Old, but good. David Lynch on the iPhone film experience. (And from the related videos, why he turned down Return of the Jedi.)
As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.
— Mike Monteiro writing about Apple’s iPad. (via John Gruber)
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson. (via Ck/ck)
Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
Jeffrey Zeldman writes for 24 Ways on the vast, real problem of getting embedded type to render consistently across browsers and platforms. He explains why the appearance of type in Safari looks so different — Apple appears to have implemented its own hinting engine that ignores data in embedded font files in favour of its own rendering rules — and is rather glib about the likelihood of an easy cross-browser solution:
There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing — the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of
@font-facewere supposed to save us. I don’t know that even mighty Typekit has figured out every needed variation yet (although, working with foundries, they probably will).
Ugly rendering by browser makers is the key reason services like Typekit and its ilk are still a tough sell for most projects. Unless your audience is overwhelmingly using Webkit, results like these are hard to avoid. The tragedy of this is that Typekit is a terrific service doing its darnedest to conquer these issues through technical smarts and by working with type makers.
Update: I’ve edited the last paragraph to better convey my thoughts.
When I arrived to pick up Ollie from Poppa’s place later that afternoon, they were both at the table, with two steaming pots of noodles in front of them. … They had compared the contents of the flavour sachets, and were conducting a taste test worthy of a 3-star sommelier.
— Ben Gracewood takes a break from tech to write about the importance of answering kids’ questions.
Why do we Tumbl? In the end, we use Tumblr not because it’s a great way to connect with our readers (though it is that), or because we believe this or something like it is a part of a new way forward for interaction between publishers and audience (though we think that too). We use Tumblr because it’s fun and while, you know, you can’t eat fun, or trade it in for fistfuls of dollars to fund serious journalism, we believe there’s a value in doing things we like simply because we like to do them, and that hopefully our fellow Tumblrs will too.
— Newsweek on why they use Tumblr. (via Meaghan O’Connell)
Delete unimportant things. Even if you love them. If it isn’t spectacular, it gets cut. Kill your darlings. Be a cold-blooded killer. Ruthless. Delete. Refine. Improve.
— From Frank Chimero’s 10 Principles That May Make Your Work Better Or May Make It Worse, originally published on AisleOne.
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
— Cormac McCarthy during a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen. (via John Gruber)
I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all?
— Y Combinator’s Paul Graham eloquently explains the dichotomy between the manager’s and the maker’s schedules. We mostly have the ringers on our phones turned off for this reason — that frequent din is a subconscious disruption to designers and developers alike; handling client communications on our own terms helps us focus on the work for more extended periods. (via John Gruber)
The contraction of space on a shrinking planet suggests a time, not far off, when there will be no remoteness: nowhere to become lost, nothing to be discovered, no escape, no palpable concept of distance, no peculiarity of dress — frightening thoughts for a traveler.
— Paul Theroux. (via José Barbosa)
