Quarter Life Crisis

Sandals¶

536 words

Here come the interesting links of the day along with a few articles from the current issue of Die Zeit. It's very strange: Some weeks the whole paper seems pretty boring and in other weeks they have not one but quite a few interesting reports to read.

• In a sidenote, Nicholas Riley mentions that Apple's script menu doesn't only take AppleScripts but also shell scripts. Cool, very useful, very easy and more than I had expected. The menu will even detect what kind of script it's dealing with and display an appropriate icon. Those are the details I like Apple for.
• Another detail I like, is that my iPod will turn itself (and its light) on when I unlock the 'Hold' button. While this is an obvious thing to do, I bet many designers will miss it. A thing I don't like, though, is that the iPod will return to its main menu once it has finished playing a playlist or an album.
• John Gruber on shortcomings of the Finder and a utility 'fixing' them. While I couldn't agree more on the problems with the Finder, John's comment

  Now, with Nudge, I can nudge the parent folder, and the Finder will update the list to reflect the current state of each item. Sweet.

  – particularly the last word isn't worthy of a curmudgeon. Having to do things myself to update the display is not sweet, we've got words like annoying or Windows for that. Whatever Apple's policies on the Finder displaying the current state of the file system will be in the future, programmers can use one-liners like [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] noteFileSystemChanged: @"/path/to/file"]; today to make sure the Finder's display is current if they think that's important for their users.
• The Register on the inventor of the magic Control-Alternate-Delete key combination

  'I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill Gates made it really famous,‘ he told a gathering at the twentieth anniversary of the PC.

• An article on the dark business that is food design, how instant food makes its way into restaurants and, of course, the Atkins hype.
• Die Zeit has been running a series on Germany for many weeks now. Every week a double page is dedicated one topic like 'growing up', 'becoming a criminal' &c and it is analysed how these things happen in Germany. This week it's about clothing. And it's quite funny, stressing how much Germans like 'functional' clothing, the worst manifestation of which is, of course, the atrocity that is the sandal.
• I tend to think that Germans are easy to spot abroad because of their clothes. [Of course behaviour plays a role as well: if people look like Germans but are too cool, they're probably Danish or Dutch…] But I also have the suspicion that other nationalities are as easy to spot if it's your own. Any opinions?
• Burger photos from our little burger feast last week. Manipulating those photos a little, I noticed once more that I don't know anything about colour management. The camera seems to use a profile. And so does GraphicConverter (except in its save preview dialog), but will all web browsers use it?
• Hooray for female computer names.

Here come the interesting links of the day along with a few articles from the current issue of Die Zeit. It's very strange: Some weeks the whole paper seems... February 1, 2004, 0:41