Fraser Speirs:
Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain “a list of all running apps”. It contains “a list of recently used apps”. The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.
That’s what I thought until I woke up yesterday to a battery drained into the red. The Location Services pane in Settings showed that MotionX-GPS (which I’m otherwise quite happy with) had been using the GPS even though I’d long since stopped the track-recording that it had been doing. I couldn’t figure out why it was doing that, so I went into the multitasking bar and quit it.
iOS Multitasking MotionX-GPS
Matt Gallagher:
Obviously, while inspired by the Mac App Store icon, this design is not trying to accurately replicate it. The real purpose is to show how to achieve the multiple, layered gradients, curve drawing, path-based clipping, shadowing and scaling you're likely to need if you want to create a non-trivial design in code.
Seth Stevenson:
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
This reminded me of Justin O’Beirne’s posts, which I’m sorry to see are now gone, about the Google and Bing maps.
Update (2012-01-03): Imus’s site was down when I first posted this, but now it’s back up. There’s a PDF showing “how the map advances geographic literacy”, and you can also purchase the map itself.
