512 Pixels

Holy moly, this is a great website.

Well, this should be an interesting read.

Brett Terpstra has written one of the most amazing things I’ve read online in a long, long time. Happy birthday, bud.

A grim — but necessary — procedure had been put in place if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were to become stranded on the moon.

The fact that man has walked on the moon never ceases to fill me with wonder. The fact that we did it with 1950s and 60s tech is even more amazing.

I joined Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Peter Cohen on the latest episode of Moisés Chiullan’s Thank You For Calling podcast to talk about customer service in the IT world.

Yesterday marked the end of The Prompt:

The young men (and Stephen) of The Prompt gather one last time and discuss Overcast and IBM.

Be sure to listen to every last second of the file, becuase there’s a great surprise at the end.

Over 57 episodes, Federico, Myke and I generated just shy 3 GB of MP3 files that would take someone 3 days, 47 minutes and 35 seconds to listen to. I couldn’t be prouder of our work on 5by5, and couldn’t be more excited about the future. Stay subscribed to the feed; we’ll be back with something new soon.

Well, there’s this:

We’re delighted to announce that we never let you upload anything to our wonderful, hyper-connected service for curating your precious moments. We could not be happier that you could never use this. Today, we’re curating our pivot to provide for peak sunset value. The Prompt has ended, and we’d hate to have to provide a way for you to download things from this service. Just thinking about all that work seems tiring. Remember us fondly, with all the other cursed services.

The last episode of The Prompt will be out tonight, but stay subscribed to the feed. We’ve got some goodies coming your way.

While NASA doesn’t use the old “worm” logo anymore, this style guide is a fascinating study in detail and production oriented design.

Here are some Overcast-related headlines that I’ve been workshopping:

• Overcast: Cloudy with a chance of podcasts
• Finally.
• Overcast rains on Instacast’s parade
• Orange you glad Overcast is out?
• Overcast: The BMW of podcast clients
• BREAKING: Overcast does support shows on networks
• Overcast beats Fast Text for iOS 7 to release
• Something Something Accidental

Joking aside, Overcast is great. It’s been on the home screen of my iPhone from the very first beta, and even though it isn’t as full-featured as some of the competition, it’s a real winner. The app’s Smart Speed feature which dynamically shortens silences, which has saved me over five hours of time over the last few months. Overcast actually makes you younger.

If you are listen to poorly-mixed shows, or listen to podcasts with a Jambox while in the shower, Overcast’s Voice Boost feature normalizes audio and makes it louder in a clear, even way. It’s a great way to squeeze more decibels out of a device without blowing everything out.

Overcast is free on the iOS App Store, with a $4.99 in-app purchase that unlocks lots of goodies.

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan at Gizmodo:

Apple, Trapper Keeper, and Reebok: Three of the most well-known brands of the 1980s, and three companies that used the same futuristic-looking typeface to do it. So why isn’t the typeface a classic like other period pieces cough Helvetica cough? Fate is a funny thing.

Today Fonts In Use and BrandNew point out the odd case of Motter Tektura, a typeface created in 1975 by the Austrian designer Othmar Motter, who died in 2010. If you were alive in the late 1970s or 80s, you’ll recognize it as the former font used in Apple’s early logos, as well as those of Trapper Keeper and Reebok—which kept it in use well into contemporary times.

While I have a couple of computers floating around that are graced with Motter Tektura, I had no idea that it was used by other brands until reading these links.

As Gizmodo points out, Tektura is more or less a lost font, as there’s no authorized digital version of the typeface. This is the case with many older Apple-related typefaces.

To read more about fonts used by Apple over the years, check out this list of links:

• Wikipedia: Typography of Apple Inc.
• Wikipedia: List of Apple Typefaces
• Wikipedia: Fonts on Macintosh
• Wikipedia: List of typefaces included with OS X

With iOS and now OS X Yosemite, Apple is turning to Helvetica Neue more and more for its interfaces. While beautiful, it’s a tad boring after revisiting these old typefaces.

Brian X. Chen and Steve Lohr at The New York Times, on the companies’ new partnership:

Under the partnership, IBM will serve as a sales force in corporate accounts for Apple products and provide on-site service, which have been gaps in Apple’s capabilities.

IBM once gripped the technology industry with an iron fist, and now it’s in bed with the little hippie company from Cupertino.

Also, that headline really hurt me to write.