Hacker News Reader

melloclelloon What skeuomorphism is (and isn't)

Rounded rectangles are totally functional if you consider that you're going for the most minimalist interface compatible with the human visual cortex. Sharp corners can cause all kinds of ringing artifacts in certain situations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_grid_illusion

melloclelloon What skeuomorphism is (and isn't)

Baroque?

melloclelloon What skeuomorphism is (and isn't)

> It helps tell these apps apart

I would agree, variation is very important in this respect - however, this skeuo-leather-morphic design is but one small niche in the set of all possible variations. Have Apple exhausted their own potential? Is the only way for them to further refine their software really for them to turn away from minimalism and add more and more revolting kitsch?

If this is true, why does it have to be this particular style of kitsch?

melloclelloon Nintendo Almost Made a Knitting Add-On for NES

tbth I was thinking more like a computer-controlled 'home loom' that people can use to 'print' patterned fabric. Wouldn't have to be Nintendo...

melloclelloon Nintendo Almost Made a Knitting Add-On for NES

25 years too soon. People would be all over this idea in today's world of Kickstarter, Etsy, and 3D printing.

melloclelloon Is your iPad keeping you up at night?

I gotta say I reckon f.lux is the only thing on Cydia worth jailbreaking for.

melloclelloon Show HN: BigVideo.js

Holy smokes, you chose a cool video to demo it with.

melloclelloon Show HN: A multi-touch document manipulation system

Stanislav Datskovskiy (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8) is a particular favourite writer of mine, on this kind of topic.

Also, would you like any help?

melloclelloon New Zealand: Wish you were here?

You can actually get tomatoes at any time of the year.

I dunno man I paid like $5 for two watery hydroponic tomatoes at New World the other day.

melloclelloon The Science of Serif vs Sans Serif Type

Oh man, my first university used Univers (and not just Univers, the condensed version) for all their signage and handouts as well.

I almost feel like with a font like Univers the similarities between letters could saturate out your pattern recognition quite easily (imagine looking at these same stems and bowls all day long), and that perhaps serifs (or at very least, differing lettershapes) add a much-needed bit of stochastic resonance to the whole process. Maybe the uniformity of modernist typefaces isn't all it cracked up to be. </idle speculation>

An exaggerated example of what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/Ypwtm.png

(I wish I had a Discrete Fourier Transform plugin for Photoshop so I could try it with these two examples)

melloclelloon The Science of Serif vs Sans Serif Type

No mention of acutance at all, surprising. There's a lot to be said about the way the human visual system responds to spatial frequencies, above all else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifact

The way I see it, serifs may have evolved as a way to emphasise and deemphasise the various spatial frequencies in a given letter. A sharp 90-degree line at the end of a stem may help 'cut off' and locally restrict the frequencies represented by the stem in a way that makes them more easily distinguishable by the visual cortex.

Try flicking between these two images and you might get an idea of what I mean:

Normal: http://i.imgur.com/NPAh3.png

High-passed: http://i.imgur.com/IoHCC.png

melloclelloon DoubleRobotics: Telepresence gets sexy (and made in the USA)

Does this not buzz anybody else out? Getting a wee bit future nauseous over here

melloclelloon NSHipster: a journal of the overlooked bits in Objective-C

Oh my god, NSValueTransformer. Why has this not been in my life the past two weeks. Same goes for performSelectorOnMainThread. Thankyou.

melloclelloon First glider discovered in a cellular automata on an aperiodic tiling

Hey man I gotta say I dug that writeup - did any more information surface regarding whether that pattern is indeed inside every retina Pro?

melloclelloon Joost van der Ree creates iOS interface concept

Anybody else find something unsettlingly sycophantic (towards Apple) about this kind of thing?

melloclelloon Show HN: JSON5 — modern JSON

Horrible. There's a reason JSON is homoiconic with valid javascript. You should never have done this.

melloclelloon The Collapse of Moore's Law: Physicist Says It's Already Happening

Rhyming words are very stable memes, they carry their own error correction.

melloclelloon Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X

Update: worksforme on Mac and iOS, going to start playing with this tonight

melloclelloon Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X

Is it open source? I'd love to check it out.

melloclelloon Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X

Oh my god. I just spent the last month on and off trying to wrap my head around CoreAudio. I'm flabbergasted, thank you so much.

melloclelloon The Psychology of Tackling Hard Problems

I hear ya partner. Nothing gets me going like the old hippie speedball.

melloclelloon Why Objective-C is Hard

The fact that he chose the fake method name performAction:withTwoParameters: betrays that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Under the Apple style guide you would describe the parameters next to the arguments in the method signature itself, and in this case would use something more like performActionWithParameter1:parameter2.

You do this so that you actually know what you're putting into the damn function. As soon as you've typed 'object per' Xcode's autocomplete will have filled out the rest of the entire function, complete with parameter descriptions and little empty bubbles with the expected argument class for you to tab over and type your arguments into. This is indispensable if you have a method with a large number of arguments.

melloclelloon The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

Agreed, I've never noticed any kind of problem - I'll happily play Left 4 Dead for hours with the MacBook trackpad.

melloclelloon Linus: please write good git commit messages

I'm terrible. I'll edit things randomly then make commits before I'm about to do something.

melloclelloon Liblime seeks trademark for an open source product created by an NZ library

The Maori Language Commission are going to be all over this like a ton of bricks, 'koha' is such a generic word here (my best guess is that it sort of means 'wilful donation' in English)

melloclelloon Jack Dorsey does 8 hours at Twitter, 8 hours at Square daily

Everyone here likes to believe there's a bit of a startup boom in Wellington at the moment - government R&D grants and the Grow Wellington business incubator certainly seem to have gone a long way towards helping the culture along. In any case you can't walk down Cuba St without running into people from all the different tech startups these days. It's great, since fifteen years ago the only other employment options in this town were cafés or the public sector.

melloclelloon Tired of Being Tired

I just recently suffered a terrific burnout at the end of the university semester. Forcing myself to take a couple of days off to just hit the painkillers and play Minecraft is one of the most sensible things I've done for my health in recent times.

melloclelloon Single psilocybin dose may make lasting personality change

Someone like you almost always pops up in every internet discussion on hallucinogenic drugs - they're always pretty universally dismissed as what you would call, 'wrong', by everybody who actually knows what they are talking about.