Archive for October 19, 2018

Friday, October 19, 2018

Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion in macOS Mojave

Craig Grannell:

What you’d expect to happen is for macOS to remove the semi-transparent bits. So instead of Finder sidebars or the macOS app switcher showing what’s beneath them, they’d just have a neutral solid background. Nope. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Apple’s decided those components should instead be coloured by your Desktop background.

This makes no logical sense. Why should the colour of an interface component be influenced by elements that may be several layers beneath them? Also, this decision can make interface elements less accessible, because you end up with an inconsistent interface (colours shifting as you move a window around the screen) and can impact on legibility (such as when moving a Finder window to the right on the default background, whereupon the sidebar goes a weird brown colour).

Craig Grannell:

So, anyway, I just opened the App Store app on macOS Mojave, and I had the audacity to click on something that was featured and looked quite interesting. WHOOSH went the full-window slide transition. BLORCH went my innards. Through squinting eyes I then did a bit more testing. Clicking Done made the window zoom downwards again. And then I clicked a standard list item. WHOOSH went the full-window slide transition, but, excitingly, in a different direction this time (horizontally). GAH went my brain, asking me to JUST SODDING STOP WITH THIS STUPID EXPERIMENT ALREADY.

This is with Reduce Motion on.

Previously: Is There Hope for the Mac App Store?.

It’s Like @2x for Color

Gus Mueller:

At any rate, I filed it this past summer as radar://41731847: Mojave does not support writing 16bpc/deep color HEIC images.

The format supports it, and we’ve got DP3 color profiles on iOS and MacOS now. We just need the encoders to catch up.

Ironically, the introduction of a wider color gamut such as Display P3 will increase the amount of banding in our images, unless you move from 8 to 16bpc.

Previously: Improving Color on the Web.

Paul Buchheit on Joining and Leaving Google

Paul Buchheit (via Hacker News):

I didn’t believe in the business or think the company would be a huge success, though. I thought they were going to be roadkill and would get squashed by one of the big internet companies. By then, Yahoo was already a behemoth, and Alta Vista had so much money. I didn’t understand how this little startup would be able to compete. But I decided I didn’t care. I wanted to go work on Linux stuff and figured I’d at least meet some smart people there, and maybe they’d later start a company that would actually be successful.

In hindsight, I realize the early team at Google was actually quite remarkable. I think they made a real point of hiring smart people. In part, that was because they were working on really interesting problems and smart people want to work on interesting problems. I remember Jeff Dean had gone to work at another startup before Google and immediately fixed all of their problems. When he asked, “Now what do I do?,” it turned out that they had nothing else interesting to work on, so he left. He was drawn into Google because of the interesting systems problems there.

[…]

Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn’t noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don’t know who are telling me to do stuff that I don’t care about.” I knew immediately that if I stayed at Google, and wanted to be successful and influential, I would have to become more of a big company person. I knew that I had the capacity to do that, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to do something else, so I left.

Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Inflated Video Ad Viewing Times

Rachel England (via Nick Heer):

After reviewing some 80,000 pages of internal Facebook records, obtained as part of court proceedings, Crowd Siren now claims that Facebook had not only known about the issue for over a year, but had massively underestimated its miscalculations. The company told some advertisers it overestimated average time spent watching videos by 60% to 80%. The plaintiffs, however, believe that figure is much larger, and that average viewership metrics had been inflated by as much as 900%.

John Gruber:

If true, Facebook’s big “pivot” to video was really a scam.