It’s that time again! Apple’s rumored to announce a new iPad next month. One of the supposed features is a new higher resolution screen. What does 2048×1536 look like? To answer my own curiosity I threw together this little chart.
That’s a lot of pixels. You could watch a full resolution HD movie and still have some space for content. On a 9.7 inch screen!
As the new year begins I’m reflecting on the work I’ve done over the past year. Some of it was good, some could have been better and some was crap.
In an attempt to make more things and become a better <whatever I’m trying at the moment>, I look to inspiration from other smart people. Mike Monteiro’s words this morning struck me as sound advice. Particularly this passage:
“We have more processing power, affordable tools, and combined intelligence right this very minute than at any point in the history of design. We are using it to build shit. It’s time to aim higher. Let’s find problems to solve that actually improve people’s lives. Whether it’s figuring out a better way to access medical records, figuring out how 14 year olds can stop carrying forty pounds of textbooks back and forth to school every day, or a reservation system for the communal rooftop farm in your building, there has got to be something more beneficial to society than the next Facebook clone.”
While it may be a new year, ripe with new opportunities, it’s still the same job. Keep working, better yourself and better your community.
With the recent iOS 5 and OS X Lion updates I’ve been noticing a lot more linen in my UI. It shows up everywhere, from the login screen in Lion to the canvas behind a Safari window on the iPad and OS X.
I was curious to find out where it appears and discovered this thread on reddit.
I discovered at least 4 different shades.
Dock.app – backgroundTile.png
Dock.app – defaultdesktop.png
AppKit.framework – NSLinenBackgroundPattern.png
Safari.framework – ReadingList-BGLinen.png
It’s interesting that the Reading List variant isn’t 256px by 256px, but rather 300px by 300px – a non base-two size. It’s also worth noting that the iPad uses the darkest texture for the canvas in Safari, while Lion uses the second lightest version.
Update: George mentions in the comments, as of 10.7.3 backgroundTile.png from the Dock.app bundle was renamed to ecsb_background_tile.png. The files appear to be exactly the same.
Update 2: The new beta of Messages for Mountain Lion includes a new addition to the linen family.
/Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/linen.tiff
I love getting emails like this one:
No, I’m not being sarcastic. You see, this email came from an iPad/iPhone game called Pocket Frogs. In this game you breed and nurture tiny frogs. You can feed them and race with them with the goal to create new generations of offspring with new combinations of colors and designs. To encourage new users the developers have a messaging feature baked in. You can message your friends to let them know about the app in hopes they’ll download it.
So why do I love emails like this? Because they’re from my daughter. At the ripe old age of five, she’s discovered how to use the in-game messaging – she taps on the frog, then the “Share”, then “Email” and sends a message to my name, stored in her Grandmother’s iPad.
So while I’m staring at code, sitting in a meeting or editing video for 8 hours a day, my daughter sometimes thinks about sending her newest frog to her old man. I’ll never tell her she’s doing it wrong.
Nearly a year ago I hired a bright young man by the name of Will Sutton. Over the course of the following months Will and I made this – the official Saint Louis University iPhone App. (Which you are most welcome to download at iphone.slu.edu)
Will initially started from scratch, learning Objective-C and his way around XCode. Even more impressive was the fact that he really never used a Mac much before.
Like a fish to water he quickly had a rough prototype up and running. It was serviceable, but very, shall we say, rickety.
Then we were alerted to the existence of a great open-source app framework created at West Virgina University by then student Jared Crawford.
Will set about updating the framework with SLU specific data sources. We had to meet with legal, create icons and vet our data sources for reliability. With Jared’s awesome framework we were able to quickly turn around a tight first release of what I’m sure will be a vital asset to any SLU student.
Meanwhile the IT department was preparing to launch a mobile portal for some of the very same services. Like some superhero wonder group we joined forces and released our apps simultaneously. Being web-based their app has a much larger reach, but our app allows us to perform some hardware specific feats.
Our next step is to squash a few 1.0 bugs, update the app for the new Retina display and start adding additional features like dining information and athletic reports.
You can read more about the apps from this nice press release.