I’ve been looking for an Apple-style wallpaper for my iPhone 4S for a while. I couldn’t find anything that both matched the existing UI and was subtle enough to look like it belonged there, so I made my own. Using the standard Apple pattern and a few round-cornered rectangles, I think it turned out good enough to share.
Edit: I’ve also attached the original with no inlays if you’d like to make your own.
I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-through tonight because I felt I earned a prize for a great week of work, and for getting a bunch of chores done I’ve been building up to for a while. Of course, as I pull up to order, a police car also pulls up immediately behind me.
23 year old me would have been scared about getting a ticket for something I felt I didn’t deserve.
33 year old me paid for his dinner.
He thanked me via the employee at the second window, I thanked him for his public service. It wasn’t until I got home and was shoveling salty, delicious fake-potatoes furiously into my old, weathered gullet, that I realized the difference 10 years will make.
Also, no ticket. Booyah.
While working on some 2x retina images for WordPress.com, and the bbPress and WordPress open-source projects, I found an image rendering issue that I haven’t seen documented anywhere yet. Here’s the WordPress core retina ticket, for reference.
The first image highlights the difference between the WordPress core 2x icons, and the bbPress 2x icons. Notice how the icons next to Forums, Topics, and Replies have a slightly thicker black outline, specifically in 2x mode. The icons next to Posts, Pages, et all, are WordPress’s icon32 equivalents, with the same border thickness as the original 32px icons used in the 1x headers.
Using the original 32px icons was a great idea for a first-pass win at having 2x icons in WordPress core, and there are 64px equivalents now too! The difference between the WordPress and bbPress icons is subtle but important when you look at the second image in the gallery.
If the browser loads 2x images, but the display (for whatever reason) renders in 1x mode, you naturally end up with downsampled 2x images. To purposely duplicate this behavior:
While edge case, the circumstances where a browsers’ calculated pixel ratio does not match the display are a new bug from a new convention. Arguably, operating systems and graphics cards should handle this more smoothly, and I suspect they will eventually. Until then, if the risk is providing a worse experience than plain-old 1x images, it’s our responsibility to include 2x images that will downsample to a usable state in 1x mode.
Weird, wild stuff!
If you’re a user of the old iTether app like I am, and you need to re-download the OS X app, here’s the original download url.
http://tether.com/i/Tether-iPhone.dmg
Took me a while to find it again since they switched to the reverse proxy HTML5 method.
Checkout this time-lapse video, taken by Alex Mills with his GoPro.
It was made using 9788 images that were taken over the course of 3 hours and 24 minutes, before the battery died. The full-quality 2592×1944 pixel images totaled 16.6GB, and you can enjoy the video in that full quality size by choosing “Original” rather than 720p.
