespread Landmark’s threats are. From January 2019 to July 2020, Landmark sent identical demand letters to 1,176 small businesses all across the country. Those letters threaten to sue unless Landmark gets paid a $65,000 licensing fee. Landmark essentially insists that if you use a website for e-commerce, you infringe this patent.

Sounds like no one is going to be rooting for Landmark in this case other than their fellow patent trolls.

Sketch: In 2021 and Beyond ★

Sketch:

Real-time collaboration works with documents you share in your Workspace, but with the control and privacy features you’d expect from us; a drafts folder to keep work private until you’re ready to share, and a simple promise that we will not store, share or sell data about how you work. For example, neither us nor your manager can pull up a report that shows how long you’ve been working. Some products consider tracking like this a feature. We consider its absence a feature.

This is clearly a shot against Figma, a purely web-based rival app to Sketch, and an interesting angle to take. Figma allows for some truly invasive tracking of what your team members are doing — without them knowing that you (as a manager) are effectively standing over their shoulders watching them work (or not work). But I suspect such tracking — when used to micromanage — is really only a thing at big companies, and the people who agree with Sketch that the absence of tracking capabilities is a feature are not the people who choose the company’s design tools.

Figma has really taken off, with a lot of market and mind share, because their collaboration features truly are useful and cool. (It’s just a good design app in general, even if you’re not collaborating with anyone.) I know several designers who, in general, would prefer to use a native Mac app like Sketch but who really do love Figma because it’s a great tool. It’s great to see Sketch launch their own collaboration features. Sketch-vs.-Figma (vs. Adobe XD) is a rivalry that is good for everyone. Reminds me a bit of Illustrator-vs.-Freehand and QuarkXPress-vs.-Pagemaker from the early days of desktop publishing.