Ever wonder why ƒ-stops have the numbers they do, or what those numbers mean? Watch this great video to find out
Ever wonder how those funky aperture numbers ended up on your lens barrel? Or who chose those odd ƒ-numbers that run in the seemingly arbitrary 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 sequence? And why does the biggest number refer to the smallest lens-hole?
Now, video sketching supremo Dylan Bennett is back to explain ƒ-stops to you. Grab a beverage, sit back and enjoy 15 minutes of easy-to-follow explanation. With drawings!
Here’s another lovely short video from Matthew Pearce, the man behind the Matt’s Macintosh YouTube channel.
MacPaint doesn’t just explain what MacPaint was, but is more about why it was an important part of the software lineup back in those days. Things we take for granted today (like copying a graphic and pasting it into another document) were new and exciting back then.
As Matt points out, MacPaint in 1984 laid foundations for features you still see today in modern graphics applications.
(And one other thing: Matthew’s original Macintosh 128K looks pristine, and the screen as clean and bright as the day it was made. He even has an as-new copy of the original printed manual. Where does he find this stuff?)
Back in 1981, Bill Gates co-wrote a PC game called Donkey, commonly known (as some apps were back in those days) by its filename, DONKEY.BAS. If you’re old enough to remember those days and old enough to yearn for them, you might enjoy playing Donkey all over again on your iPhone.
The guys over at Macminicolo just celebrated their seventh birthday (Happy Birthday!), and took a look at some numbers. During those years, the humble Mac mini’s benchmarks have increased by some 1429%.
I’m lucky: the real Stonehenge is only about 40 minutes’ drive from my front door, so I can go and visit whenever I like. For students of prehistoric monuments who live further afield, the Stonehenge Experience app for iPad offers a tiny glimpse of what this ancient English stone circle is all about.
Wow, Merry Christmas indeed. Dieter Bohn over at The Verge has put together the end-all-be-all guide to iOS, an overview of Apple’s plucky little mobile OS so well-illustrated, informative and complete, all we can do is stew in jealousy we didn’t do this ourselves.
The iPod is essentially Apple’s typewriter: a piece of technology that reshaped society completely, then was made redundant by its descendants. However, the iPod’s birth a decade ago launched a legacy that can’t be ignored, no matter how hard you try.
We’ve got a special one for you, folks. My dear friend and colleague Bill Scott found a delightful treasure while riffling through his archive a few weeks ago: the original brochure for the Lisa, Apple’s very first graphical user interface computer with a mouse. Bill worked at Hovey-Kelley Design when the firm created the first mouse (his beautiful sketches can be seen at the New Yorker).
Dating from early 1983, the brochure is a fascinating window into how Apple was thinking about the future of computers almost 30 years ago. It has hilariously florid discussions of how revolutionary the mouse is (“The mouse and the natural movement of your own hand. They’re all you need to control Lisa.”), overly obvious explanations (“The keyboard is just for typing.”), and the occasional fashion anachronism (see the vest and lavender bow above). Though it would be a few years yet until Apple became an industrial design powerhouse, it’s interesting to note how advanced the company’s graphic design already was — at least by the standards of the pre-Mac, dots-and-teal squiggles era.
It’s an enormous document, so I’ve uploaded it to Scribd, where you can read it online or download it for offline reading. Definitely worth your while if you bleed brushed aluminum.
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