ExpanDrive

You may have notice from out sidebar that we’ve played a little bit of Flight Control, a simple but extremely addictive iPhone game. If you think Flight Control is exciting, then this FAA simulation of real events at Charlotte Douglas International Airport will probably get your heart racing.

I’ll set it up for you a bit, because the radio chatter can be hard to follow if you’re not used to listening to it. The blue blip labeled JIA390 is a regional jet with 46 people on board. It’s leaving the commercial airport and planning on taking off from the end of runway 18L, which is the left end up the upper horizontal runway. On the radio they’ll refer to this aircraft as “Blue Streak 390”.

The yellow blip labeled N409DR is a single engine turbo prop with 3 people on board. It’s leaving from the civil aviation part of the airport, and it’s told to expect to take off from the middle of runway 18L, by means of taxiway A (which is pronounced “Alpha”). This aircraft has the radio call sign is 9DR (pronounced “Nine Delta Romeo”).

The that after the incident:

ASDE-X is a radar and transponder system that sounds an alarm in the control tower if it thinks there’s a “runway conflict”.

Werner Herzog is the director of Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and many other films.

Some lawyer friends of mine just pointed me towards a website redesign that just went live for the law firm Morrison & Foerster. If you do nothing else today, please go to their front page and click on “Imagination”. Then write me an email and tell me what these guys were thinking.

There is a detailed review at Above the Law. I actually like the graphic design more than wood-panels-and-old-money look of most law firms. But the site’s content. Oh man. Here’s a few of my favorites:

• The “Imagination” page.
• A page of optical illusions mislabeled as “puzzles”, and presented with out solution or explanation.
• An integrated bookmarking / PDF export system called “MoFolder” (incase you want to save an optical illusion).
• A directory directory of lawyers searchable by “law school”.
Search for lawyers by law school.
• A “Commitment” page that claims they’re so committed that they don’t even have to explain it.

Maybe there’s a killer app on the way, something on the order of VisiCalc for the Apple II, but as far as I can tell, this’ll be the biggest dud since the G4 Cube.

–Cosmo on the iPad. Saved for posterity.

Apple’s web browser, Safari, has a feature euphemistically named “Private Browsing…” When enabled, private browsing makes it so that the sites you visit aren’t stored in the browsers history, and cookies from those sites are deleted when “Private Browsing…” is turned off. In short, there’s no record left on your computer of what you’ve done on the web when “Private Browsing…” was enabled. If used judiciously you can be confident when guests borrow your computer and type www.you into the browser location bar, Safari will always suggest the completion tube.com and never porn.com.

In light of the recent news with Tiger Woods, I wonder if there might be demand for a similar feature on the iPhone. Users could, in a password protected configuration panel, flag certain contacts with a special setting. Incoming, outgoing, and missed calls for these contacts would simply not be saved, and text messages would be deleted automatically after they’ve been read. A contact with this setting would look like any other contact that you never called or heard from. Apple could call the feature “Private Calling…”, or maybe they could come up with a better name.

Also, don’t miss the making of.

Photos of a very Martian Sydney at the Big Picture.

According to Yahoo, “AT&T” [sic] is about to release a “MicroCell”. You plug it into your internet connection, and it broadcasts a short range 3G signal that a few phones can use for voice and internet. Basically a wireless router for cell phones.

I’m having a little trouble wrapping my head around it. On the one hand, you can fix the dead spot in your basement apartment or get an iPhone in Vermont. That’s really cool. On the other hand, you’re going use your own internet connection to augment AT&T’s shitty network, and you’re going to pay AT&T for the privilege?

You know what would be great? If you could get one without the AT&T. I mean, if the call is going from your phone to your MicroCell and then over your internet, then what is AT&T really bringing to the program?

A Typophile user named miha has done some amazing pixel art that exploits subpixel antialiasing. In his first post he reworked the YouTube favicon from a pink mess into something that looks sharp and legible.

His second post debuts a draft of a completely legible typeface with an x-height of 3 pixels. The picture above (taken from miha’s comment on the post) shows the word “ipsum dolor” at 16× magnification. The original size text, so small you might not notice it, is in the lower right corner.

Subpixel antialiasing is some magic stuff. As he said in his YouTube post “If you want to be suprised: white text on red is not really white, it is purple & yellow! There is no spoon.” I’d love to see a 9× mockup of what it looks like after antialiasing is applied.

(Mac users can open Digital ColorMeter, in Applications -> Utilities, for a quick way to zoom in on the pixel art.)