Arkiv: februari 2012

I’m slowly adding old posts to this blog. It’s the posts from henrikcarlsson.se and kalkyl.nu that’s now starting to show up in the archives here. (These posts are in swedish.)

MacWorld’s Serenity Caldwell has posted an article about some changes to OS X in Mountain Lion. This new backup thing interests me.

After having a terrible hard drive disaster back in college, I’ve been horribly paranoid about my backup arrangements. Mountain Lion will humor my paranoia by letting me use Time Machine to back up to several disks at once, automatically. And since OS X supports backup to networked drives, I can keep my files current in several physical places as well, without any extra work.1

  1. Ten exciting system changes in Mountain Lion ↩

This is a very interesting review from the Verge. Here’s three very important quotes:

What every other PC maker has failed at, Apple nails: the touchpad on the Air works better with Windows 7 than any other Windows laptop on the market.

[…]

Apple’s decision to use premium parts shows in the display. The 13-inch 1440 x 900 resolution panel bests most of the others in terms of resolution and pixel density. […] [It’s] also a very high quality display. That means that you can see what’s on the screen from most angles, and there isn’t any noticeable color change when you move the display back, like on the Folio 13.

[…]

And there’s more on this below, but the lack of bloatware really speeds up the general responsiveness of the operating system.1

To me as a Mac user it proves that Apples focus on premium parts at a premium price really pays off for the user experience. (Ultimately the reviewer concludes that the Air plus Windows 7 is a bit to expansive.)

  1. MacBook Air with Windows 7 review: the ultrabook to rule them all? | The Verge ↩

Publicerad den
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After the Battle of Yavin, the dark lord of the Sith crashed his out-of-control TIE fighter on a remote planet’s northern hemisphere.

As of summer last year I have been doing some hobby photographing, as a way to do something creative that is not part of what I usually consider to be work. A big influence for me has been the various toy photographies by Chris McVeigh. I’ve got a lot of old toys that I would like to photograph in interesting ways.

Via McVeigh I also found the equally great Avanaut and a couple of weeks ago he published a photo called The ”Ghost” that inspired me to take a photo of one or more toys in the snow.

So me and Linn went out for a walk on the ice on a small lake close to our apartment. I brought some toys1 and the camera and apart from just enjoying the sun and some hot chocolate we tried to take some pictures. ”Darth Vader in the snow” is the one that turned out the best, but still not great. The bright sunlight really reveals the fact that it’s a toy. I would like to try again in less light, preferably at night in the star- and moonlight. I also need to do a lot more reading and practicing on forced perspective to make things blend together better.

  1. The other toys that was brought but not used were an AT-AT Walker and two small TIE Fighters. ↩

It’s impossible to imagine a world now in which developers proudly browser-sniff to check that the customer is using the “right” browser on the “right” operating system, while they race to code applications that revolve around non-standard “extensions” thereby locking themselves and their users to one browser because it temporarily has the shiniest proprietary extras. That’s absolutely unthinkable as we approach 2011.1

A relatively old post (over a year), but I found it the other day. A great way of looking at the browser arms race of today.

  1. http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2010/in-praise-of-ie6/ ↩

Could this maybe be Apple’s idea of the future in video editing? Instant wireless previewing on the HDMI-input-enabled monitor of your choice. (Check the iMovie tab.)

Today I’m going through my old posts and making sure they work as intended with the new theme. This might result in some bugs and weird behavior during the day, but it will soon stabilize.

Dialogs can be done well in many cases, avoiding the barrage. They’re only shown when the app requests access to the protected resources, and only the first time. Conscientious developers can usually avoid showing multiple dialogs in a row by only showing them when the data is needed — for instance, I don’t ask for location access unless (and until) a customer selects the automatic-dark-mode setting.1

Marco Arment writes about the permission dialogs in iOS and Android and muses about what’s a good way to solve the various problems that too many dialogs can result in.

  1. http://www.marco.org/2012/02/17/ios-permission-dialogs ↩

I’ve just activated a beta version of a new theme on this site. I’ve been working on the theme quite a lot over the past 48 hours and now I feel it’s good enough to be tested in the wild.

There is usually a lot of stuff that I read I’d like to share. Currently I’m not really happy with the way sharing stuff works on my WordPress blog, and I’m especially unhappy with the way WordPress’s share bookmarklet works.

Tumblr however has gotten this very right, in my opinion. Therefore I’ve launched a tumblr account (henrikcarlsson.tumblr.com) to collect all kinds of awesome stuff that I want to share and that I’ll hopefully include in this blog some way, some day.

So feel free to visit Henrik Carlson’s tumblr to see what kind of stuff I currently want to share. (Or as usual, follow me on twitter, @synvila.

With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.

via Daring Fireball: Walter Isaacsons Steve Jobs

John Gruber writes a great article about Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs Biography, and about five simple words that could easily be used as a replacement for Apple’s “Think different”-tagline.