I was fortunate to once again join Myke and Terry on the always-great Bro Show podcast. This week, we talked about Lion, iPhone 5 rumors and the 13” MacBook Pro.
Be sure to stick around to the end. We included some bonus material this week.
Category: Design
Mac mini Innards
Lion’s Linen
I was digging around in the System Library folder in Lion this afternoon, and found the linen graphic Apple uses heavily in the new OS. It was inside the Dock.app bundle, if you’re curious. I’ve also copied it here, if you can get enough of the new texture. It actually make a pretty decent minimalistic wallpaper when tiled.
Photoshop in Real Life
I wonder if this version will crash when trying to apply layer masks…
[via reddit]
Water at 7,000 FPS
What an amazing world we live in.
Four Years
Google Launches 180 New Web Fonts
While I’m very happy with Typekit, this collection isn’t too shabby.
Andy Hertzfeld Given Free Reign in Designing Google+
Josh Ong, on the designer of the original Mac and his work at Google:
Hertzfeld admitted to having taken a risk with the design.“It wasn’t a given that anyone would like what I was doing, but they did,” he said.
“I’ve heard in the past that Larry Page he didn’t like animations but that didn’t stop me from putting in a lot of animations in, and Larry told me he loves it,” he continued. “Maybe Apple’s resurgence had a little bit to do with it."
On Apple ‘Copying’ Android
But like I said, there can be only one right way to do it and more often than not, Apple is the one to get there first. They did it with the MacBook Pro, the iMac and even the iPhone. The iPhone 4 is perhaps the best looking phone ever manufactured. It’s not quite perfect, but there’s nothing better out there right now.
[…]
In the case of notifications in iOS 5, the reverse happened. Android had pretty much perfected the notification system. So if Apple had to create a perfect notifications system it was going to be difficult for them to not make it look like the one on Android. For their part, they actually went a step ahead and improved upon what was already an excellent notification system on Android. It’s not quite perfect yet, but if anyone does manage to do that, I believe it won’t look far too different from what Apple has done here.
12,500 Cores
One of the keys to Pixar’s ability to do what it does is the giant, powerful render farm located in its main headquarters building here. This is serious computing power, and on “Cars 2,” it required an average of 11.5 hours to render each frame.
But some sequences were especially complex, particularly those involving ray tracing–which involves simulating light hitting surfaces, essentially “trying to simulate photons.” And as a result, a huge amount of computing power was needed to process frames that took as much as 80 or 90 hours to render, Shah said. And that meant that the studio “bulked up our render farm.”
It’s the Little Things
Someone clearly spent some time on these sidebar icons from Finder in Lion. Impressive work:
Evernote Peek Harnesses Smart Cover Power
This is the sort of thing that excited me when Apple announced the Smart Cover.