PlasmaBlog

Highly-anticipated video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV has received a string of near-perfect reviews ahead of its worldwide release on Tuesday. The game is expected to break records for the fastest-selling game of all time and many shops are opening their doors at midnight for gamers. But I suspect many of those people won’t remember the first GTA…

Behold. The first Grand Theft Auto.

Just a quick shameless plug for the latest of my wallpapers to be added to PlasmaDesign.co.uk. ‘Turbulence’ is available to all visitors in widescreen and regular 4:3 ratio resolutions up to 2560×1600 pixels. The original version of this photo was a shot of the water fountain outside the Grand Hyatt in downtown San Francisco at night. The final version has been subjected to a considerable number of adjustments using Photoshop CS3.

Get it here.

You may have come here looking for an answer to the question above. If so, sorry. I wish I knew. How can a company as large and well respected as Adobe justify releasing a software updater that uses 100% of CPU resources from the minute it launches until the moment it quits? Indeed, that question can be added to other Adobe-related gripes, like why Illustrator takes forever to load even on a quad core Mac Pro? Or why my Version Cue database slows Bridge to a crawl if there are more than 100 projects? Or why using Dreamweaver CS3 on a Mac is akin to wading through treacle. For the love of God, Adobe. If you are going to charge thousands of dollars for your software, spend some of that revenue on ironing out it’s countless bugs because one day there might be a viable alternative. And if that happens you can kiss goodbye to my cash.

Typography.com published a great comparison between the newly designed currencies of the UK and US. Both were designed using very different approaches…

“Above, the new face of British currency, announced by the Royal Mint. The striking new designs, selected from an open competition that attracted four thousand entries, are the work of a 26-year old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. They are Mr. Dent’s first foray into currency design.

Below, the new five dollar bill, introduced last month by the United States Department of the Treasury. The new design, which features a big purple Helvetica five, is the work of a 147-year-old government agency called the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It employs 2,500 people, and has an annual budget of $525,000,000.”

Yet more proof that ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’.

Have you time for a good read? Then try the new Wired article on ‘How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong‘.

“It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications — kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.”

As the owner of a graphic design agency, I see the negative impact of ‘design by committee’ on a frequent basis. It is rarely pretty.

The northern lights must be one of the most beautiful natural phenomenon known to man, yet they are notoriously difficult to capture on film. However, Sigurdur H. Stefnisson seems to have perfected the art. These stunning photos of were all taken in Iceland over the last 20 years.

If you are like me and you feel compelled to tinker under the hood of Mac OS X then you may find the latest Alcor (the genius behind Quicksilver) project interesting. ‘Secrets 1.0′ is a system preference pane that provides GUI access to a multitude of hidden user defaults for both Mac OS X itself, Apple software and third party apps.

Secrets 1.0 is an open source project, compatible with Leopard only. Every time the preference pane is accessed it pulls the entire list of user defaults from http://secrets.textdriven.com/. New entries are being added to the site by its users on a minute by minute basis so the list of changes you can make to your Mac using the ‘Secrets’ preference pane will grow and grow over time.

Once again, another fascinating project by the creator of Quicksilver, and one that is sure to have the developers of more conventional system tweaking apps like Tinkertool, Onyx and Cocktail looking over their shoulders.

Download the software and find out more about Secrets here.

A few years back when my kids had less attitude and hadn’t perfected the art of sarcasm they frequently subjected me to many hours of Tellytubbies. My personal favorite was Noo-Noo, but that’s besides the point.

I came across this article on GoogleSightseeing.com; a great Web site that publishes the co-ordinates of points of interest on Google Earth. I always thought that The Teletubbies was filmed in a BBC studio somewhere but apparently not!

View Teletubby Land from space here.

One of the highlights of Macworld 2008 for me was attending Merlin Mann’s presentation on ‘Time & Attention‘. The session was originally labelled ‘Living With Data’ so many attendees were surprised not to be learning about backing up their files etc. It is a testament to Merlin’s presentation skills and his obvious passion for the subject that no-one left halfway through the misleadingly billed session. And I spoke to many people afterwards who were fascinated and downright inspired by Merlins talk. As was I.

The audio and slides for Merlins ‘Time & Attention’ presentation can be watched online at 43folders.com

Plowing through my RSS feeds this morning I can across this 360 degree panorama of a brand new Airbus A380 cockpit. Don’t forget to use the zoom button to check out what all of those buttons and VDU’s do. And is that hatch behind the copilots seat really stuck down with red gaffer tape?

Check it out here.