Linked List: March 25, 2024

Monday, 25 March 2024

The Original Original ‘Apple Vision’ ★

I thought going back to the 1990s was old, but here’s an Integer BASIC graphics and sound demo from 1978 named “Apple-Vision”. (Thanks to DF reader James Mitchell.)

Data Suggests Twitter/X Is Bleeding Users ★

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News:

Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.

In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.

You know I’m skeptical regarding Sensor Tower’s data, but if they’re measuring all social network mobile app use the same way, it seems like a fair comparison against other social networks. And it jibes with my personal anecdata.

‘How Comics Were Made: A Visual History of Printing Cartoons’ ★

Glenn Fleishman:

If you love newspaper comic strips, you will love my new book How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. I’ve combined years of research and the diligent collection of unique comics printing artifacts with dozens of interviews with cartoonists, historians, and production people to tell the story of how a comic starts with an artist’s hand, and makes it way through transformations into print and, more recently, onto a digital screen. I need your help to make it happen!

The book will be a glorious full-color celebration of the art form, heavily illustrated from the 1890s to the present day with materials that you’ve never seen before, drawn from my personal collection and museums, cartoonists and their estates, and institutions around the United States. It will also feature never-before-published strips and versions of some popular comics.

I’m a sucker for labor-of-love books, and remain fascinated by the history of printing technology. So of course I’m backing Fleishman’s Kickstarter campaign. But I’ll bet a lot of you might share the same interest. Here’s a brief taste: “The Week in Doonesbury That Wasn’t” on YouTube.

The campaign is just over 75 percent funded with three days to go.

The Original ‘AppleVision’ Lineup ★

I quipped in my post linking to Apple’s updated style guide that if Vision Pro had been a product from the 1990s, Apple might have named it “AppleVision”. Turns out Apple did make products under that name — a short-lived line of CRT displays. From a little birdie who worked on them:

It was an ill-fated (and largely disgraced) line of CRTs with automatic color calibration built-in. [...] The on-screen brightness and volume controls that still grace macOS today are there largely because of the AppleVision product, though an earlier form of them showed up on a 14” CRT just prior. Also, DigitalColor Meter (now styled as “Digital Color Meter”) came out of that software effort as well.

But the AppleVision displays were, despite a huge amount of innovation, extremely unreliable. It was the first time Apple had attempted to build a multiscan CRT on their own, and it turns out that multiscan CRTs are really, really hard to get right. Apple took a large (for the time, in the mid 90s) financial hit on the AppleVision 1710 and 1710av, in particular. The name was eventually abandoned as it had been tarnished beyond usefulness.