Worthy stuff to watch and read - 2

3-minute read
  • Story of the Graphing Calculator app for Macintosh. Two consultants worked for Apple. Their project got cancelled. They decided to push forward and finish their app despite the circumstances. With no pay, and at some point with revoked access to the building, they kept sneaking in and working (with no pay, of course).

At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn’t caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, “This doesn’t suck” (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.

  • China is actively building high speed railways and is dreaming about trains from Shanghai to Helsinki, Paris and London. Current trains are travelling at 300 km/h, and they already built over 12000 km of high speed railroads.
  • Perfect cup of tea as instructed by George Orwell. By the way, his opinion is definitely tea first, milk last.
  • Nice read by Om Malik on Microsoft, announced cuts, Steven Elop and Nokia.

More…

Something to watch
  • Researchers at MIT figured out how to use flying drones as light assistants. Camera is shooting the subject, the resulting image is transferred to the computer 20 times a second. The software figures out corrections to the current lighting and sends data to the drone with the light. Drone changes its position to achieve authentic rim lighting effect. There is article and video.
  • 45 years ago Apollo 11 mission achieved a successful landing on the Moon. The Atlantic published beautiful set of 45 pictures from the project. Including many pictures by the Hasselblad camera that stepped first on the surphace of another planet.
  • One week in France as seen and filmed by @Stammy, who is working at Twitter Photos team. As you might know, pictures on a webpage might be a surprisingly tricky task. I think, he managed to implement this extremely well in his own photo blogging engine.
  • VFX making-of reel by Mackevision studio on the latest Game of Thrones season IV. The studio is located in Berlin. Bonus - article and more VFX reels on previous seasons of Game of Thrones show.
Notes
  • As you noticed, this blog engine is getting new features as we move along. This week’s (tiny) addition are quotes. Next expected addition will probably be pagination - for which I’ll probably use pagination component written for the previous project at Red Badger.
  • Feel free to contact me on Twitter: @karismafilms. Chances are, there won’t be any comments on this blog, ever. Disqus became some sort of Wordpress for Internet - it is clumsy, horrible, but everyone keep using it since there are no better options.
  • Have a nice relaxing weekend!