10 ms·
Better title: Dr. Drang Notices Some Crappy Formatting in a Slide and Also Programmers Aren’t Mathematicians
by webwielder2 9y ago
Better title: Dr. Drang Notices Some Crappy Formatting in a Slide and Also Programmers Aren’t Mathematicians
- ioquatix 9y agoWoah there, some programmers are mathematicians.
- rasz 9y agoJobs would fire 5 people for something like this. Nowadays nobody at Apple cares anymore.
- webwielder2 9y agoI think both of those sentences are untrue.
- cooper12 9y agoJeez, even after the wealthy man died from curable cancer, his cult of personality persists. (or should I say "reality distortion field") This isn't the main keynote at WWDC, but rather is just a panel, so I don't see why Jobs would have cared or had the resourced to care about each presentation. Additionally, while Jobs did take a calligraphy course and was in tune with typography, I doubt he was especially knowledgable about mathematical typesetting as this author is. Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting? The author likely just made their own slides and the WWDC coordinates obviously can't work on each and every presentation.
- coldtea 9y ago>Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting? Or you know, it might just be no persons fired, but just the team/presenter scolded. It's not like the parent made an absolute statement. Rather they wanted to make what we call "a point".
- cooper12 9y agoMeh, saying "five people would have been fired!" is too hyperbolic for my tastes. If you click through to this other HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671047), you'll notice they don't use proper typographic emdashes (typewriter dashes `--` instead of `—`) and they have a black diamond where their asterism [0] or some other mark would have gone. However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing. In the same way, this is just a minor aspect of the WWDC presentation and isn't such a big deal necessitating people to have been fired for. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography)
- coldtea 9y ago>However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing. Only in this post's case, the quality of the typography WAS the topic under discussion.
- cooper12 9y agoMy point is that it's such a minor aspect of an otherwise edifying talk on photography. Certainly not something to demand firings for.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoSource, please, that pancreatic cancer is "curable".
- coldtea 9y agoTwo words: iPod socks.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, he would not have. He would happily have gotten on stage in front of this slide.
- coldtea 9y agoWhile he might not have cared for a slide from a technical presentation, he would not have "happily gotten on stage in front of this slide". This is all contexture of course, but even if he didn't know the nuances of minus vs dash etc, he wouldn't have left the extra space on the "e" and the misaligned equals signs to slip by.
- drfuchs 9y agoHaving tagged along with Knuth when Jobs invited him over for a personal demonstration of a pre-production Macintosh, I can attest that Jobs was knowledgable about, and cared strongly about, typography. And having been in the room when Jobs pitched the NeXT cube and printer to Frame, to convince us to do a port of FrameMaker, this was again clearly the case. So, no way he would have allowed this slide in any stage appearance of his. For further evidence, remember that what (once) saved Apple was the the Jobs-driven pair of Macintosh and Apple LaserWriter (the first PostScript printer). This combination sparked the desktop publishing revolution, as it allowed the masses to get typographically reasonable output semi-affordably. He made both of these devices happen, and good typography was a core goal.
- FabHK 9y agoYes. Jobs famously took a calligraphy class at Reed college, and mentioned frequently how it influenced him and e.g. the design of the Macintosh. http://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/ http://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-tribute-to-a-great-artist-steve-jobs-99783256/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-tribute-to-a-gr...
- Finnucane 9y agoYou worked for Frame? I used to love FrameMaker. To this day I haven't forgiven Adobe for killing the Mac version.
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoWith the "positive anymore," [O] you can say: "Anymore, nobody at Apple cares" [O] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore
- nxc18 9y agoI remember when I moved from the northeast and heard the positive anymore for the first time. I assumed the speaker was just somewhat dim, or maybe suffering from a minor stroke. It turns out this is an established construction if you venture away from the west and best coasts...
- mwfunk 9y agoWeird, I've never heard this either and I grew up in Michigan (not quite "positive anymore" territory according to Wikipedia, but certainly in the neighborhood). I believe it, I'm just always pleasantly surprised to learn about common things that everyone but me seems to have known about.
- JadeNB 9y ago> if you venture away from the west and best coasts... Typo, editorialising, or both?
- planb 9y agoWhoa, why is this downvoted so heavily? It's obviously a joke, and it's funny because Jobs really cared about typography, so he probably would have objected to this.
- nikdaheratik 9y agoExcept that Apple has been pushing better support for math in their office suite. It's just that the people handling these slides didn't use it.