John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:
Sotheby’s is auctioning the estate of renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. The auction house, which is auctioning the estate’s assets in multiple lots includes several collections of classic iPods and custom iPods…
Just look at some of these things:
Sotheby’s posted this video to Instagram, highlighting the collection:
I love my HomePod minis, and today there is a new one:
Today, Apple introduced HomePod mini in midnight, made with 100 percent recycled mesh fabric. At just 3.3 inches tall, HomePod mini offers big sound in an impressively compact design. With a seamless, acoustically transparent mesh exterior and a backlit touch surface that illuminates from edge to edge, HomePod mini is a stunning smart speaker that complements any space. HomePod mini in midnight is available starting Wednesday, July 17, and joins other bold colors, including yellow, orange, blue, and white.
Yesterday morning, I got obsessed with the 10-day forecast section of the Apple Weather iOS app—specifically, how it presents each day’s temperature range. I still don’t understand the logic behind it.
The blog post is impressive, but the footnote contains a straight-up murder:
Several readers on Mastodon told me the alignment was fine on their phones and suggested Larger Text/Dynamic Type as the reason the charts on my phone are messed up. They were absolutely right. I bumped up my text size so long ago I’d forgotten all about it, but I should’ve known to look into that before posting. Interestingly, moving my text size down just one tick got all the bar ends to match up. The colors still seem a little off to me, but I’ll need to zoom in and look more carefully.
I loved this video, and it makes me want to put more shelves up in my studio.
The last time I redesigned the site, a guy named Barack Obama was still President. Since then, I’ve launched the membership program, integrated the Quick Links more fully into the mix, (more recently) opened comments for members, and tweaked about a million different things about how the site works and looks. But it was overdue for a full overhaul to better accommodate all of those incremental changes and, more importantly, to provide a solid design platform for where the site is headed. Also, I was just getting tired of the old design.
Well, the dogcow images are perfect.
Kenneth Chang has a wonderful piece for The New York Times walking through the history and usage of NASA’s iconic logo:
Last month, NASA welcomed Richard Danne to its headquarters in Washington to celebrate work he had done nearly half a century ago.
Mr. Danne never studied the stars. He never built a rocket.
But he and his design partner, Bruce Blackburn, came up with one of the most recognizable elements of the space agency: the logo known as the “worm,” with the acronym N-A-S-A spelled out in bold, sinewy, orange-red letterforms.
Speaking of Microsoft branding, a reader emailed me links to both its and Google’s style guides, to go along with Apple’s.
The Apple Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional materials, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and user interfaces. The intent of these guidelines is to help maintain a consistent voice in Apple materials.
Writers, editors, and developers can use this document as a guide to writing style, usage, and Apple product terminology. Writers and editors should thoroughly review the guide to become familiar with the range of issues involved in creating high-quality, readable, and consistent materials. Apple developers and third-party developers should follow these guidelines for user-facing text.
I’ve had this on in the background today and have been enjoying it quite a bit.
A few years ago, I took a Halloween photo that I really like. It’s of my wife Merri, dressed as a hot dog:
I recently wanted to use it as a wallpaper on my iPhone, but its landscape nature didn’t really play nicely with the modern lock screen.1 Then I remembered that Photoshop has a bunch of AI tools, and after some tinkering with its generative fill feature, I had something that worked pretty well:
Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way.
Today, we look at a UI element that started life in iTunes, but spread to the iPod, iPhone and Mac over time: Cover Flow.
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first we should recognize Andrew Coulter Enright, the inventor of Cover Flow. In December 2004, he published a blog post proposing a new way to skim media in iTunes: