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Tigers Jaw – “Guardian”

Tigers Jaw
Jason Tate

Tigers Jaw will release their new album, spin, on May 19th via Black Cement Records. The album was produced by Will Yip and they’ve released the first single “Guardian” via NPR.

When bands fall apart, sometimes they grow back through the broken pieces like ivy through cobblestone. Tigers Jaw — now all up-capped — went through the pains of a breakup (that wasn’t quite a breakup), losing three members who stayed through the recording of 2014’s mellow-yet-dramatic Charmer. It was a loss, but also a signal, turning the band from pop-punks into thoughtful songwriters mining the sorrows of pop, particularly the thematic and sonic tumult of Fleetwood Mac.

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Paramore’s New Album Is Finished

Jason Tate

Zach Farro of HalfNoise talked a little about the new Paramore album in a recent interview:

It’s all finished. We’re just figuring out the logistics of when to release it and everything. With HalfNoise it’s just me and a couple of managers, and we work pretty closely, but Paramore is a worldwide known band. There’s a lot of chefs in the kitchen, and figuring all that stuff out… the goal is definitely to release it this year, but I can’t really touch base and even if we had a set day we were telling people, things change so much. But the record is finished.

How Instagram Changed — Before It Had To

Instagram
Jason Tate

Harry McCracken, writing for Fast Company:

“A big change happened when we decided to go non-square,” says Systrom, who, with his close-cropped beard, chocolate-colored quilted blazer, and wooden water bottle, has a sense of style befitting the cocreator of a tool for sharing beautiful photography. The decision not only gave the company more confidence to change its app, but also inspired it to go much further in evolving the service. Systrom realized that if the company waited until there were signs that the app was in dire need of revamping, it would likely be too late.

Guetzli: A New JPEG Encoder From Google

Google
Jason Tate

Google Research Europe:

At Google, we care about giving users the best possible online experience, both through our own services and products and by contributing new tools and industry standards for use by the online community. That’s why we’re excited to announce Guetzli, a new open source algorithm that creates high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller than currently available methods, enabling webmasters to create webpages that can load faster and use even less data.

Guetzli [guɛtsli] — cookie in Swiss German — is a JPEG encoder for digital images and web graphics that can enable faster online experiences by producing smaller JPEG files while still maintaining compatibility with existing browsers, image processing applications and the JPEG standard. […]

And while Guetzli produces smaller image file sizes without sacrificing quality, we additionally found that in experiments where compressed image file sizes are kept constant that human raters consistently preferred the images Guetzli produced over libjpeg images, even when the libjpeg files were the same size or even slightly larger. We think this makes the slower compression a worthy tradeoff.

Impressive.

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