David Emery Online
Frame of preference
Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
This would be a wonderful trip down memory lane just by itself — and I say this as someone who remembers well everything from about 1991 onwards, which is far too long a go to consider.
But! You realise after a moment that the computer screens throughout aren’t static images, they’re fully working emulators of the damn Macs. The whole thing, Finder, ancient versions of iTunes, Control Strip — history in a bottle, through the narrative of system settings.
Sometimes I struggle a little with everything that the internet has become, but then every once in a while something like this comes along, a piece of art that could only be born on the web, like a pearl in a river of sludge. It’s not all bad.
Visit ➔
The hardest working font in Manhattan
In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
A beautiful deep dive into a font you have definitely seen, but likely never noticed.
The sheer craft that has gone into this article is remarkable. A reminder of the best that the web can be, and a timely palate cleanser in amongst everything else that is going on right now.
Visit ➔
Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?
The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.
A beautiful mediation on a concept that has been contained to science fiction for the longest time but, now, is quickly losing the “fiction”. While it is likely that AI and large language models may well take jobs away from people, it seems that philosophers have heady days ahead of them.
Visit ➔
The Inter typeface family
Inter is a workhorse of a typeface carefully crafted & designed for a wide range of applications, from detailed user interfaces to marketing & signage.
A wonderful free, open source typeface, just updated to version 4 with a range of additional alternate glyphs and styles.
So wonderful, in fact, that I’ve just switched it in to replace the default-choice Helvetica on this site. Much better. I particularly like the option that let you switch in slashed zeros—amongst many other little tweaks—to give it a little more character.
(No pun intended.)
Visit ➔In Memory Of Tweetbot
On January 12th, 2023, without warning, Elon Musk ordered his employees at Twitter to suspend access to 3rd party clients which instantly locked out hundreds of thousands of users from accessing Twitter from their favorite clients. We’ve invested over 10 years building Tweetbot for Twitter and it was shut down in a blink of an eye.
For a while I’ve been hearing people say how “bad” their Twitter experience has been recently. How many controversy-baiting tweets they’re being pushed, or how often they get content they just don’t want to see. This had always confused me, as it didn’t match at all with what I was seeing—I thought to myself that maybe they should just unfollow whoever was retweeting that content into their timelines.
Well, now I get it.
I’ve not used the official Twitter client in—checks notes—over a decade and, well, it turns out it’s not… great. Spot checking it just now, and out of my latest 15 posts, 7 of them are negative, click-batey noise that the algorithm is prioritising as the most “engaging” content. I’m also getting notifications about random accounts that I don’t follow having posted. Hugh Laurie’s dog has died. Thanks for letting me know, Twitter.
Tweetbot has been one of my top used apps for years, but also my refuge. Always focused on the user experience above all else, it is such a loss to see it come to an end in such an abrupt and unceremonious way.
The only silver lining to this dark cloud is that Ivory—Tapbot’s new Mastodon client—is brilliant. It already feels like home.
Visit ➔A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.
Bars are responsible for serving only so much alcohol per drink, not serving someone too intoxicated, not serving to anyone below a certain age. Keeping track of every drop of alcohol. And if they break any of these laws, they can be shut down permanently, owners can lose their license, people can go to jail. Why? Because alcohol is dangerous. With Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar, mass shooters in America being radicalized online, the January 6 insurrection that was planned online, and nazis reinstated on Twitter, can anyone still claim that poorly managed social spaces are any less dangerous?
Derek Powazek
I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.
It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.
At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…
Visit ➔