Linked List: September 27, 2022

Tuesday, 27 September 2022

Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorship Openings 

September and October are usually the busiest months of the year, for the obvious reason that it’s the season when Apple holds its biggest product announcements of the year. But I haven’t mentioned these openings for a while, and I’ve still got a few openings for weekly sponsors this month — including this current week and next week.

Get in touch if you have a product or service to promote to DF’s audience. And remember that weekly sponsorships include the graphic ad in the sidebar of every page of the site.

Jason Snell’s iPhone 14 Pro Review 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

The biggest single hardware upgrade in the iPhone 14 Pro is the main camera, which now has a 48-megapixel sensor, four times the pixels of the iPhone 13 Pro. Apple has for years said (accurately) that counting megapixels is not enough when it comes to measuring the quality of a camera, and the 12MP camera in the iPhone 8 is indeed a far cry from the 12MP camera in the iPhone 13 Pro.

True to its word, Apple has taken its flashy 48MP sensor and made its default mode… a 12-megapixel image. The idea is that Apple’s new “quad-pixel sensor” allows it to gather light from four separate pixels and then combine them to create a 12MP image with superior results, especially in low-light situations. And yes, I saw much less noise in images generated in 12MP mode.

But Apple’s decision is still somewhat puzzling. While you can get a 48-megapixel image out of the iPhone 14 Pro, you have to do it by turning on RAW capture in the Settings app. These RAW captures are slow — it takes a second or more for the camera to be available to take another shot after you snap one — and they’re huge (80 to 100 MB each). But they are also, especially in bright light, spectacularly detailed. Yes, they can be a little noisy, but with a little work in a RAW photo editor (I used Adobe Lightroom Classic), I was able to make great-looking images that had amazing levels of detail the likes of which I’d never been able to do on an iPhone before.

Snell includes a bunch of interesting side-by-side examples in his review. I won’t quite argue that Apple was wrong not to include a 48 MP JPEG shooting mode, but it does seem like shooting RAW on the iPhone 14 Pro produces more impressive results than with previous iPhone generations. This new main camera sensor is impressive.

Testing the iPhone 14 Pro’s 48MP ProRAW Camera Mode 

Mark Spoonauer, writing for Tom’s Guide:

The 48MP camera in ProRAW mode is very impressive, especially if you want to potentially zoom in or crop an image after a fact to reframe your shot. And we really only tested one aspect of ProRAW here.

Overall, the photos shot in ProRAW mode offer more realistic, life-like contrast — particularly in the shadows — and feature fewer digital artifacts. There’s less sharpening by the iPhone’s camera software, and the images keep a broader dynamic range for making edits later. (This might also result in some of haziness and exposure differences that crept into a few of the above samples.)

Some amazing side-by-side examples in this piece.

The Design of Audio Hijack 4 

Neale Van Fleet, writing for the Rogue Amoeba blog:

Audio Hijack 4 is a kinetic app, with subtle animations to aid in understanding. The tiles and wires move, meters bounce, and status icons pulsate to show when things are in action. I’m proud of all these animations, but there are two particular bits I want to call out.

First up are the amazing animations on the connecting wires. While the previous version’s wires could occasionally look somewhat soft, Audio Hijack 4’s wires are all drawn with vectors, so they’re super sharp. They’re also beautifully curved and feel incredibly snappy as you drag blocks around.

I do love these design breakdowns. I’ve noticed so many nice little details in Audio Hijack 4, but I learned a bunch more from reading this post. Just the way that nodes inside a session snap into place on the canvas — it makes Audio Hijack a pleasure to use.

Rogue Amoeba’s 20th Anniversary 

Speaking of Rogue Amoeba, here’s Paul Kafasis:

20 years ago this month, Rogue Amoeba unveiled Audio Hijack 1.0, the very first version of what has become our flagship product. To celebrate that anniversary, we’ve got a great deal to share with you. But first, take a gander at what things looked like way back on September 30, 2002.

Worth reading the post just for that screenshot alone.

Speaking of celebrating, we also thought we’d use this occasion to provide a very special discount. You may know that we seldom run sales on our products, instead striving to offer them at fair prices every day of the year. However, we figured that temporarily providing an even lower price would serve as a small way of saying thanks to existing customers, and help new users join the fold as well.

Through the end of September, everyone can save 20% on every purchase from Rogue Amoeba, in honor of our 20 years in business.

Here’s to 20 more years.