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Charles Apple: The Visual Side of Journalism

 

‘Hardware ‘n’ software’ archive

Number of comments in parentheses

Feb. 3: Doonesbury takes on QR codes

Doonesbury took on QR codes Thursday: Doonesbury of course, is by Garry Trudeau. Find the strip’s online home here. Previous mentions of Doonesbury here in the blog: Sept. 17, 2008: “You’re being offered a buyout. You’re one of the lucky ones.” March 2, 2009: “About to scratch myself, stand by.” June 29, 2009: “No, thanks. I hear they’re dying.” Jan. [...]

Jan. 24: Washington Post graphic explains two types of touch screens

There’s a great technology graphic in today’s Washington Post by artist Alberto Cuadra and graphics reporter Bonnie Berkowitz. Click for a much larger look: Find an online version of the graphic here. Or download a PDF of the entire page — today’s page 1E — here. I don’t know Bonnie. She’s a 1987 graduate of the University of Kansas and [...]

Jan. 22: Newsroom staffers receive iPhones; a visuals manager reacts (1)

I swore to someone, a while back, that I’d never ever post one of those ubiquitous Hitler rant videos. I lied. This one nails a very real problem we have in newspapers. Plus, it’s funny as shit. Enjoy: Thanks to David Sheets of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for tweeting about this today.

Jan. 13: How a newspaper was published and printed in 1970 (3)

The paper, in this case, happened to be the San Jose Mercury News. The film is about 10 minutes long. Enjoy: This film was produced by an outfit called Carroll Films and posted by the Internet Archive. The Atlantic reposted the video today. Thanks to former Merc staffer Martin Gee — now with the Boston Globe — for tweeting about [...]

Jan. 9: A little TOO much information, perhaps, about Twitter users (1)

Gavin Sheridan, innovation director of Storiful, blogs today about his attempts to put geocoded Twitter info to use in finding patterns that could be turned into stories. He ran searches on Twitter and fed the results into Datasift. What you’re seeing in the map below are 135,000 tweets over this past weekend from users who mentioned GOP candidates by name. [...]

Dec. 22, 2011: Cool idea: Sunday Times publishing iPad-only edition on Christmas Day

In 1912, writes Arif Durrani of UK Media Week, the Sunday Times of London started a tradition of not publishing on Christmas Day. The idea, of course: To give employees the day off. (A secondary benefit, perhaps: We’ve found, over the years, that single-copy sales pretty much suck on holidays. But let’s not go there right now.) The Times of [...]

Dec. 15, 2011: AP launches software ‘automates the proofing process for AP style’ (4)

From a press release by the Associated Press: The Associated Press today announced the launch of software technology that automates the proofing process for AP style. The new plug-in software, AP StyleGuard, powered by Equiom Linguistic Labs Inc., is similar in functionality to Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar proofing tools and intuitively checks Word documents for AP Stylebook’s fundamental spelling, [...]

Dec. 1, 2011: Reinvesting in journalism technology: A novel idea? (2)

A while back, I visited a newspaper that told me it was all hot and bothered about the iPad. iPad this. iPad that. The paper wanted to be the place to go for iPad content. So I went back to the graphics department and found two things. Much of the work going on there was in Flash. And… The folks [...]

Nov. 30, 2011: Technology alert: Are you SERIOUS? (1)

Mobile devices? iPads? They’re so earlier this year. The new chic: The Little Printer by Berg. Check out the video. And keep an eye out for the news application in this. Believe me, you’ll notice it when it comes ’round… Yeah: Basically, a little fax machine. Sort of. But tiny. Real tiny. This is either genius or a very, very [...]

Nov. 18, 2011: Siri, help me conduct an argument over the phone (1)

It was just a matter of time before we saw this, right? Warning: Some of the language might not be right for your workplace. Despite it being funny as hell. Thanks to Yuri Victor for tweeting this today.

Nov. 9, 2011: Flash finally dies 19 months after it was mortally wounded by Apple

Jack Shafer of Reuters said it best, perhaps, today via Twitter: [Steve] Jobs wins one from the grave. Adobe Systems announced today it was abandoning development of a Flash player for mobile devices. This comes after announcing Tuesday the company will lay off up to 750 employees.     Flash runs on neither Apple’s iPhone nor iPad, thanks to decisions [...]

Oct. 24, 2011: Score one for ‘responsive’ web design

Josh Clark — web developer, designer and author of the books iWork ’09: The Missing Manual, Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps and Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders — apparently had some time on his hands today. Curious to see just how responsive this new trend in “responsive” HTML5 web design can be, he decided to pull up [...]

Oct. 5, 2011: The world is just a bit less brilliant tonight (2)

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs Apple Computer Go here [...]

Oct. 3, 2011: Pretty sweet digs for a company that’s laying off employees left and right

The Star-Telegram of Fort Worth began moving into a brand-new newsroom yesterday. Sparkling. Clean. Cutting-edge technology. Here’s a quick tour of the centerpiece: A nice breaking news-slash-online center, conducted by executive editor Jim Witt. Looks a lot like the bridge of the USS Enterprise from the new Star Trek movie, a couple of years back. Just add lens flare. The [...]

Sept. 12, 2011: New video game lets you be a TV war correspondent

A new video game called WARCO: The News Game allows you to experience war. But not from the viewpoint of a shoot-’em-up fantasy soldier. Rather, from the point-of-view of a TV news correspondant. I’m not a gamer. But this looks like something I might enjoy. The write-up, as presented by Australian-based Defiant Development: WARCO lets players shoot and record what [...]

July 24, 2011: Now available for your Web browser: A Rupert Murdoch alert

Now available for Firefox and Chrome: An add-on that will give you a warning whenever you visit a web site owned or controlled by Rupert Murdoch, News Corp., Fox News or so on. I’ve not downloaded the filter, nor do I plan to. But here’s what it reportedly looks like in action. Click for a readable version. This is only [...]

June 28, 2011: An endorsement of Apple’s new Final Cut Pro version X

The folks who work on Conan O’Brien‘s new TV show have happily endorsed the new version of Final Cut Pro. Sort of. Enjoy.

June 21, 2011: Bangor (Maine) Daily News builds open-source publishing system (1)

MediaBistro‘s Lauren Rabaino reports: A former colleague of mine, William Davis, understands what a “web first” workflow is, and has made it happen through software at his newspaper in Maine. The Bangor Daily News announced this week that it completed its full transition to open source blogging software, WordPress. And get this: The workflow integrates seamlessly with InDesign, meaning the [...]

June 9, 2011: All that money you’ve spent on Apple products? Here’s what it’s going to buy… (1)

Ailing Apple CEO Steve Jobs came out of his medical leave Monday to help make the announcements for all the cool new operating system and cloud storage solutions Apple is introducing. You heard about that, of course. What you might not have heard about: Jobs then took another break from his break Tuesday to pitch a design for a new [...]

May 20, 2011: As if we didn’t have enough ethical issues already: ‘RoboPhotoshopping’ (5)

This one’s a bit complicated. I’ll sum it up as briefly as I can here. But I urge you to head over to Paul Lukas‘ Uni Watch blog to read the long version. Yesterday, there was a story about upcoming intra-league play posted on a web page administered by Major League Baseball. But you see that video embedded there? There’s [...]

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