[MyAppleMenu] Jun 14, 2014

[applesurf at myapplemenu.com]

MyAppleMenu
<http://www.myapplemenu.com/>
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*** glFlush(); Goto Metal; ***
<http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/447>
Guy English, Kickingbear

> Metal treats the GPU as what it has grown up to be: a massively parallel computation device which is best served with giant batches of data and a coherent and concise command stream.



*** A Dark Room: The Best-selling Game That No One Can Explain ***
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/06/a-dark-room-the-best-selling-game-that-no-one-can-explain.html>
Michael Thomsen, New Yorker

> A Dark Room starts with a few lines of text on a black screen: “the fire is dead. the room is cold. awake. head throbbing. vision blurry.” A bright-blue line cuts across the center of the screen, just below the words “stoke fire.” You press the words and suddenly the screen turns white. More text arrives: a ragged stranger has stumbled through the door. You keep stoking the fire, the thin blue bar disappearing and then slowly filling itself out again each time to signal when you’ll be able to press the “stoke fire” button again.
> What follows is a strange hybrid, part mystery story and part smartphone productivity software, an app that inexplicably rocketed to the most-downloaded spot in the App Store’s games section in April and stayed there throughout the month. A product of a collaboration between two men who worked together without ever having met in person, the game evokes the simplest text-based computer games of the nineteen-seventies while stimulating a very modern impulse to constantly check and recheck one’s phone. It’s like a puzzle composed of deconstructed to-do lists.



*** The Strange 1960S Gym-Class Anthem In Apple’s New iPhone Commercial ***
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/06/13/chicken_fat_song_apple_iphone_5s_commercial_uses_kennedy_era_exercise_anthem.html>
Ben Yagoda, Slate

> “Kennedy told us that he liked the song,” the aide, Dick Snyder, said, “but every time he heard it he thought of ‘chicken shit,’ and he wondered if maybe we shouldn’t change the title. We said we’d talk to Willson about it, but we never did.”



*** Reeder 2 For Mac Review: Consume RSS With Speed, Style ***
<http://www.macworld.com/article/2361469/reeder-2-for-mac-review-consume-rss-with-speed-style.html#tk.rss_all>
Dan Moren, Macworld

> But while it may not have every feature under the sun, it does a good job of streamlining the RSS experience—I don’t constantly feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content available.



*** How Well Do Tech Companies Protect Your Data From Snooping? ***
<http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/12/320997037/how-well-do-tech-companies-protect-your-data-from-snooping>
Steve Henn, NPR

> Apple encrypts iMessage from end to end. It recently announced it is taking steps to make it more difficult to track its users' identity on Wi-Fi networks. Apple encrypts e-mail from its customers to iCloud. However, Apple is one of the few global email providers based in the U.S. that is not encrypting any of its customers' email in transit between providers. After we published, the company told us this would soon change.



*** Only Apple ***
<http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple>
John Gruber, Daring Fireball

> New Apple didn’t need a reset. New Apple needed to grow up. To stop behaving like an insular underdog on the margins and start acting like the industry leader and cultural force it so clearly has become.



MyAppleMenu Reader
<http://www.myapplemenu.com/reader/>
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*** Isolation Unit: 'All The Birds, Singing,' By Evie Wyld ***
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/books/review/all-the-birds-singing-by-evie-wyld.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0>
Maile Meloy, New York Times

> The novel is set in rough, remote places, but the growing dread and terror reminded me of Daphne du ­Maurier, who knew a thing or two about birds. Like du Maurier, Wyld is interested in the haunting power of the past and the menace of the half-seen.



*** A Nice Cup Of Tea ***
<http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm>
George Orwell

> When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden.



*** Vanity Fair's Donna Tartt Piece Reduces All Literary Criticism To Childish Squabbling ***
<http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118133/vanity-fairs-donna-tartt-essay-evgenia-peretz-criticism>
Evan Hughes, New Republic

> What makes Peretz’s article worth discussing is its near-perfect embodiment of a widespread and pernicious attitude: She consistently treats other people’s views as self-evidently the product of bad faith.



SushiReader
<http://www.myapplemenu.com/sushireader/>
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