Simply Jonathan

Archive for 2018

Karl Marx Gets a Job 

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I generally like Existential Comics, but I particularly enjoy the Marx ones.

When to put down the tools – Mike Monteiro 

Facebook employees, with a few individual exceptions, don’t believe their company has crossed a line yet. Twitter employees, again with a few individual exceptions, don’t believe their company has crossed a line yet. We know this because they haven’t put down the tools. And by continuing to aid the companies making those decisions by selling them their labor, they’ve become complicit in their actions. They haven’t organized. They haven’t made a stand.

And they won’t.

From URL to Interactive 

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A List Apart’s From URL to Interactive series just concluded, and I think it’s worth a read for any web developer.

It’s structured in a way that reminds me of one of my favourite books, Charles Petzold‘s Code, moving from the bottom of the stack to the top.

Pseudo Localisation at Netflix 

This is a really interesting technique from Netflix to fake English strings to look like ones in other languages, in order to make sure long strings aren’t being truncated disruptively.

Pop

Screenshot from Apple Music showing four hip hop albums ‘from our pop editor’

I’m not really complaining, but this is probably not what I would have picked if I were pop editor.

Matthew Panzerino reporting on Apple’s new Pro Workflow Team 

An interesting report, but I kept wondering about this:

Apple decided to go a step further and just begin hiring these creatives directly into Apple

What do these people actually work on? The story makes it clear it’s not Hollywood stuff (because they’re understandably hesitant to bring that work in to Apple), but then what? Does nothing actually come out of this and are these just the world’s most expensive testers?

Reverse engineering the Notability file format 

A turn-by-turn description of how Julia Evans reverse engineered the proprietary image format used by the iOS Notability app.

As she says:

People don’t usually invent totally custom file formats! Nothing in here was really complicated – it was just some existing standard formats (zip! apple plist! an array of floats!) combined together in a pretty simple way.

Harry Potter Unicode Arrow 

Doing the Lord’s work (finding the perfect Unicode arrow to illustrate an external link), I stumbled upon ↯, which I can only assume is a tribute to Harry Potter.

Essential image optimization 

An eBook by Addy Osmani on everything you could want to know, and then some, about the most efficient ways to serve images in browsers.

Google closing down the goo.gl URL shortener 

It serves to Google’s credit that existing goo.gl redirects will remain (for the time being…), but this is just another in a seemingly list of tales that all boil down to: You can’t trust Google with this sort of thing.

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.