Updating iPhone apps within iTunes has always felt slightly awkward. Maybe it’s the window placement of the various items you need to click to initiate the update:

1. In the top-left corner of the window, click the badged Applications item in the sidebar.

2. In the bottom-right corner of the window, click 2 Updates Available.

3. In the top-right corner of the window, click Download All Free Updates.

4. In the middle-left of the window, click the badged Downloads item in the sidebar.

Jonah Lehrer reports in the Boston Globe on a surprisingly reliable trait of success:

In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new – “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked – the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going. — The truth about grit, boston.com, August 2, 2009

The article says that people with great focus are often great achievers. But what the article doesn’t mention is that, when pursuing a goal for which their own skills are inadequate, great achievers often call upon others and in turn help them to become great achievers as well, one person of great focus in turn focusing the efforts of others towards a goal whose ambition lies beyond any of them separately.

Turns out that the new section on Pixar’s website about the food in Ratatouille is an excerpt from Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen, a 58-page paper from Siggraph 2007 whose four chapters cover the sets, shading, lighting and effects used to make the food in Ratatouille look so appealing.

Chapter One describes how, in order to make the food look delicious, the set designers had to figure out to how make it sag naturally:

…computer models built by hand or by code tend to have a rigid posed look. They lacked a “found in nature” feel to them, which one might describe as weight or contact or sag or rest. Our hand sculpted models tended to not adequately show that the soft objects had a weight to them, causing them to sag and droop and deform according to their surroundings. Piles of food tended to not look natural. They looked as if someone had carefully stacked them together (which was true!) More importantly they didn’t actually look like soft objects were pushing against each other. In the end we had hard plastic toys carefully stacked together and not a crate of soft vegetables randomly thrown in. — Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen , pixar.com

They refined their solution by simulating how sacks of potatoes lie against each other and by how fruits and vegetables pile naturally in a container, then applied what they’d learned to, among other things, a poached scallop dish with a dollop of cavier on top:

The caviar dollop was a new problem. There is an overall shape that feels like it has weight and is resting on top of the scallop. In turn the dollop is made up of a multitude of individual eggs, that each needed to feel as if they were truly squeezed in together.

Consider the level of detail here: in a feature-length film running 111 minutes, in one of many scenes with food on plates, one plate containing scallops has cavier on top. Making the individual eggs in that cavier lie naturally posed a new technical problem interesting enough to include in a technical paper.

Pixar is an amazing group of artists. If good cooking starts with good ingredients, good animation about cooking surely starts with passionate attention to detail like this.