Andrew

Client: We have two changes. One: change the font to Helvetica. 

Me: It’s already Helvetica. 

Client: Oh. 

Me: What’s the other change?

Client: Change the word “consulting” to “consultating.”

Me: …

how 2 use galaxy note edge with your left hand pic.twitter.com/FkwYuCmtxw

— dan (@dcseifert) September 3, 2014

This really takes "you're holding it wrong" to an entirely new level.

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Well, this is certainly one of the more… interesting Photoshopping trends we’ve seen. Thanks to a brigade of dedicated Photoshop masters on Tumblr, Marvel superheroes are getting the most unlikely of makeovers — Hello Kitty makeovers, to be precise.

Tumblr bloggers and obvious Photoshop gurus Dreamstore, Leeeeeeeeeegooooooooolaaaaaaaaas and Nerdwegian have teamed up and are using their collective creative powers to turn Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye and other Marvel characters into heroes so sparkly they’d make the characters in a Twilight novel jealous.

Adorned in pink bows, bedazzled arrows and the ubiquitous Hello Kitty logo, The Avengers look like they’re about to walk down a catwalk, not head into battle:

Regardless of the silliness involved, the Photoshopped images are actually pretty well done. We’re especially fond of Thor’s glistening, pink hammer… although Iron Man’s pink livery is quite impressive, too. Take a look at a few more of the examples the trifecta of artists have created below:

For more Hello Kitty Avengers madness, head over to Tumblr by clicking here.

(via Laughing Squid)

FROM: Client

TO: Me

SUBJECT: Screenplay - only if you have time

If you have a minute, but ONLY if you have a minute, I’d be honored if you could look it over. Some people HATE reading and if that’s you, don’t worry. But you do have a lead part. (Don’t worry, you are disguised.) 

FROM: Me

TO: Client

SUBJECT: Re: Screenplay - only if you have time

This is really outside my area of expertise. I gave it a quick read and everything is basically correct.

I am a software engineer, hired by the client to build a simple site. The 17-page screenplay featured me as an antagonist named “The Boss,” telling a child in a candy shop she wasn’t allowed to have more than 5 pieces of candy.

I don’t even know.

Photographer Oleg Grigoryev, like many of us, is a man who enjoys traveling, hiking and camping. Unlike many of us, his latest endeavors have taken him through the Fann Mountains of Tajikistan, where he captured a simple yet beautiful series of wanderlust-inducing images aptly titled Morning Views From the Tent.

As you could probably guess from the title, the photos in the series chronicle Grigoryev’s travels from a first-person point of view as he peers through the un-zipped flap of his tent each morning.

As he moved from location to location, the series shows the beautiful terrain he was crossing in Tajikistan’s mountains, showcasing everything from bright blue lakes to snow-clad mountains. And, of course, no tent-flap landscape would be complete without Grigoryev’s terrain-torn legs and feet helping to frame the shot.

The series is both playful and beautiful, and while it’s not a new idea, it gives us an interesting POV perspective at what it’s like to hike some of the most beautiful terrain mother nature has to offer. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to deal with whatever it is that keeps destroying the poor guy’s feet!

To see more of Grigoryev’s work, head on over to his website by clicking here.

(via My Modern Net)

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Image credits: Photographs by Oleg Grigoryev and used with permission

If you’re thinking about adding a video component to your portfolio, one of the most important-but-confusing things you’ll have to wrap your head around is codecs — the different video compression/decompression formats available to you. These not only determine the quality retained by the camera, but also affect how you will approach the post-processing of the footage.

Unfortunately, video codecs — with all of the myriad factors at play and the number of options available — can be a bit confusing, and so cinematographer David Kong has shared the above, incredibly comprehensive look at everything you need to know.

You’ll have to check out the full 43-minute run-through to get into the details, but the basic idea of the walkthrough is rather straightforward: Kong simply goes over the multitude of variables that each codec possesses.

From what a codec is, to bit depth, to chroma subsampling, to bitrate and more, Kong gives thorough-but-concise explanations, compressing (pun intended) what would easily be a semester’s worth of class into a single video.

Click play at the top to see it for yourself — although we suggest you grab a pen and paper first — head over to filmmaker Phillip Bloom’s blog for a text run through from Kong himself, and then check out more of Kong’s work over on his Vimeo page.

Everything You Need to Know About Codecs [PhillipBloom.net]

An anonymous reader writes Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have used a program named Ash 3D to predict the impact of a Yellowstone volcano eruption, and found that cities within 300 miles from Yellowstone National Park may get covered by up to three feet of ash. From the article: "Ash3D helped the researchers understand how the previous eruptions created a widespread distribution of ash in places in the park's periphery. Aside from probing ash-distribution patterns, the Ash3D can also be used to identify potential hazards that volcanoes in Alaska may bring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The more you look at South-Africa based photographer Anelia Loubser‘s Alienation series, the more captivated you become. A simple idea on the surface — close-up, upside-down black-and-white portraits of people’s eyes and foreheads — the final images encourage you to dive deeper into each wrinkle and other so-called “imperfection” than almost any standard portrait might.

According to Loubser’s description of the series on Behance, Alienation was inspired by a profound Wayne Dyer quote:

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

With creative composition and excellent execution of a simple idea, she manages to put a picture to these words:

The concept reminds us of the famous upside-down drawing exercise. The idea behind this approach was to confuse the analytical left side of the brain, engaging the more abstract right side that would see the lines as they truly were and not as a group of already-defined concepts (i.e. nose, eyes, eyebrows, etc.).

Of course, some will inevitably be tempted to crane their necks or flip their computer screens to reframe the portraits in a more ‘normal’ light, but we hope you won’t do that. As Loubser says, “the work is on the one hand strangely aesthetic, on the other hand mysteriously eerie.” A little bit of discomfort isn’t just normal, it’s encouraged.

To see more from Loubser, head over to her Behance profile, check out her website, or give her Facebook page a like.

(via Photojojo)

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Image credits: Photographs by Anelia Loubser, used under Creative Commons license

On the same day in 1994, August 30, Boyz II Men released its 12-times platinum second album II, while Oasis released its first album, Definitely Maybe. The first was perfect throwback R&B. The second marked a new rise for Britpop. Both bands would hit staggering heights. And by the end of the '90s, both bands would largely be cast aside.

Together, these groups represent a time in music that no longer exists: An era when popular culture was narrow enough to support their existence and success, when bands that would play to small niches today would play to everyone who loved music. If only for a little while.

The rise of two genre-specific bands

Boyz II Men in 1994 (Michel Linssen/Getty)

Boyz II Men and Oasis entered a world where the biggest musical artists played to ultra-specific genres. Nirvana was grunge. Madonna was pop. Aerosmith was rock-and-roll. There were fewer of the kinds of crossovers that we see today, where hugely successful artists — from Kanye West to Lorde — fail to fit neatly into a single genre. Boyz II Men (R&B) and Oasis (Britpop) fit squarely within this framework.

Boyz II Men, with their tight four-part harmonies and a sound that harkened back to '60s and '70s R&B, achieved massive success from the very beginning. Cooleyhighharmony (1991), the group's first album, sold 9 million copies and won the group a Grammy for Best R&B Performance.

"That album doesn't sound 20 years old," said Steven Hyden, a music critic for Grantland. "It uses the roots of '70s R&B. It sounds like a much, much older album."

This version of R&B, featuring tight vocals and smooth harmonies, essentially no longer exists, at least as far as the radio is concerned.

"We came up at a time where there was an R&B group pretty much on every street corner, and every record company had one," Boyz II Men member Nathan Morris told NPR. "But now, it's dwindled down to solo artists, or the duets, or even bigger bands — where you have bands like The Roots that got seven or eight people — but the actual R&B group is a dinosaur."

The same can be said for Oasis. Though Britpop certainly existed before Oasis debuted Definitely Maybe in 1994, that album was "the capstone on the young, hungry, wildly ambitious first phase of Britpop," in the words of Ryan Leas at Stereogum.

Definitely Maybe invaded the consciousness of American radio with hit singles like "Live Forever." It's as straightforward a rock-and-roll album as Oasis ever produced, and it topped the U.K. charts within weeks of its debut. The band's second album, What's the Story, Morning Glory? (1995), would prove even bigger in both nations.

"Oasis dominated the music scene in the '90s," Hyden said. "Every time they had a new song, it was on MTV, and the release was an event. They were definitely the big British band at the time. Though Blur and Pulp get more media credit now, Oasis was so much more popular."

Oasis's genre domination extended into its personal behavior. Brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher fought constantly in public. They showed up drunk to events. They were rock stars in every sense of the word.

As its career progressed, Oasis's sound grew more pop, more like its major inspiration, The Beatles, but it maintained its fan base by continuing to create lyric-heavy songs on top of great guitar riffs.

The music industry of 1994 was built for their success

When both of these bands were making their mark 20 years ago, the music industry was a very different place. Getting signed to a major record label — as both Oasis and Boyz II Men did — often meant rock-star-level sales, packed concerts, and a consistent, present fanbase. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly.

Both bands sold more records and had more no. 1 singles than almost any star today

Numbers can't tell the whole story, but they do show a stark comparison. Boyz II Men's "End of the Road" hit no. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1992 and stayed there comfortably for 13 weeks — taking the longest running no. 1 single record from Elvis. Boyz II Men would break its own record twice more in the course of its career with II's "I'll Make Love to You" (14 weeks) and "One Sweet Day," a collaboration with Mariah Carey that topped the charts for 16 weeks.

Though it didn't break the Billboard record, Oasis was certainly hugely successful in its own right. It had 22 top-10 hits in the U.K, the most in history.

Both bands sold more records and had more no. 1 singles than almost any star today. This past week, the highest selling album only sold 90,000 copies. When Oasis's Be Here Now sold 152,000 copies its first week in 1997, it was considered a mammoth disappointment.

Part of each band's massive sales can be attributed to the monoculture that existed in the early 90s. There were very few specialty radio stations and music videos were shown almost exclusively on MTV. In the early '90s MTV functioned as a televised boombox: A mixtape that all of America listened to together. That meant the nation as a whole watched Oasis make an entire music video in reference to The Beatles, and watched Boyz II Men synchronize together in cut off white t-shirts.

Now, that consistent fame doesn't exist in any format. There are more bands to listen to than there were in the '90s. But for that matter, there are more TV shows and movies than ever before. In the age of the internet and fragmented culture, it's difficult to come to a consensus on who is famous and who is not, like we did at the height of Boyz II Men and Oasis's fame.

"It's definitely harder in the last 10 years to come up with [bands] that seemed like obvious consensus choices either because they sold a lot of records or because they were a critical favorite," Hyden said. "That's true of pop culture in general. There are still hit TV shows, but they aren't pulling the kind of ratings that TV shows did in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. There are just more options now."

The legacy of two chart-giants

Nostalgia for bands like Boyz II Men and Oasis is easy to come by. "There just aren't these kinds of rock bands anymore," Leas writes about Oasis for Stereogum, "the kind that play music this way, and not only hope but expect and know that they will be superstars, and that live with all of the comical excess and decadence that come with all the myths they've been handed down." He's right.

"It seemed like acts like that would dominate forever"

Without MTV to dictate which bands America hears on repeat, and without solid genres for bands to replicate and succeed within, bands like these don't exist anymore. "It seemed like acts like that would dominate forever," Hyden said. "But by the year 2000, they were mostly afterthoughts."

These kinds of dominating bands are inconceivable today. There are plenty of industry giants creating music today, but very few of them are bands. Katy Perry may have plenty of no. 1 singles, but will people listen to "Teenage Dream" in 20 years? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine that song having the impact of "I'll Make Love to You" or "Wonderwall."

The end of the monoculture shouldn't be seen as a tragedy. Fragmented culture allows for more people to love music, to talk about music, and to care about specific artists and specific bands. It grants more entry points into a cultural conversation than ever before.

But the end of solid, genre-specific bands that created monster hit after monster hit, great songs that permeated American culture? That's a death worth mourning.

From an animated YouTube series I was a voice actor on: 

Client: Hey, I just wanted to let you know that [a fellow cast member] killed himself last night.

Me: Oh my God! That’s terrible! 

Client: It’s okay, I’ve sent out emails to potential replacements, and we should be back on track with recording by the end of the week.

Me: Wait, what? I’m really not comfortable with that. Can we at least take a break before recasting him, since this is a not-for-profit series anyway?

Client: He would have wanted the show to go on. 

Me: What?

I got no response to this. That night:

Client: False alarm guys, [the cast member] is alive and well! I just assumed he’d killed himself because he was acting really depressed and he didn’t answer the IM I sent him a couple of hours earlier. Everything’s back to normal, so let’s move on to episode three!

Both of my parents were teachers, and for as long as I can remember they both encouraged me to do something in life that would help others. I figured being a doctor would be the most obvious way to do that, but growing up around a pair of teachers must’ve rubbed off on me. My venue wouldn’t be the classroom but rather the Internet. On April 26, 1997, armed with very little actual knowledge, I began to share what I had with the world on a little Geocities site named Anand’s Hardware Tech Page. Most of what I knew was wrong or poorly understood, but I was 14 years old at the time. Little did I know that I had nearly two decades ahead of me to fill in the blanks. I liked the idea of sharing knowledge online and the thought of building a resource where everyone who was interested in tech could find something helpful.

That’s the short story of how I started AnandTech. There’s a lot more to it involving an upgrade to the AMD K6, a PC consulting business I ran for 2 years prior and an appreciation for writing that I didn’t know I had - but that’s the gist.

I’m 32 now. The only things that’ve been more of a constant in my life than AnandTech are my parents. I’ve spent over half of my life learning about, testing, analyzing and covering technology. And I have to say, I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

But after 17.5 years of digging, testing, analyzing and writing about the most interesting stuff in tech, it’s time for a change. This will be the last thing I write on AnandTech as I am officially retiring from the tech publishing world. Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithAT) is taking over as Editor in Chief of AnandTech. Ryan has been working with us for nearly 10 years, he has a strong background in Computer Science and he’s been shadowing me quite closely for the past couple of years. I am fully confident in Ryan’s ability to carry the torch and pick up where I left off. We’ve grown the staff over the course of this year in anticipation of the move. With a bunch of new faces around AnandTech, all eager to uphold the high standards and unique approach to covering tech, I firmly believe the site can continue to thrive for years to come.

It’s important for me to stress two things: this isn’t a transition because of health or business issues. I am healthy and hope to be even more so now that I won’t be flying nearly 130,000 miles every year. The website and business are both extremely strong. We’ve expanded our staff this year to include a number of new faces contributing to both mobile and more traditional PC categories. Traffic is solid, we are looking forward to a bunch of very exciting launches especially in the final quarters of 2014. On the business side we continue an amazing run of being self sustaining, profitable and growing for every since year since 1997. We don’t talk about business affairs much on the site but we set a number of records in 2013 and expect that to continue. In other words, you don’t have to worry about the ability of the site to continue to operate.

Even though I’ve been doing this for nearly 18 years, we’ve evolved with the industry. AnandTech started as a site that primarily reviewed motherboards, then we added CPUs, video cards, cases, notebooks, Macs, smartphones, tablets and anything else that mattered. The site today is just as strong in coverage of new mobile devices as it is in our traditional PC component coverage and there’s a roadmap in place to continue to support both sides of the business. Our learnings in the PC component space helped us approach mobile the right way, and our learnings in the mobile space have helped us bring the PC enthusiast message to a broader audience than would’ve ever seen it before.

Over the past year I’ve transitioned many of my personal coverage areas to other ATers. Ian took over CPUs not too long ago and Josh has been flying solo with our mobile coverage for a bit now. Even the articles I helped co-author with Josh were 90% his. Kristian has more or less been running our entire SSD review program at AnandTech for a while now and he’s been doing a tremendous job. I remember editing one of his pieces and thinking wow, this kid knows more than me. In fact I’d go as far as to say that about all of our editors at this point. We’ve got a sea of specialists here and each one of them knows more than me about the area in which they cover. I’m beyond proud of them all and honored to have worked with them.

On a personal level I’ve made myself available to all AnandTech editors for advice and guidance, however I have fully removed myself from the editorial process. I can offer a suggestion on how to deal with a situation so long as describing the situation does not reveal any confidential information to me.

Thank You All

To everyone I worked with in the industry - thank you for the support and help over the years. You were my mentors. You showed kindness and support to a kid who just showed up one day. I learned from you and every last one of you influenced me at a very formative period in my life. The chance you all took on me, the opportunities, and education you provided all mean the world to me. You trusted me with your products, your engineers and your knowledge - thank you.

To Larry, Cara, Mike, Howard, Virginia, Hilary and the rest of the LMCD team that has supported (and continues to support) AnandTech for almost its entire life, I thank you for making all of this possible. I learned so much about the business side of this world from you all and it helped give me perspective and knowledge that I could have never gotten on my own. For those who don't know them, the LMCD crew is responsible for the advertising side of AnandTech. They've made sure that the lights remained on and were instrumental in fueling some of our biggest growth spurts. 

To the AnandTech editors and staff, both present and past, you guys are awesome. You are easily some of the hardest working, most talented and passionate enthusiasts I've ever encountered. Your knowledge always humbles me and the effort that you've put into the site puts my own to shame. You've always been asked to do the best job possible under sometimes insane time constraints and you've always delivered. I know each and every one of you will have a bright future ahead of you. This is your ship to steer now and I couldn't be happier with the crew.

To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I’ve received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you.

I’ve always said that AnandTech is your site and I continue to believe that today. Your support, criticism and push to make us better is what allowed us to grow and succeed.

In the publishing world I always hear people talk about ignoring the comments to articles as a way of keeping sane. While I understood the premise, it’s not something I ever really followed or believed in. Some of the feedback can be harsh, but I do believe that it’s almost always because you expect more from us and want us to do better. That sort of free education and immediate response you all have provided me and the rest of the AnandTech team for years is invaluable. I’m beyond proud and honored by the AnandTech audience. I believe we have some of the most insightful readers I’ve ever encountered. It’s not just our interactions that I’m proud of, but literally every company that we work with recognizes the quality of the audience and the extreme influence you all exert on the market. You’re paid attention to, respected and sometimes even feared by some of biggest names in this industry. By being readers and commenters you help keep our industry in check.

I hope you will show Ryan and the rest of the AnandTech team the same respect and courtesy that you’ve shown me over the past 17.5 years. I hope that you’ll continue to push them as you did me, and that you’ll hold the same high standards you have for so long now.

In our About Us page I write about the Cable TV-ification of the web and the trend of media in general towards the lowest common denominator. By reading and supporting AnandTech you’re helping to buck the trend. I don’t believe the world needs to be full of AnandTech-like publications, but if you like what we do I do firmly believe it’s possible to create and sustain these types of sites today. The good news is the market seems to once again value high quality content. I think web publishing has a bright future ahead of it, as long as audiences like AnandTech’s continue to exist and support publishers they value.

As for me, I won’t stay idle forever. There are a bunch of challenges out there :) You can follow me on Twitter or if you want to email me I’ve created a new public gmail account - theshimpi@gmail.com.

Thanks for the memories and the support. I really do owe you all a tremendous debt of gratitude. I hope that my work and the work that continues at AnandTech will serve as a token of my appreciation.

Take care,
Anand

On a cracked lakebed in Death Valley called Racetrack Playa, there are a collection of stones, some weighing several hundred pounds, that clearly, mysteriously, move. They leave long serpentine trails behind them in the dirt, and for decades visitors have guessed at how they migrate across the desert floor. Hurricane force winds, sliding sheets of ice — and, of course, aliens — were all contenders, but then last December the cousins Richard Norris and James Norris caught the rocks in the act.

In a paper published in Plos One, they describe watching a thin layer of ice break into large panes and get pushed by a light wind against the boulders, which then began to slide through the mud at about 15 feet a minute. "We were sitting on a...

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A YouTube feed of a Counter-Strike game took an unexpected turn today, when it was interrupted by a very real SWAT team that happened to be sweeping the building. The gamers in the video are part of The Creatures, a group based in Littleton Colorado that publishes videos to YouTube and Twitch, and since the broadcast was in progress during the raid, their entire arrest ended up on the livestream.

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I originally bought Bioshock for PC a number of years ago during one of Steam's summer sales. It was $2, and I had heard good things about it so I decided to buy it. Unfortunately like many of the inexpensive purchases I made, the game sat in my library unplayed for a long period of time. A couple of years after purchasing it, a friend of mine mentioned that I had quite a number of unplayed games in my Steam library and insisted that I play some of them. At that time I finally sat down and played Bioshock, and it became one of my favorite first person shooter games of all time. While some of the visuals seemed dated as a result of me playing it so long after its release, the atmosphere, setting, environments, and the story were some of the best I had experienced in a video game.

When I recently heard that Bioshock would be coming to iOS, I felt both excitement and worry. The excitement was obviously due to my love of the game and the appealing prospect of being able to play it on a smartphone. The worry came from my fear that the game would be severely crippled to run on mobile devices. Deus Ex: The Fall was a recent disappointment for smartphone gaming based on a successful PC and console franchise, and I worried Bioshock would meet a similar fate. But I was hopeful that it would be a faithful experience so long as they maintained the original experience which wasn't designed for the limitations of mobile hardware. Thankfully from my experience with the game so far, my hope wasn't misplaced.

Getting Set Up

Bioshock was originally released in 2007, and includes support for DirectX 9 on Windows XP and DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Windows 7 has never really been an officially supported operating system, and I find that Bioshock gives me more trouble than other games do. Just do a Google search for "Bioshock crash windows 7" and you'll see what I mean. The issues seem to relate to audio, as on a new Windows install I will either have issues with crashes to desktop or a lack of audio in an otherwise functioning game. Disabling all sound output devices except for the one in use seemed to fix the issue this time.

Once the game was booted I jumped into the graphics settings menu to make sure everything was at its highest setting. For the purposes of these comparisons the PC versions of the game was run at 1920x1080 for a 16:9 aspect ratio matching that of the iPhone 5s version.

There's one option here that needs to be discussed and that's the option for "Horizontal FOV Lock." Essentially this setting keeps the horizontal FOV at the same value it would be on a 4:3 display regardless of the aspect ratio of the monitor being used. For 16:9 displays this means a more zoomed in appearance. Below I've put screenshots of the game with this option on and off, as well as the iPhone version for reference.

Top: FOV lock off. Middle: FOV lock on. Bottom: iPhone version

The iOS version of the game doesn't have any sort of graphical settings menu. As you can see above, it definitely uses the horizontal FOV lock setting and the field of view is essentially the same as on a PC or console with the setting enabled. At the very least, this ensures a consistent experience going from iPhone to iPad, but I'm still not a fan of how zoomed in it feels at times.

Bioshock on iOS doesn't really require any setup like the PC version. There are settings for difficulty, subtitles, object highlight, the quest arrow, and vita chambers, but like other mobile games there's nothing involving graphical settings. The menus themselves are the same as the PC version which really helps to make it feel like you're playing the full Bioshock and not a cut down mobile experience.

Graphics

The first thing to talk about here is what devices Bioshock runs on. This is definitely the most demanding game on the App Store, and despite the visual concessions in bringing a PC game to mobile it still requires significant processing power. Because of that, only devices sporting Apple's A6 or A7 chips can run the game properly. It will open on an older device but the frame rate is very low and the game becomes essentially unplayable. This means that every Apple A5 (and A5X in the third generation iPad) device is unsupported which is quite a long list of devices. First generation iPad Mini owners may be especially disappointed since their device is still sold and isn't even two years old, but given that it launched with the same hardware platform as the iPad 2 from 2011 it was to be expected that it wouldn't have a record setting length of time for software support. 

Top: PC. Bottom: Mobile

The game looks very impressive for a mobile shooter. Scenes like the introduction with the plane crash and the burning wreckage on the water have impressive fire and smoke effects that compare well to the PC version. However, there were definitely sacrifices made with the lighting and the shadows. The images for the HUD and the menus are also surprising low resolution, and I think the quality reduction there had more to do with fitting inside Apple's 2GB limit for applications than any issue with hardware capabilities.

Below are some more comparisons of Bioshock on iOS compared to on PC. In all cases the mobile version is on the left and the PC version on the right. I've tried to take screenshots of several different areas and objects to give an idea of where the graphics were toned down to work on mobile, and where they really hold up well compared to the PC version. You can click the images to view in a larger size.

I feel like 2K did a good job in maintaining the quality of the models in the game when bringing it over to mobile. The effect for the electro bolt plasmid is really close to the PC version. Something that needs to be kept in mind is that some of the areas that look low quality in the iPhone screenshots are harder to notice when the game is in motion on a 4" display.

I chose the last two comparisons for a reason, as they do well to demonstrate the affect that the reduced lighting and shadows have on the game's atmosphere. Graphical fidelity aside, the game just isn't as dark and creepy on mobile. The shadow of the splicer playing with the baby carriage being missing was especially disappointing as that's a very disturbing scene and it doesn't have the same impact without it.

The aliasing is also a significant issue as well. I don't know what resolution the game has to render at to run at an acceptable frame rate but I think I would have taken some more graphical reductions for either anti-aliasing or a higher rendering resolution. My big concern is that the aliasing is really noticeable even on a 4" iPhone 5s which has the best CPU and GPU speed relative to its resolution of all the devices the game runs on. While the iPad Mini Retina and iPad Air are less thermally constrained and can sustain higher clock speeds for a greater period of time, they're likely to have even more issues with aliasing with the game being scaled up to larger displays. I also began to wonder about the overhead impact of OpenGL ES and if the game could look even better if it had been made to run using Apple's Metal API that will be launching with iOS 8. I emailed 2K and they were unable to comment on any plans for using Metal on Bioshock or any future releases so we'll have to wait and see how future iOS games can look with Metal.

Below I have an album of all the screenshots I took while playing. At the time of writing I was at the medical pavilion level and I do intend on completing the game on mobile. One final thing to note is that there's no significant compression to the game's audio to reduce the size. The audio contributes greatly to the atmosphere of Bioshock and I'm very happy it was preserved.

Gameplay

In my opinion the gameplay is really what matters. I would rather have a game that visually mediocre but enjoyable to play than one that looks amazing but feels like a glorified tech demo when played. I don't have access to a Bluetooth controller so I'll be evaluating the touch control experience for Bioshock on iOS. I believe that's how most users will play the game anyway.

Before I talk about how the HUD functions, I really do need to reiterate that the blurriness of all the controls is distracting and annoying. I don't know why they're so low resolution and I really hope 2K updates the game to fix them.

Bioshock has a more complex control scheme than other first person shooters. This is partly due to the inclusion of plasmids which necessitates a way to switch between them and your weapons. Before the game released I had wondered if the game would be altered to allow plasmids and weapons to be used simultaneously like in Bioshock 2, but the original system has been preserved.

Movement is controlled by a virtual control pad on the left side which only appears when in use. Crouching and standing is controlled by the button on the left of the screen. On the right side of the screen there is a button with three bullets on it which is used for reloading weapons. When using plasmids the icon of this button changes to an eve hypo syringe. The section below the reload icon controls switching between weapons and firing. Tapping on the icon for the selected weapon or plasmid fires it. Tapping the other icon is how you switch between weapons and plasmids. When using a weapon or plasmid, the arrow icon cycles through them. This can be troublesome when trying to switch from the wrench to a weapon like the chemical thrower which requires several presses. Update: I've just been informed that holding the button brings up a quick menu with all weapons which is a very fast way to switch between them. The last menu section is the ammo selection menu at the top which allows you to cycle through the various ammo types for your weapon.

In practice these controls work fairly well as far as touch controls go, although I really want to try the game out using a Bluetooth game controller. The one control you may notice is missing is for jumping. Bioshock for iOS actually doesn't have a way to jump, and some levels have had changes made as a result. For example, the very first level in the PC version has a fallen pillar on the ground and when approaching it the game tells you to hit the space bar to jump over it. Since the iOS version has no jumping, this tutorial and the fallen pillar was removed. While this does feel like a concession to make the game work on mobile, jumping was never a big part of Bioshock to begin with and when playing I never wanted to jump but was unable to.

One thing I would like to see is an update to allow the placement of the controls to be changed. The current position of the controls for firing and weapon switching end up covering the viewmodel for your weapon and I would like to move it further to the right side of the display.

The rest of the gameplay is very faithfully brought over to mobile. Plasmids, hacking, upgrades, and everything else is still in the game. The hacking in particular translates very well to mobile, it may actually be better on mobile than it was on PC.

Conclusion and Thoughts on Handheld Gaming

As I'm writing this I'm actually anxious to get back to playing because it's very exciting to have a full fledged first person shooter game that can be put right in your pocket. When I was younger I remember that Call of Duty 4 for the Nintendo DS was the best you had for a handheld first person shooter and as you can see in the image on the right it's not too impressive. We've come a long long way with what phones and handheld gaming devices can do. Although you often hear the term "console quality" thrown around regarding mobile GPU capabilities, I don't think we're quite there yet. But the gap between current generation smartphones and the previous generation of game consoles is certainly closing, and there's nowhere for the quality of mobile games to go but up. I'm very excited to see what the future holds for mobile gaming.

Bioshock for iOS is available on the App Store now for $14.99. The download is 1.65GB in size (and takes up 2.6GB installed on my iPhone 5s) and it only runs on devices with Apple's A6, A6X, or A7 chips which includes the iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, iPad 4, iPad Mini Retina, and iPad Air. I really think it's worth checking out if you can spare the money and are a fan of the original game.

Yesterday, the culture world was dominated by two stories. In the first, David Chase told our writer that Tony Soprano wasn't dead after all. (Chase later said his remarks were "misconstrued," but he did not deny having said them.)

In the second, the Japanese cartoon cat best known as Hello Kitty was revealed in the Los Angeles Times to, uh, not be a cat, but rather a little girl. Who just looks like a cat? We guess? It turns out a translation error may have been the problem here. So Hello Kitty is a cat after all. Phew.

But though both of these stories could not be more different on their surface, they're actually about the exact same thing: authorial intent.

What is authorial intent?

Authorial intent is an idea within criticism of what the author intended when he or she created a work of art. It rose out of the world of literary criticism, which is why the word "author" is there, but it's gradually come to be applied to just about every possible artform.

If you are a big believer in authorial intent (sometimes called an intentionalist), then you believe wholeheartedly that what the author wanted to do with the work is one of the most important things that can be determined. Thus, if David Chase says Tony Soprano is alive or J.K. Rowling says Dumbledore is gay or Sanrio says Hello Kitty is a girl, you probably revise your opinions of the work in question to reflect these ideas. You also will probably get in a lot of arguments about Hello Kitty from now on (especially with people who know Japanese), but you get the idea.

But you might have noticed a lot of TV critics yesterday saying they didn't much care about what Chase said (both in the wake of the piece and after he released the later statement), that they remained comfortable with the idea of the final scene being totally ambiguous. And this is because many, many critics reject the idea of authorial intent completely.

Harrison Ford plays a man tracking down robots in Blade Runner. But perhaps he is a robot himself?! (Warner Brothers)

Why would they do this? How will we know what is real anymore?!

Well, think about it this way. If you're like a lot of people, the idea of Hello Kitty being a little girl is an odd one. You're probably quite comfortable deciding for yourself that she's a cat and leaving it at that. (Since you're calling her Hello Kitty, you're already expressing your comfort with the death of authorial intent, as Sanrio says her name is "Kitty White.") Congratulations, you've rejected the chains of authorial intent!

Of course, for a lot of people, it's easier to do this with a cartoon mascot controlled by corporate overlords that they'd apparently misunderstood from the word go. If Warner Brothers released paperwork from the 1930s that proved Bugs Bunny was actually a gopher tomorrow, nobody would go along with that either. These sorts of ideas have long since moved past their original owners and out into our collective unconscious, perhaps because they're so heavily identified not with individual creators but with corporate masters.

This gets trickier when you get to the level of an individual book, film, album, or TV series. Despite the collaboration that goes into all of these artforms, we're quite comfortable attributing credit for them to the author, director, artist or band, and showrunner, respectively, because we live in a world where auteur theory is largely accepted. (Briefly, auteur theory is the idea that even highly collaborative artforms like film have authors, and in a film, that author is the director. This idea has spread to TV, where the showrunner has become the equivalent of a director.)

Because we live in a largely individualistic society, we tend to be inclined to respect other people's wishes within reason. And so, out of subconscious politeness, plenty of us retroactively agree with Rowling that, hey, Dumbledore is gay, because it doesn't really negate anybody's readings of the Harry Potter books, and it's kind of cool and inclusive (if very strange to announce after all the books had been published).

The problem comes when a work signals intentional ambiguity, and the author comes out and says specifically what they intended. Even beyond David Chase, we have the curious case of Ridley Scott and the film Blade Runner.

In the film, Harrison Ford's character, Rick Deckard, is chasing down so-called "replicants," which are humanoid robots that have attained sentience. Throughout the film, the suggestion that Deckard himself might be a replicant is teased but never confirmed, and it's led, as you'd expect, to a fair number of debates about Deckard's true nature. But within the text of the film, it seems clear that whether he is or isn't a replicant doesn't matter, because the true reason for this ambiguity is to play around with ideas about the class system, about how any time we try to reduce someone to a faceless "other," we dehumanize and invalidate them.

Then, years after the film's release, Scott announced that when he made the film, he very much intended for Deckard to be a replicant, and we should all watch the film that way. As far as some were concerned, that was that. But do the questions of Blade Runner (or The Sopranos) boil down so easily to a binary answer? If you watch either, the answer is a resounding no.

So for many critics — including myself — the most important thing about a work is not what the author intends but what the reader gleans from it. Authorial intent is certainly interesting, but it's not going to get me to stop calling Hello Kitty a cat.

Michael Gambon played Dumbledore in the last six Harry Potter films. (Warner Bros.)

You don't just get to say what things mean!

That's the thing, though. We all do this all of the time.

The idea that authorial intent should be rejected rose out of the New Criticism, a movement from the first half of the 20th century. One of its proponents was the famous poet T.S. Eliot.

One of the main arguments of New Criticism was that the primary reason to read a text wasn't to figure out what the author had meant to do. Many of the authors literary folks study have been dead for centuries, and both our meaning and understanding of the world shift and change with every new generation. The most important thing was the reader's interpretation of the work, which could be filtered through any other number of critical lenses (feminist, Marxist, formalist, etc.).

New Criticism largely won out, and for the most part, authorial intent is treated as a curiosity in critical circles today. (There are still people who care about authorial intent, of course, but they do not tend to be the most prominent voices, particularly in popular criticism.) Now, once a work is released, the author's relationship with it is supposed to be over, and it belongs to the audience. That's why Rowling's comments rankled a few. She might be the creator of Albus Dumbledore, but she doesn't get to change everything about him retroactively. (See also: her comments about how Hermione and Harry should have ended up together.)

In a way, this is just an extension of humanity's long evolution from collectivism to individualism. Using criticism to figure out an author's intent is having a bunch of people try to solve the same problem (albeit in their own highly individualistic ways). Using it to share individual interpretations allows for far more diverse readings and considerations.

So when I say "we all do this all of the time," I mean that when you, say, watch a movie and say, "That was good!" or "That was bad!" you're not worrying so much about what the director intended as you are what you thought about it. This isn't a strict rejection of authorial intent so much as a normal, immediate emotional reaction, but it does exist in the same general neighborhood as that rejection.

Every time we experience art, that's filtered through our own perceptions and ideas about the universe, and, thus, when we express our interpretation of a work, we're telling others around us as much about ourselves as we are the work. The best critics do both together so smoothly that you don't even realize what they're doing. But go read, say, a really good Roger Ebert movie review sometime, and you'll realize how much it resembles a personal essay.

So go ahead. If you want to think Tony Soprano is dead, do so. If you want to believe Harry Potter ended up with Luna Lovegood, that's only right. And for God's sake, don't try and think Hello Kitty is somehow anything other than a cat.

So I just shouldn't care what the author thinks at all?

As stated, it's complicated. Learning what an author intended can be interesting — particularly if they wildly missed the mark — but it shouldn't change our fundamental experience of something. (If you go back and read our David Chase profile, this is one of the things he and the author argue about in regards to his film Not Fade Away.)

The best course of action is this: listen to what the author says and take that into consideration. But by all means, if you disagree with it on a fundamental level, don't abandon your original thought. Once it's released, art no longer belongs exclusively to its creators. It belongs to all of us, and we all get to play a part in shaping its story.

(h/t to @HeerJeet for this awesome idea)

Ever wonder why America's two biggest cable providers don't bother competing with one another? Or why you have only one choice for Internet service in your neighborhood? Or why cable prices have been rising at more than triple the rate of inflation? Well, wonder no more. Ars Technica flags some recent filings sent to the Federal Communications Commission sent by Internet service providers CenturyLink and RCN that detail how Comcast works tirelessly to keep them out of its markets and then justifies its actions as a favor to poor people.

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I'll be honest: this video hits kind of close to home. Especially because I saw the headline "Is this the new iPhone 6?" and clicked on it like a maniac, and then I sat for two minutes and twenty seconds (not including the pre-roll ad) and watched every single second of Doldo411 telling me about the new iPhone 6. I know I won't be the only person Doldo411 victimizes this way. I hate Doldo411. I hate myself.

But I don't hate this video. It's amazing. It's a perfect send-up of the millions of videos we've all watched and made and dissected over the years. You should watch it. The iPhone 6 is in it.

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What was the happiest day of your life? The day you got married? The day you saw your newborn child for the very first time? The day you graduated college and knew you had a bright future ahead of you? Not for this man. For this man, the happiest day of his life appears to be when he found out he'd finally be able to ditch his current Internet provider for Google Fiber.

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For all we know, the three dimensional world we see around us is really an illusion — one that’s actually in 2D. It’s a slightly unsettling idea, but it’s also one that physicists have been thinking about for some time. Unfortunately, until recently, a 2D universe wasn’t something we could verify. Now, thanks to an experiment recently launched at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois, we might finally be able to determine how the universe stores the information we interact with everyday — and whether we’re living in a hologram.

"For thousands of years we have assumed that space is made of points and lines," said Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, in an email to The Verge. But "maybe that is not right —...

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The CW today revealed the latest poster for the upcoming The Flash series. Here, Barry Allen taps into the Speed Force to create his iconic symbol. It's a solid poster. But The Verge writers sat down and dug a little deeper into what's happening here.

Adi Robertson: The interesting thing about TV is that it's subverted film's blue / orange filter. Although maybe Gotham will bring it back, based on the posters.

Ross Miller: So... is he dashing then turning sharply and going backwards diagonally, then turning sharply back around... OR is he like backpedaling / strafing to make curves?

TC Sottek: Yeah pretty inefficient tbh.

Kwame Opam: Maybe he's dodging really random bullets?

Sean O'Kane: Maybe his speed warps spacetime.

P...

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This video gets submitted every now and then, but it’s been years since we last showed it off. 

via (x)

Cruise ships have had a rough go of it lately, but Royal Caribbean is debuting some remarkable technology on its long-teased ship that it's hoping can turn things around. It's a little less "poop ship" and a little more science fiction. It's called "Quantum of the Seas," and is a remarkably high-tech vessel. Sure, some of the changes are just keeping up with the hospitality times, like online check-in and RFID luggage tracking. But then you walk aboard the 167,800-ton ship, sit down in the Bionic Bar, place an order on the Windows tablet built specially for the ship, watch a robot bartender mix your drink, and realize you're somewhere a little different than your average hotel.

You can play Xbox Live while you sit in a SeaPod in the...

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Throughout the entire rumor cycle for this year’s new iPhones, we’ve been inundated with reports of two new screen sizes, 4.7 and 5.5 inches. But while the physical sizes of these displays leaked early and often, the exact pixel dimensions have not.

At this point, there’s too much smoke around the “two new iPhones, one at 4.7 inches and the other 5.5 inches” narrative for there not to be a fire. I think that’s what Apple is planning to announce next month — not because anyone “familiar with the plans” has told me so, but simply because so many parts have leaked corroborating these two sizes.

I’ve spent much of the last month trying to figure out the pixel counts for these displays, and it’s actually quite tricky. When Apple changed the iPhone display previously, they did so in obvious ways. With the iPhone 4’s retina display, Apple kept the physical size exactly the same (3.5 inches¹) and exactly doubled the pixels-per-inch resolution (from 163 to 326). When the iPhone 5 increased the size to 4 inches and the aspect ratio (switching from 3:2 to 16:9), they simply added pixels vertically. Same pixels-per-inch resolution, same width (640 pixels), new height (1136 pixels instead of 960).

There is no similar “easy” way to do either a 4.7 or 5.5 iPhone display.

But after giving it much thought, and a lot of tinkering in a spreadsheet, here is what I think Apple is going to do:

• 4.7-inch display: 1334 × 750, 326 PPI @2x
• 5.5-inch display: 2208 × 1242, 461 PPI @3x

@2x means the same “double” retina resolution that we’ve seen on all iOS devices with retina displays to date, where each virtual point in the user interface is represented by two physical pixels on the display in each dimension, horizontal and vertical. @3x means a new “triple” retina resolution, where each user interface point is represented by three display pixels. A single @2x point is a 2 × 2 square of 4 pixels; an @3x point is a 3 × 3 square of 9 pixels.

I could be wrong on either or both of these conjectured new iPhones. I derived these figures on my own, and I’ll explain my thought process below. No one who is truly “familiar with the situation” has told me a damn thing about either device. I have heard second- and third-hand stories, though, that lead me to think I’m right.

How I Derived These Figures

First, I’m assuming both the 4.7 and 5.5 inch rumors are true. Second, I’m assuming a 16:9 aspect ratio for both displays.² Given these assumptions and the Pythagorean Theorem, it’s easy to create a spreadsheet model that gives you the pixels-per-inch resolution for a given pixel count.

For example, consider the 4.7-inch display. That’s the diagonal measured in inches. Given the height and width in pixels, we can solve for the diagonal in pixels (a² + b² = c²). Starting with values of 1334 and 750 for a and b, we get roughly 1530.4 pixels diagonally solving for c. Divide 1530.4 by 4.7 inches, and you get 326 pixels/inch — exactly the same pixel density as all previous iPhone retina displays (and the retina iPad Mini).

When I’ve written about this sort of diagonal pixel division in the past, I’ve gotten complaints that there’s no such thing as “diagonal pixels” or fractional pixels. But for our purposes, that doesn’t matter. Effectively we’re treating “pixel” as a unit of measure — the length of an actual pixel on the display. If you don’t believe me, we can use the Pythagorean Theorem the other way, to compute the length of the sides in inches given the diagonal in inches and the aspect ratio. A 16:9 display with a diagonal measuring 4.7 inches has a height of 4.1 inches and width of 2.3. 1334/4.1 and 750/2.3 both work out to roughly 326 pixels per inch. Trust the math.

Keeping the same 326 pixels-per-inch density would fit with the patterns Apple has established. They keep reusing the same pixel densities across iOS devices. In the past, I’ve speculated that this might be a matter of economy of scale — that they just cut different size displays from the same (large) sheets of LCDs. I no longer think that’s the reason. For one thing, they stick to these same pixel densities even across devices that use entirely different displays. The iPhone 5, retina iPod Touch, and retina iPad Mini all use 326 PPI displays, but all three use different LCD display technology.

I think the explanation has more to do with the physical size of user interface elements and touch accessibility. It’s about points. User interfaces in iOS aren’t specified in display pixels, they’re specified in virtual points. On non-retina devices, points and pixels were one and the same. But as stated earlier, on @2x retina devices, each (virtual) point represents two (physical) pixels on the display in each dimension.

Apple has always recommended tappable targets of at least 44 points. From the iOS HIG:

Make it easy for people to interact with content and controls by giving each interactive element ample spacing. Give tappable controls a hit target of about 44 × 44 points.

This recommendation is based not on aesthetics — how the controls look — but on the size of human fingertips. That’s the real constraint. 44 points isn’t a magic number; it’s a by-product of the size of the pixels on the original 2007 iPhone display (pre-retina, one point equaled one pixel). On every iPhone to date, from the original through the 5S and 5C, there has been a single consistent point resolution: 163 points per inch. That means a 44 × 44 point UI element has remained exactly the same physical size (as measured in inches or millimeters).

The original iPad introduced a second point resolution: 132 points per inch. This has remained consistent on the large (9.7 inch) iPads. The iPad Mini (both original and retina) uses the iPhone’s 163 points-per-inch resolution. Apple’s recommended target sizes did not change for the 9.7-inch iPad: they simply made the recommended tap targets physically larger. 44 points on an iPhone or iPad Mini is roughly 0.27 inches (6.9 mm). 44 points on a 9.7-inch iPad is 0.33 inches (8.4 mm). Everything is bigger by a factor of about 1.24.

Making UI elements (and text) bigger on the iPad works, both in terms of touch and visual accessibility. Making UI elements smaller, however, would not work, either physically (touch sizes) or visually (legibility). Any changes that Apple makes to iOS displays, in terms of physical dimensions or pixel resolution, necessitate extra work for app developers and designers to fully support. They’ve gone from @1x to @2x, and eventually (I think next month) they will go to @3x. They’ve introduced three different aspect ratios: 3:2 (now deprecated), 16:9 (all recent iPhones), and 4:3 (all iPads). They’ve used two different sizes of the same aspect ratio (iPad and iPad Mini).

But what they have never done, and I believe never will do, is redefine the virtual point to something other than 1/44th the recommended minimum tap target size for every device.

Apple has already started encouraging iOS developers to begin using adaptive layout techniques. See session 216 from WWDC 2014: Building Adaptive Apps with UIKit. What’s telling when you watch that session and read the documentation is that developers should clearly anticipate new aspect ratios (whether for new displays, or for a still-hypothetical but rumored split-screen multitasking feature on future iPads) and physical sizes, but nowhere is there any suggestion that the role of the point as the UI unit of measure is changing.

This is important when speculating about new iOS device displays. Take the physical pixels-per-inch of the display, divide by the retina factor (@1x, @2x, @3x, etc.), and you get the points-per-inch for that proposed display. If that result is higher than 163 points-per-inch, then a 44-point UI element would be undesirably small as a touch target for human fingertips. What we want are display resolutions that provide more total points but the same or fewer points-per-inch.

Now, in theory, Apple could go ahead and do this anyway, and on such a device developers would have to use an entirely different recommended size, in points, for UI elements. But effectively that would require double the design work. The adaptive techniques and APIs that Apple is recommending (again, see WWDC 2014 Session 216) are intended to enable apps to be designed just once and flexibly adapt to different displays.

It’s also important to consider the two possible (and not necessarily conflicting) reasons why larger displays are desirable:

1. To show more content on the display at once.
2. To make the content on the display physically larger.

#1 is about showing more content on screen (e.g. more text per page in an e-book). #2 is about making the content bigger (e.g. larger text in an e-book). #1 is about increasing the number of points, not (only) the number of pixels. #2 requires larger points (fewer points per inch).

Using the Above Assumptions and Concepts to Consider Hypothetical iPhone Display Resolutions, Starting With 1136 × 640

As a baseline, let’s consider the existing iPhone 5 / 5C / 5S display:

Size	Retina	Pixels	Points	px/inch	pt/inch
4.0	@2x	1136 × 640	568 × 320	326	163

The easiest thing Apple could do to create 4.7 and 5.5 inch displays would be to use the current 1136 × 640 pixel resolution, but this leads to several undesirable results, even though developers would have to do nothing new to support it. Such a 4.7-inch display would have a resolution of only 277 pixels per inch, and a 5.5-inch display would come in at only 237 pixels per inch. Neither display would show any additional content compared to the iPhone 5, and though everything would be physically bigger, the lower pixel-per-inch resolution would make everything look jaggier, especially on the 5.5-inch model. That’s not going to happen. New iPhone displays need to look as good as or better than the existing ones.

1704 × 960: Only Works Well for 4.0-inch Displays

Now, let’s consider an oft-cited prospective new iPhone resolution, 1704 × 960, about which 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman reported in May:

Fast forward to 2014, and Apple is preparing to make another significant screen adjustment to the iPhone. Instead of retaining the current resolution, sources familiar with the testing of at least one next-generation iPhone model say that Apple plans to scale the next iPhone display with a pixel-tripling (3X) mode. […]

568 tripled is 1704 and 320 tripled is 960, and sources indicate that Apple is testing a 1704 × 960 resolution display for the iPhone 6. Tripling the iPhone 5’s base resolution would mean that the iPhone 6’s screen will retain the same 16:9 aspect ratio as the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, and iPhone 5c.

Simply tripling the base point size would make things relatively easy for developers — it’d be akin to the 2010 introduction of the first retina device, the iPhone 4. Developers would just need to add @3x graphic assets.³ The layout of the app, as specified in points, would remain unchanged.

I think Gurman was right that Apple was testing an @3x mode. I’m almost certain he was wrong that they ever tested 1704 × 960, unless they considered a new iPhone with a 4.0-inch display. That’s the only size at which 1704 × 960 makes any sense. Why? Because as measured in points, an @3x 1704 × 960 display would show no additional content compared to the iPhone 5. It’d still be 568 × 320 points. (One could comfortably reduce their Dynamic Type system-wide font size preference on such a display, but it wouldn’t increase the amount of content displayed by default. Dynamic Type alone is not a good enough solution to showing more content — the only good solution is increasing the number of points, not just the number of pixels.)

A 4.7-inch 1704 × 960 display would require a 416 pixels-per-inch display, and would have a scaling factor of 1.18 compared to all previous iPhones. It would display the same content, but everything would be 1.18 times larger. A 5.5-inch 1704 × 960 display would require a 356 pixels-per-inch display, and would display content at a comically large 1.38 scaling factor. (For comparison’s sake, the iPad Air has a scaling factor of 1.24 compared to the iPad Mini.)

The one thing that’s magic about 1704 × 960 is that it’s the one resolution that would keep the iPhone akin to the iPad — multiple physical sizes and retina factors, but with one universal dimension in terms of points. You know how iPad apps have the exact same 1024 × 768 layout on all iPads, just with different physical and retina scales? That’s what 1704 × 960 (with @3x retina scale) would do for the iPhone. I think the iPhone is fundamentally different from the iPad in this regard, however.

(As I said above, 1704 × 960 would work perfectly for a new 4.0-inch iPhone with @3x retina scaling. Layout and UI element sizes would remain unchanged from the iPhone 5 series, but everything would look 1.5 times sharper with a 489 pixels-per-inch display. By all accounts, however, there is no such device in the works. Apple seems to be leaving the 4.0-inch size behind.)

1334 × 750: The 4.7-inch Sweet Spot

Size	Retina	Pixels	Points	Area Factor	px/inch	pt/inch	Scale Factor
4.7	@2x	1334 × 750	667 × 375	1.38x	326	163	1.0x
5.5	@2x	1334 × 750	667 × 375	1.38x	278	139	1.17x

At 4.7 inches, 1334 × 750 works perfectly as a new iPhone display, addressing problem #1, showing more content. With point dimensions of 667 × 375, this display would show 1.38 times more points than the iPhone 5. At 326 pixels-per-inch, everything on screen would remain exactly the same physical size. There would just be 38 percent more room for content.

This resolution is feasible for a 5.5-inch display, but doesn’t work well enough in my opinion, for the reasons italicized in the above table. 278 pixels-per-inch is unacceptably low — again, new iPhone displays need to look as good as or better than the previous models, and 278 pixels-per-inch is too low. Apple does this with the iPad Air and Mini (two sizes, same pixel count), but the iPad Air gets away with its sub-300 pixels-per-inch display because you tend to hold it further away from your eyes than you do a phone.

If Apple were to use this display resolution for both the 4.7- and 5.5-inch phones, the relationship between the two devices would only be a matter of scale. Everything on the 5.5-inch iPhone would appear 1.17 times larger than on the 4.7-inch one, but they would each show the same amount of content. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to produce two new larger iPhone display sizes.

1472 × 828: Too Small for 4.7, Too Crude for 5.5

Gurman this week reported on a configuration file in the latest iOS 8 beta SDK, suggesting a display size — measured in points, not pixels — of 736 × 414. That, indeed, was interesting — but not so much at @2x, as Gurman posited.

Size	Retina	Pixels	Points	Area Factor	px/inch	pt/inch	Scale Factor
4.7	@2x	1472 × 828	736 × 414	1.68x	359	180	0.91x
5.5	@2x	1472 × 828	736 × 414	1.68x	307	154	1.06x

This resolution is a non-starter for a 4.7-inch phone on the basis of scaling. With 180 points per inch, UI elements and text would be rendered almost 10 percent smaller than on an iPhone 5. With a scaling factor of 0.91, I don’t think it would appear comically small, but no one expects or wants things to appear smaller on a 4.7-inch phone than they do on a 4.0-inch phone. Not going to happen.

At 5.5 inches, however, this resolution works. The only hiccup is that the display would be “only” 307 pixels-per-inch. That meets Apple’s original 2010 definition of “retina display” as 300+ PPI, but just barely. Sticking with @2x retina scale would be less work for UI designers, and such a display would cost less and be less graphically taxing than what I’m about to propose, but a new iPhone with a lower resolution (in terms of pixels-per-inch) display is a bitter pill to ask people to swallow. Again, I think the display on a new top-tier iPhone must be as good or better than the previous model in every way. 307 pixels-per-inch doesn’t quite cut it, I think. (If I’m wrong about anything in this piece, however, this might be it — that 307 pixels-per-inch number is the only thing I see wrong about a 5.5-inch 1472 × 828 display.)

2208 × 1242: The 5.5-inch ‘Holy Shit’ Sweet Spot

Take the same 736 × 414 point display size, and apply a retina scaling factor of @3x instead of @2x, and you get a very intriguing 5.5-inch iPhone:

Size	Retina	Pixels	Points	Area Factor	px/inch	pt/inch	Scale Factor
4.7	@3x	2208 × 1242	736 × 414	1.68x	539	180	0.91x
5.5	@3x	2208 × 1242	736 × 414	1.68x	461	154	1.06x

Nothing changes compared to 1472 × 828 but one thing: pixels-per-inch resolution. The 4.7-inch size is still out because the scaling factor would render everything almost 10 percent smaller.

Everything works at these dimensions for a 5.5-inch display. With an increase in area of 68 percent and a scaling factor of 1.06, this display would address both reasons why someone might want a very large iPhone: it would show a lot more content, and it would render everything on screen, point-for-point, a little bit bigger. And at 461 pixels-per-inch, everything would be amazingly sharp. At that point it would be difficult for most of us to perceive individual pixels from any viewing distance, not just from typical practical viewing distance. This would be so sweet, I’d wager Apple comes up with a new marketing name for it: super-retina or something.⁴

The only issue is whether it’s technically feasible for Apple: (a) to obtain sufficient supply of 461 PPI displays at a reasonable cost, and (b) to produce a GPU capable of pushing that many pixels. (b) Might not be a problem at all, considering that last year’s A7 SoC is already capable of driving the 2048 × 1536 retina iPad displays without breaking a sweat. As for (a), rumors abound that @3x is a real thing, and if that’s true, I think it’s for the 5.5-inch phone. In terms of the total number of pixels, the technical jump from the iPhone 5 series to this display would be quite comparable to that from the 3GS to the iPhone 4. With the 3GS to the 4, the number of pixels exactly quadrupled. Going from the 1136 × 640 iPhone 5 display to a new 2208 × 1242 display would increase the total number of pixels by a factor of about 3.8. After four years of @2x retina scale, I think it’s plausible that Apple could pull this off — especially since they pulled off the @1x to @2x jump after only three years.

The technical and manufacturing difficulties involved in such a leap could well explain the pervasive rumors that the new 5.5-inch trails the 4.7-inch model in terms of production. It also fits with pervasive rumors that it will cost at least $100 more.

Other Resolutions

1564 × 880 is feasible for a 5.5-inch phone. That’s what you get if you maintain the 326 pixels-per-inch density and @2x scale. This would increase area — the number of points displayed on screen — by a whopping 89 percent. But it wouldn’t increase the size of what you see at all. I think the sweet spot for a 5.5-inch phone would allow you to see more content and make what you see at least a little bit bigger. So that’s why I’d bet against 1564 × 880. (1564 × 880 would be implausible for the 4.7-inch phone: it would render UI elements and text 15 percent smaller than all previous iPhones.)

1920 × 1080 is a standard resolution for “high definition”, but the numbers only work for 4.7 inches at @3x retina scale:

Size	Retina	Pixels	Points	Area Factor	px/inch	pt/inch	Scale Factor
4.7	@2x	1334 × 750	667 × 375	1.38x	326	163	1.0x
4.7	@3x	1920 × 1080	640 × 360	1.27x	469	156	1.04x
5.5	@3x	1920 × 1080	640 × 360	1.27x	401	134	1.22x

None of those numbers jumps out at me as terrible (although the 1.22 scaling factor at 5.5 inches comes close), but none of them are particularly compelling either. At 4.7 inches, 1920 × 1080 would give you 27 percent more content (in points), and would increase the scale of points by 4 percent. Both of those are plausible, and a reasonable balance between showing more content and bigger content. But it seems like a worse tradeoff balance for 4.7 inches than my perceived sweet spot of 1334 × 750. I’ve repeated those numbers in the chart above for comparison. I think for the 4.7-inch phone, you want to focus on more content, not bigger content, and 1334 × 750 is a better — and cheaper, and more power efficient — option for that.

At 1920 × 1080, a 5.5-inch iPhone would skew too heavily toward showing bigger content than more content. People who really want bigger text would be served just as well, I think, with a 2208 × 1242 @3x display and changing the Dynamic Type font size. At 1920 × 1080, everyone would get very large type by default. Even worse, a 1920 × 1080 5.5-inch phone at @3x would have fewer points than a 1334 × 750 4.7-inch iPhone at @2x (640 × 360 vs. 667 × 375, respectively). I don’t think it’s feasible for the physically larger phone to show less on-screen content. This is why it’s essential to consider points, not just pixels.

Lastly, I considered 2272 × 1280 at @4x retina scale. Jumping from @2x to @4x would make things much easier for iOS UI designers (see footnote 3 below), but Apple’s top priority isn’t making life easier for UI designers. 2272 × 1280 is exactly double the current 1136 × 640 iPhone 5 display. The problem with that is that it doesn’t change the screen size in terms of points at all. You’d see exactly the same amount of content, only bigger (on the 4.7-inch phone) or much bigger (on the 5.5). Everything would look incredibly sharp as well, but I think showing more content is an essential aspect of the demand for large-screen phones.

Conclusions

The three main factors to consider for a new iPhone display size:

1. Content area: showing more points on screen.
2. Scaling factor: the number of points per inch.
3. Sharpness/quality: the number of pixels per inch.

A 4.7-inch iPhone at 1334 × 750 pixels would change only one of those: content area. The points-per-inch and pixels-per-inch would remain unchanged from the iPhone 5 series, but the display would expand from 568 × 320 points to 667 × 375, an increase of 38 percent. This is such an Apple-like thing to do — keeping the exact same 326 pixels-per-inch density and simply putting more pixels in both dimensions to make a larger display — that I’m surprised I can only find one mention of it: an April report from KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo. (In that same note, Chi-Kuo pegged the 5.5-inch iPhone at 1920 × 1080, which, for the reasons outlined above, I very much doubt.)

A 5.5-inch iPhone at 2208 × 1242 pixels (and @3x retina scaling) would improve all three factors:

1. Content area: with 736 × 414 points, viewable content area would increase by 68 percent over the iPhone 5 (and 21 percent over my conjectured 1334 × 750 4.7-inch phone).
2. At 154 points per inch, points would be 6 percent bigger than on all other iPhones to date. Just a little bigger, not a lot bigger, which is probably just what the doctor ordered.
3. At 461 pixels per inch, everything would be rendered incredibly sharply.

So, those are my guesses.⁵

Wyatt Neumann is a photographer and father who last year took his two-year-old daughter Stella on a road trip across the country, documenting their travels as they went. Along the way he captured beautiful landscapes, pictures of the open road, as well as a handful of adorable images of Stella wearing what two-year-olds very often wear: a fairy dress or nothing at all.

Normally, when put in a family photo album or a personal collection to show off to friends, this sort of subject matter isn’t an issue. But, as Neumann found out the hard way, these nude but non-explicit images engendered an entirely different reaction when he posted them online.

As the trip progressed, Neumann shared the images from his travels with his daughter through Facebook and Instagram. Until, that is, about halfway through the road trip when the images began drawing criticism from people the world over.

The public backlash of the images brought a hailstorm of critics who called them “perverse,” “sick” and “pornographic.” Specifically, a group from the website Get Off My Internets began verbally attacking Neumann for publishing these images after a forum thread drew more attention to the photos than he had ever anticipated.

Before long, members of the site sent out a plethora of complaints to both Facebook and Instagram and managed to get Neumann’s profiles suspended. Eventually reinstated, it was the broad criticism of both him and his daughter and the suspension of his accounts that lead Neumann to realize this was a matter of freedom of expression and the freedom of speech.

It was then that he came up with the idea to turn these images into a gallery and accompanying book. Aptly titled I FEEL SORRY FOR YOUR CHILDREN: The Sexualization of Innocence in America, The Safari Gallery exhibition and book take what Neumann hopes is an honest look at what childhood is and what it’s been turned into. As he explains in his artist statement:

What’s troubling is the abject reviling of the human body, the intense and overt sexualization of the natural form, especially the naked bodies of carefree young children, who have yet to feel the burden of institutionalized body image awareness and the embarrassment that comes with adolescence. My children are free, they live without shame.

As part of the series, the gallery and book featured images from their entire road trip, not just of Stella. And along with each image comes a comment, one of the comments left on the nude or semi-nude photos of Stella by the people who were so offended by those images.

Neumann says he is committed to “showcas[ing] the lives [his children] get to live, express myself, and catalog the reality of my children’s experience.” As for the online critics who had more than a handful of words to share with Neumann in regards to the images of his naked child, his closing statement seems to sum it up fairly well:

So the choice seems clear: do we live in fear and condemnation? Or do we celebrate one another, and ourselves, in this life? I choose to believe in our ability to fight fear with love, ignorance with understanding, and to unite rather than divide. But you be the judge… is this pornography, art, expression, or exploitation. It’s up to us to either cower in fear, or liberate ourselves and live.

Below are a number of images Neumann was kind enough to share with us, presented as they were in the exhibition: alongside the critical, hateful and often vulgar words of anonymous strangers who commented on the images of Stella:

Here’s a feature of Neumann by Vocativ (warning: contains strong language):

To learn more about this project or see any of Neumann’s other work, be sure to visit his website by clicking here.

(via Huffington Post)

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Image credits: Photographs by Wyatt Neumann and used with permission

 I often tell young filmmakers that the best way to learn the art of directing, is to take their iPhones and go out and shoot a sequence or short.    That way, you won’t focus on the technical restrictions of lenses, camera support etc – you focus only on how you move the camera (and why) the length of each shot, and the art of sequencing…   Point is:  the lack of depth of field won’t make a good film…  the depth of your storytelling skills (not to mention the quality of the original story and screenplay) will!   This is a big focus on what we’re doing on tour right now, now on city 6 of 32.

Here is a great example of what an iPhone 5s, connected to a Freefly Systems  MōVI M5 can do – and just how good it can get.  

Now to be frank:  I really don’t care what anyone shoots on… I just care about the result.   I think it’s often superfluous to talk about the cameras, lenses etc when the focus should be on story.   But this is a great example of that in an odd way as well:  the use of the cameras and movement when combined with an iPhone and MōVI show you where things will head in the future… smaller cameras, new camera support and innovations galore.    Because ultimately, none of your general audience cares about how your film was made – they just care if it holds their attention and entertains them.   That’s my opinion anyway.

You’ll see a little BTS at the end of the video below that shows how the video was shot – and edited on an iPad in the plush seats of a Bentley… "as you do!"  

 

Here’s an oldie but goodie. Published back in January of 2010, this little What the Duck strip breaks down the difference between an artist, a photographer, and a Photoshopper in humorously simple terms. A good little laugh for your Sunday before we dive into another intense work week.

To see more from What the Duck, click on the photo above, check out our interview with WTD creator Aaron Johnson, or head over to the comic strip’s website here.

(via OneSlidePhotography)

I am a (female) fashion designer. I create unique dresses, mostly for cocktail parties and weddings.

Me: So here is my quote for the cocktail gown that we discussed last week.

Client: Thanks… I understand the lines for fabric and other material, but what is the last line about?

Me: That’s for my design work and the time necessary to stitch and build the gown.

Client: I don’t understand. How does that account for that sum of money?

Me: Based on our initial conversation and preliminary design, I estimated X hours of work.

Client: You charge money for drawing designs?

Me: Yes.

Client: I don’t get it. Doesn’t your husband make enough money?

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

There's a debate raging at The Verge, and we need your help. One of The Verge's video producers, Nathan Cykiert, thinks 1994 was the best year in film,...

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