Simply Jonathan

Archive for April 2018

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.

The investors who never were 

Fascinating story in The Blizzard (an excellent quarterly football publication for the uninitiated) about the takeover of Notts County.

The Kasper Schmeichel angle (and the general superstar allure of Eriksson and Campbell) meant it was covered in the Danish media, but I had always just assumed the funding dried up, not realising the extent of the scam.

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.