Davidmuful's Place

jofamo: Finished! I actually finished something for...

Sat, 11 May 2013 05:06:00 -0400

Finished! I actually finished something for once!

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind X Pokémon.

This was a great learning experience, first time I’ve painted a background with no outline too, which for me is much harder than it sounds.

I really really want to do Porco Rosso next. Stay Tuned!

Good ol’ mashups.

I am enjoying the Tumblr app for Windows Phone quite a bit....

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:01:19 -0400

I am enjoying the Tumblr app for Windows Phone quite a bit. Needs a couple of small improvements, but still good. Windows Phone has been getting lots of decent support recently, in general. I have not been unable to find an app I wanted in quite some time.

jofamo: Feels good to be drawing again, when 2 hours fly by and...

Fri, 03 May 2013 04:14:16 -0400

jofamo:

Feels good to be drawing again, when 2 hours fly by and you don’t even notice.

Work in progress. Pokémon x Studio Ghibli. “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” seems so right for this kind of crossover.

Can’t wait to finish it up. Thinking of doing a whole Pokémon x Studio Ghibli project thing.

Fuck yes.

fiasko0: Syd Mead’s concept art for Blade Runner So awesome.

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:28:54 -0400

fiasko0:

Syd Mead’s concept art for Blade Runner

So awesome.

fuckyeahconceptart: Unknown artist for Bungie’s leaked IP:...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:18:02 -0500

fuckyeahconceptart:

Unknown artist for Bungie’s leaked IP: Destiny

Fuck yeah.

insteadofwatchingtv: Are You Lightest in the Morning? No.

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 15:31:30 -0500

insteadofwatchingtv:

Are You Lightest in the Morning?

No.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 07:49:44 -0400

What’s the difference between OS X and Windows? That’s not a simple question. Perhaps ‘what’s the biggest difference’ is more easily answered, certainly for me.

For me, what it comes down to is essentially apps. Windows has a bigger catalogue of apps than OS X, but the differentiator is the quality. Mac apps are, for me, just better. They look nicer and they are often more intelligently designed. The best are aimed at simple problem solving, or presenting a service in a useful and usable way. That isn’t to say that great apps don’t exist on Windows, they surely do, but it is a general statement that I think holds true.

What Apple have done for software is to attract the kind of developers who make great apps. I’m confident that if these developers took their hands to any OS they could produce great apps. But they’re doing it for OS X and for iOS.

This makes me somewhat uneasy about the imminent release of Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 8 will finally bring the kind of app development environment that will make apps of iOS quality possible but I’m not remotely convinced that we’ll suddenly see great developers and great apps. The difference between OS X and Windows proper illustrates this; both are equally capable OS’s, but Microsoft just haven’t attracted the right developers for Windows.

Windows Phone’s status as a second class OS, an afterthought, makes the current software situation less than rosy. This is why, despite there being 100,000+ apps in the Marketplace, the software selection is so sparse. The quality of all of these apps is remarkably poor, and there isn’t a top tier of well-designed and thoughtful apps to displace this, as there is on iOS.

It’s back to the chicken and egg. Microsoft and their partners must sell a tonne of Windows Phones in the next few months, I mean a shitload, for this to change (though even then, it’s no guarantee). There are no indications currently that this will happen. If Apple are selling 27 million iPhones a quarter, the baseline should be about half of that. Given that it’s a launch/holiday quarter coming up, it should be even higher.

I’ll make a prediction. If we don’t see a marked improvement in Windows Phone sales over the next few months, the app situation will barely change. If we do see this improvement, the app situation will gradually improve over the next six months. That’s a vague prediction, but there is just so much that is unknown right now, it’s hard to be any more specific.

I’ve been thinking that smartphone keyboards should store your email addresses (maybe your...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 08:29:56 -0400

I’ve been thinking that smartphone keyboards should store your email addresses (maybe your passwords with a pin to protect?) so you don’t have to reenter them all the time. On windows phone it could be in the copy paste pull out tray in the keyboard. Would be pretty neat, I think.

Dan Seifert: The only problem? Two years on, no matter how colorful, Windows Phone has yet to prove...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:27:00 -0400

Dan Seifert:

The only problem? Two years on, no matter how colorful, Windows Phone has yet to prove that it can turn any of these companies a profit.

Here’s the thing though, what companies are in the black with Android? After the meteoric rise of Android in terms of sales, only Samsung actually turn profit. I’d say that should cast the viability of Android into an unfavourable light for HTC, and my guess is that is the explanation for their renewed faith in Microsoft. Let’s face it, Android is in trouble. Samsung only make money from ripping off iOS, and it’s doubtful whether that can continue, given their recent loss in court (as a side note, the damages from that court case pretty much destroyed the profit they have made from Android). OEMs don’t have any other option. Android means a race to the lowest price point, and they can’t make any money that way.

It’s WP8 or nothing now. Thankfully Windows Phone is actually pretty nice.

But I don’t get how Seifert can cast doubt on HTC’s push for Windows Phone when Android has demonstrably proven that despite incredible sales, it cannot turn a profit.

Where oh where is Windows Phone 8?

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:43:21 -0400

Where oh where is Windows Phone 8?:

parislemon:

No one is saying this stuff is easy. But Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world. And their future depends on this. What the fuck are they doing?

My thoughts exactly.

Zombies, Run!: We're on Windows Phone!

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:25:07 -0400

Zombies, Run!: We're on Windows Phone!:

zombiesrungame:

Zombies, Run! is now out on Windows Phone! We’ve had hundreds of emails and tweets asking for us to bring the game to the platform, and so with the help of Microsoft, Nokia, and Matchbox Mobile, we’re really happy to have gotten the game out so quickly.

Our launch version (1.0) contains…

Awesome.

hoppip: Scene comparison of Victor Sjöström’s ‘The Phantom...

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:55:54 -0400

hoppip:

Scene comparison of Victor Sjöström’s ‘The Phantom Carriage’ (1921) and Stanley Kubrick’s famous scene of ‘The Shining’ (1980). (Link)

On The Verge

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:45:08 -0400

Ben Brooks talking about The Verge last December:

The amount of posts is astonishing. The scoops, breaking news, features, interviews, product reviews are there.

What’s missing is compelling content.

When a bunch of writers left Engadget and formed The Verge there was, as Brooks picked up on, a sense of an implicit promise from Topolsky, Patel, and crew. Brooks has that unfulfilled promise as the basis of his post “The Failed Promise of ‘The Verge’”, and he hits very successfully on one of the major problems in technology news today; publications don’t take a stance.

Increasingly the best insight, the best information for your purchasing decisions and the best all round coverage is coming from individuals, not larger organisations like The Verge, Gizmodo and Engadget. Daring Fireball is probably the best example of how a single person’s insight and genuine opinion can be more valuable than a whole newsroom of otherwise intelligent and talented writers who are far too preoccupied with removing personality from their work. Jim Dalrymple and Peter Cohen have one of the best Apple news sites around, and they do this by actively embracing their opinions, because as Jim Dalrymple discussed in the most recent Talk Show with Dan Benjamin, they owe it to their readers to call it as they see it.

I question the value of an organisation reviewing a product and then never telling the reader whether they, at a fundamental level, think you should get it or not. As Brooks explains, what you get from The Verge is “I like it, but who knows if you will.”

Something Brooks doesn’t mention is the Verge Scores segment of their reviews (and indeed, score systems are a common feature across many tech sites). The problem with these is that they try to put subjective views on an equal and concrete scale. For example, if two different reviewers give two different products 7.6, have they stated that both products are exactly equal? The HTC Rezound and the Motorola Atrix 2 both achieved 7.6, so how do I tell the difference. Given that so little personality and opinion is given generally across The Verge, am I able to judge which reviewer’s concerns more closely align with mine?

For that matter, what is the difference between 7.2 and 7.3? Does that mean that the 7.3 is undoubtedly better? What if one reviewer is always conservative in his hardware ratings and another more liberal, does that mean I should mentally adjust the score according to which of the many reviewers is rating the product?

This just obfuscates the answer to a simple question: what should I get? The Verge cannot and will not answer this question.

And then there is the sensationalism.

Vlad Savov posted this story on the 26th. It talks about a guy, Sahas Katta, who wrote on his blog that Microsoft cheated him out of a win in the “Smoked by Windows Phone” contest at a Microsoft store. In this first post The Verge seems happy to believe him, but they do say that they are unable to verify his story.

Then a few hours later Nathan Ingraham posted this article. In a few short hours the story went from unverifiable to absolute truth, is labelled a “controversy” with Ingraham stating that Microsoft were denying Katta “his just reward”, despite the Verge acknowledging that the Microsoft rep who apologised said he wasn’t there and didn’t know what happened. If The Verge did somehow verify Katta’s story, they made no reference as to how they did so. Tom Warren posted this the next day, and again it is asserted the Sahas did in fact win and is telling the truth with absolutely no evidence.

The particulars of this story are uninteresting to me. It sounds plausible that Katta was cheated by a Microsoft store employee, and the Smoked campaign is obviously set up in such a way that Microsoft will win (why this is suddenly a controversy I don’t know as it was obvious from the start). To me, what stinks about this is that The Verge are extremely willing to devote two ‘story streams’, five articles (two of which are editorials), and two days worth of front page coverage to a story that some guy put on his blog, with absolutely no evidence supporting its authenticity. Anecdotally most people are aware that A. people who lose contests often claim their opponent was cheating, and B. anybody can say anything on the internet and you shouldn’t just take them at their word. This is shoddy journalism.

John Gruber also recently pointed out the sensational tendency of The Verge when comparing temperatures of the new iPad, which The Verge later changed after Gruber’s article criticised them. I think we’ll see a lot more of this crap as they start to enjoy the page views this can bring.

In the long run, sensationalism hurts views, as Gawker will no doubt be aware. As long as you get no worthwhile opinion from a publication, you are going to start looking elsewhere for your content. I suggest Daring Fireball or The Loop.

The bottom line from all of this is that The Verge seemed like it was going to be different, is not and was not, and nobody should bother reading it any longer.

I had to present in front of about 25 people on Thursday. It was a ten minute presentation about...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 10:53:48 -0400

I had to present in front of about 25 people on Thursday. It was a ten minute presentation about Feng Zikai, an influential Chinese cartoonist.

I decided that I would use Keynote, so I whipped up all the relevant slides and had it looking good. I used Futura Bold for these great looking titles.

Then when I had it all looking exactly the way I wanted I remembered that I wouldn’t be able to use Keynote on their system, so I would have to convert this document to a Powerpoint file. That was silly of me.

I figured, no big deal, I would convert it then fix all the weird stuff and that would be fine. So I output to .ppt and opened it up in Powerpoint.

Immediately it looked wrong. I had expected some weirdness, but what I hadn’t expected was that it was looking bad whilst trying to render exactly the same thing. My first assumption was that it had simply not carried over the font tweaks I had made, but on closer inspection I saw that what Keynote and Powerpoint refer to as Futura Medium look nothing alike. And it is not possible to have them looking the same, selecting Futura Medium simply has no effect. (Futura Bold looks similar across the two, but the spacing looks better on Keynote).

As well as this, Powerpoint refuses to render the Futura apostrophe.

I do not know why. Instead it inserted a horribly mismatched apostrophe in every place that I used it. The font label was “MS” then a bunch of garbled characters. I have to assume this is some weird bug, but the best I could do was use the Gill Sans apostrophe, which still looks totally out of place, but not as much.

After this, I went to save the file on to a pen drive which I would use to transfer it to the system in the presentation room. In previous Powerpoint versions I believe there was a way to embed fonts into the file but this is not the case with Powerpoint for Mac 2011. After a frustrating hour of tweaking goddamn fonts this was extremely irritating.

The Help Menu offered this extremely useful solution: Use Times New Roman or Arial.

I’m having difficulty imagining that my usage scenario is an uncommon one. That is, I imagine that an extremely large number of people who are doing presentations will have to save it to some small storage medium and transfer it to a foreign computer network that is hooked up to all the projectors and sound system. Why, then, is visual continuity not a priority? Does everyone just have to put up with Arial when they are making important sales pitches or trying to scoop a new job? It is possible to save as a PDF or as images, but these do not allow for easy presentation on the other side.

Speaking of the other side, when I did eventually load up the file in the presentation room I was presented with an entirely different set of problems, after I had choked back the tears at seeing the sea of Arial on the screen in front of me, of course. The UI of whatever the hell version of Powerpoint that loaded up was completely different, and I had no idea how to run the damn slideshow. After I asked someone, and got through my un-punchy visuals with bland title slides, I took a seat so that I could be subjected to everyone else in the group giving their presentations. The next person up loaded their presentation, and lo and behold, Powerpoint now presented another equally different UI. But that’s not all. Over the course of 25 presentations, three different UIs were served on a single computer. Each had a different, obscure, placement of the play button. I noted that every presentation used Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri.

After all of this crap, we were all chatting and guess what? It turns out that apart from about five people, every single person there was a Mac user. We are all forced to buy and use a product that barely even works properly, even though there are better alternatives, because Windows and Office are the entrenched systems that the IT guys use.

It is often noted that whilst Mac sales are increasingly getting stronger, Windows still massively dominates worldwide. I wonder what the numbers are like if you just look at people under thirty. My guess is that the people who are going to make up the majority of computer sales over the next 30 years, people currently under thirty and people not yet born, are going to dramatically drive the overall traditional computer experience towards the Mac or Mac-like experiences.

Current wisdom is that traditional computer sales will fall, and devices like the iPad will become more common as most people’s main computers. Whilst I entirely agree with this, I do still think that most people will own a traditional computer of sorts for the near future. The scenario I imagine is one where a person buys a Mac or Windows machine less and less frequently, and uses it less and less as well, whilst buying a highly mobile device more frequently. People might buy an iPad every, say, two or three years and a laptop or desktop over dramatically longer periods, something like five to seven years perhaps. The traditional machine fills in the gaps of the tablet’s functionality, which are fewer and fewer with each iteration.

After this near future passes, either something new comes along or we’re entirely using these new devices, of which the iPad will be the dominant force. An experience like the aforementioned will be much rarer because clunky old crap will just not sell.

"In all things mysterious – never explain."

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 06:12:27 -0400

“In all things mysterious – never explain.”

- Stanley Kubrick, quoting H.P. Lovecraft in an interview with John Hofsess of the International Herald Tribune, 1980 (via the-overlook-hotel)

Fonts

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:44:29 -0400

A great quick guide for some excellent font combinations for printed documents.

My favourite (that isn’t in that guide) currently is:

Futura Bold as Title in 24pt with +6% character spacing.
All caps Futura Bold as Section Titles in 18pt with +6% character spacing.
Gill Sans as Body in 14 pt (maybe 12pt) with +2% character spacing.
Gill Sans Italics for Footnotes in 10pt or 11pt.

Constant tweaking is always required, there is no fixed great combo. But once you get one you like, man it’s great.

Minimal Mac: TV Is Broken

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:06:28 -0500

Minimal Mac: TV Is Broken:

minimalmac:

“Can I choose?”, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.

I never watch regular television at home. Netflix or DVDs only. I only have DVDs for relics and shows that are too popular to be on Netflix.

You forget how bad it is until you return to your parent’s house for a weekend and subject yourself during a boring hour to whatever is on. The good stuff is relegated to the hours when the rest of the country are tuning in, so most of the time there is nothing good to see.

The worst part is that when something truly great comes along, Netflix, they get shafted by baffling rights deals and ultimately what ends up happening is that 50% of what the user wants to watch is unavailable.

Netflix have succeeded in proving that people don’t want to pirate shows, they want to pay a reasonable fee and get a good service, but Hollywood are showing no signs of listening. The thing to watch over the next few years is if services like Netflix keep making money anyway, or whether they get too popular and start losing show rights.

There’s a really irritating bug/oversight in OS X that is present in Lion and remains in...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:10:51 -0500

There’s a really irritating bug/oversight in OS X that is present in Lion and remains in Mountain Lion, that was never there to the best of my memory in Snow Leopard.

It occurs when dragging a CD or mounted disk down to the trash to eject it. In Snow Leopard it would say “Eject” and change the icon accordingly, but in both Lions it says “Trash”, which to me is irritating and misleading. The trash icon still changes to the standard OS X eject icon.

Skype:

And also a CD:

What makes this (absolutely tiny and insignificant) bug doubly annoying is that when you ctrl-click it displays the correct nomenclature, “Eject”, which just makes the user even more likely to think that they are going to trash their CD if they drag it to eject.

Details, Apple, details!

The Appstore now supports Safari style back gestures in Mountain...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:01:02 -0500

The Appstore now supports Safari style back gestures in Mountain Lion, something I really missed in Lion.

Mark W. Smith: This year's killer app -- pen and paper | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:32:20 -0500

Mark W. Smith: This year's killer app -- pen and paper | Detroit Free Press | freep.com:

minimalmac:

Even as we scramble to replace our daily activities with simplified digital solutions, there’s still nothing quite like writing something down.

I’m Patrick Rhone, and I approve this message.

(via Coudal)