Daniel Pietzsch

Feb 15

Alex Stenweiss invented the album cover as we know it to create a new art form:

“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.”

So:

In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia — combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations — took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. …. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow.

His new book, Alex Steinweiss: Inventor of the Modern Album Cover, was recently honored.

[Image: Alex Steinweiss Bartok, Concerto 3]

Feb 14

Tech Journalism Near Death as iPad Coverage Has Unexpected Side Effects

nostrich:

CUPERTINO, CA — Experts expressed grave concern for the health of technology journalism this morning, one week after hundreds of tech blogs suffered extreme, adverse reactions to a routine Apple product launch. One witness commented, “they just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think some of these guys will ever recover.” A spokesperson for Engadget said that coverage of the iPad was “critical, but stable,” following emergency procedures. Steve Jobs was not available for comment.

Feb 13

“Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made contact with the “higher web,” the silent majority. The ones that don’t know a browser from the internet or what the address bar does, the ones whose web experience is pre-determined by what their homepage is set to. The ones that disregard most information in a desperate attempt to just find something that seems halfway familiar. The users who figure out one way to do something and get overwhelmed if there is more than one way to accomplish a task.” — Frank Chimero has a blog.: The Attack of Momputing

Feb 12

Is there anything better to start into the weekend than a cold bottle of New Zealand’s best beer?

Things people try to log into

Yeah! What the hell?

mrgan:

Regarding this morning’s amazing occurrence where people who had googled for “facebook login” and got taken to a news story about Facebook then assumed that the news website was Facebook itself…

Flickr user jimwhimpey posted screenshot of login pages for Facebook and MySpace; this resulted in comments from users trying to log in to those websites using small screenshots of them; or even assuming that they’re already on Facebook, talking to their high school friends and hot ladies. There are also spam/scam posts, of course.

And here’s another post about Facebook login with loads of similar comments.

There’s also a small, black market of websites offering to “help you log in to Facebook.” I won’t link to any for obvious reasons; I’ll bet good money they won’t actually help you log in to Facebook.

Is this just an outcome of Facebook’s monstrous popularity? Is it because Facebook redesigns all the time? Is their login form confusing? Note that when you start searching for “trouble log…” on Google, it autocompletes with “…logging into Facebook.” Facebook is also the top suggestion for “can’t log in…”

Man, Facebook - what the hell.

I liked the old Facebook login better -

mrgan:

Please read marco’s post on a mindblowing web artifact:

(via Zoya)

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

It took me a minute to grok this, since I typically walk around with the conviction that people aren’t THAT naive, but…

What’s apparently happening here is, Facebook users are googling for “facebook login” (because how else are you going to log into Facebook?), clicking the first result (which is sometimes a story about Facebook, on an unrelated site), assuming that the site itself is Facebook, scrolling to the bottom to get to the comment form - still thinking they’re on Facebook - and using the comment form to complain about how this, a wholly different website, is a terrible redesign of Facebook.

I just don’t even know how to start feeling about any of this. It’s like the Twilight Zone episode where you wake up and everyone in the world has started talking a different language.

It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.

This is shocking. Follow the (title) link to see the comments yourself.

Feb 11

“Clearly, the way Apple approached the iPad was that of course the iPad was going to introduce a new UI. They’re really rather fearless about it, because, I think, they’re so confident in its obviousness. Unfamiliar and new isn’t a problem if the whole thing is obvious and easy to figure out.” — Daring Fireball Linked List: Paul Thurrott, Warming to iPad

Feb 10

Flashback!

About Ruby Quicktips

I launched a Ruby Quicktips site: http://rubyquicktips.tumblr.com/. Here is some introduction:

rubyquicktips:

I have collected some initial tips for this blog now and thought it would be time to write something about the blog itself. So, here we go…

Do you know these moments when you talk to fellow programmers, read a blog article or book and suddenly discover a neat, new trick you haven’t seen or used, yet?
This blog is all about this! It’s meant to collect all those little new Ruby & Rails commands and tricks you have learned about.

Don’t expect this blog to teach you about Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails from scratch, though; it’s random and intended to be used as way to quickly discover new snippets of Ruby code.

All the tips are quicktips, which means they are short, practical and mostly lack some context and detailed explanation. However, I always link to sources which explain the commands of each tip in more detail.

I constantly learn new stuff about Ruby and Rails from the sources mentioned above and I thought it would be a good idea to share what I learned with the public, so you can benefit, too. While this is totally awesome already, it’s even better when more people participate…

Submit your tips

Let’s make this site the most awesome collection of Ruby and Rails Quicktips on the web! Your help is essential and very appreciated!

And don’t be afraid to submit something you think is trivial or maybe too complicated or specific; Ruby Quicktips is for developers of all skill levels! All you have learned is worth sharing and will probably help some of your fellow programmers, too.

You can submit your tips on the submit page or by writing an e-mail to rubyquicktips@tumblr.com.

Comments

You can comment on every tip on this blog. Please do so, if you discover an error, have an improvement to en existing tip or just want to leave a nice comment.

Follow this blog

There are several options to follow this blog:

There will be one more option in the future as soon as this blog has collected enough tips for this option to make sense. :-)

So, I hope you’ll enjoy this blog and discover a lot of useful Ruby and Rails tips.
Now go, tell your friends and submit your tip!

Feb 09

“CSS3 is where things are headed, and portions of it are here now. It’s not all or nothing, either. Sprinkle CSS3 in. Don’t tell your boss or client. Have fun with it, prototype with it, embrace it. Don’t be afraid to start using CSS3 right now.” —

Dan Cederholm, Up Late with CSS3, and Loving It! (via webkitbits)

All in all an informative article with opinions on web-standards, CSS, web browsers and more.

Feb 08

Feb 03

20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History - GeekWeek -

The extended take is, “an uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general, usually lasting several minutes. It can be used for dramatic and narrative effect if done properly, and in moving shots is often accomplished through the use of a dolly or stedicam.”
The extended take is a cinematic hire-wire act that pushes the director, actors, cinematographer, art department, sound design, and every other department to their limits. They take a very long time to set-up, and are very easy to mess up. The longer the take, the more pressure is added to get it right.

Now I’m a little smarter and saw some truly amazing film scenes.

(via kottke)

Feb 02

Before

After

Oh Instapaper, how I love thou!
Unfortunately, it can’t do anything about the text itself… ;-)

[video]

Feb 01

“I’d be thrilled if the iPad edition of Instapaper sold one-tenth as many copies as the iPhone edition, and I think that’s optimistic. Would you put in another 50-100% of development time to increase sales by 10%? (I’m going to, but that’s because I’m that kind of guy. I just spent months hacking the Kindle edition of Instapaper that’s used by almost nobody and makes almost no money, simply because I wanted to use it myself and I wanted it to be awesome.)” —

Marco.org - Loosely organized initial thoughts on the iPad

Great attitude! I think this is what makes great software.