Eli Hodapp (via Steven Frank):
If you were going to put together a list of truly classic iOS titles, and both Flight Control and Real Racing weren’t on it, you’d have some explaining to do. Sadly, it seems as of about ten days ago, the only place those games will exist anymore is in ancient reviews and YouTube trailers. As accidentally spotted by Shaun last night, while looking for something else, EA has removed the following games from the App Store[…]
Steven Frank:
We don’t know for sure, but presumably EA pulled the games because they’re not compatible with the latest version of iOS, and it’s not financially sound to provide an update.
[…]
These were arguably historically significant titles, and there is no official mechanism to archive them for preservation.
Maybe it seems silly — they’re “just” games after all, right? But now the only source of these binaries is DRM-laced copies that someone happened to purchase and download.
App Store Datacide Game History iOS iOS App
Michael Buckbee (via Nicole Hemsoth, comments):
EC2 should have been called
Amazon Virtual Servers
[…]
RDS should have been called Amazon SQL
[…]
Cloudfront should have been called Amazon CDN
Amazon Amazon EC2 Amazon SES Amazon Web Services
James Hague (comments):
CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies
Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.
CSCI 4020: Writing Fast Code in Slow Languages
Analyze performance at a high level, writing interpreted Python that matches or beats typical C++ code while being less fragile and more fun to work with.
Craft CS Theory History Optimization Programming
Adam Twardoch:
Frutiger had influenced the 20th century’s European and world typography like no other, with the possible exception of Hermann Zapf who died just three months earlier. Adrian Frutiger’s most famous typefaces (Univers, Frutiger, Avenir) embody “sophisticated modernism” in the best possible way: he managed to distill the essence of the Latin letter and reduce its formal language to the minimum, yet he never crossed the barrier of naive geometry or reduction for its own sake. Utility and legibility came always first. Frutiger’s alphabets were never forcibly individualistic. His trademark was the careful balancing of shapes and the understated beauty of his seemingly simple forms. For several decades, Adrian Frutiger remained a typographic innovator, never shying away from most difficult challenges, such as the world’s first comprehensively planned typeface family Univers, the Roissy/Frutiger family that forever changed the notion of signage and legibility, his OCR-B alphabet, or the ultra-compact yet highly readable Vectora.
Wikipedia:
Frutiger disliked the regimentation of Futura, and persuaded Peignot that the new sans-serif should be based on the realist (neo-grotesque) model. The 1896 face, Akzidenz Grotesk, is cited as the primary model. To maintain unity across the 21 variants, each weight and width, in roman and italic, was drawn and approved before any matrices were cut. In the Univers font, Frutiger introduced his two-digit numeration; the first digit (3 though 8) indicates the weight, “3” the lightest, “8” the heaviest. The second digit indicates the face-width and either roman or oblique. The response to Univers was immediate and positive; he claimed it became the model for his future typefaces: the slab serif Serifa (1967) and Glypha (1977) are based upon it.
Wikipedia:
In designing the typeface’s predecessor Roissy, Frutiger’s goal had been to create a sans-serif typeface with the rationality and cleanliness of Univers but the organic and proportional aspects of Gill Sans. Frutiger: “What was important, was total clarity – I would even call it nudity – an absence of any kind of artistic addition.”. Designing Frutiger as a print version of Roissy, this principle resulted in a distinctive and legible typeface. The letter properties originally suited to the needs of Charles de Gaulle: a modern appearance and legibility at various angles, sizes, and distances. Ascenders and descenders are very prominent, and apertures are wide to easily distinguish letters from one another.
MyFonts has some samples of his work. The eponymous Frutiger typeface has been a favorite of mine since college.
Update (2015-09-25): swissinfo.ch (via John Gruber):
He was one of the few typographers who worked with hot metal, photographic and digital typesetting during his long career.
[…]
In Switzerland, he is best known for ASTRA-Frutiger, which has been used for Swiss road signs since 2003. ASTRA-Frutiger was designed to give the eye a better hold and be clear and highly legible at a distance or using small text sizes.
Design Font History Rest in Peace Typography
