Strictly speaking, it was a two-story building behind the Texaco station:
> There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers".
I also enjoyed the reference to Cicero's Pizza:
> Burell and I [Andy] liked to have lunch at Cicero's Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant that was just across the street. They had a Defender video game, which we'd play while waiting for our order. We'd also go to Cicero's around 4pm almost every day for another round of Defender playing; Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (see Make a Mess, Clean it Up!).
Now I get to admit my age. When I worked at Tymshare in the 1970s, we often went there when it was still named Coppola's Pizza.
It had previously been part of the Pee Wee's Pizza chain founded by Albert "Pee Wee" Proietti and Nunzio "Spike" Spacone. The Cupertino location was sold to Carmen and Palma Coppola, who named it Coppola's. They in turn sold it to their mother and father-in-law, Angelina and Nunzio Cicero. (Yes, another Nunzio.)
Nunzio Cicero kept the Coppola's name out of respect to Angelina's family name, and only after she passed in 1973 he named it after himself.
Cicero's Pizza moved a couple of times after that and is still in business on Bollinger Road in Cupertino.
One fun thing about Coppola's/Cicero's is that they brought out the sliced pizza on a big round tray, but did not give out individual plates. Instead, you put a few napkins on the table and that was your plate!
As you can imagine, the tables got a fine layer of pizza grease over time.
Another Cupertino landmark around the corner from Coppola's/Cicero's was the R. Cali Brothers Mill on Stevens Creek. This was a huge animal feed mill and drive-through store. The front entrance sign said: “R. Cali & Bro. — Cupertino Feed Store, Ranch Spray Service, General Truck Hauling, Wood • Coal, Hay • Grain.”
You could drive your truck through to load it up with farm supplies, or take your car through as I did to get dog food.
While MP4s don't support transparency, both HEVC and VP9 do and their support is very good these days. I just recently used these formats to add a complex After Effects Animation to a website. It's a bit of extra work to encode two videos instead of just one but the result is great. I used this tutorial: https://rotato.app/blog/transparent-videos-for-the-web
I recently made the leap in the opposite direction: after being asked to pay 59€ to continue using the app I downloaded Tower 2. So far I'm not missing anything they introduced since then. I'm actually happy about the old app icon.
When the warning that the license is running out popped up some time ago I expected the app to still work. Just that I won't get any new updates (like Sketch). But no: it just stops working and demands more money. Pew....
Now I start to understand that licensing models like JetBrains' "perpetual fallback license" are really fair. Of course, the "buy once and get all updates" licenses which were available back in the day when apps such as Sublime Text were called "shareware" (actually Sublime Text still has a similar license: if you buy it, you get 3 years of updates) were even better, but hey, software developers need to eat too...
I share the love for hand-made svg. But it has its limits when graphics need complexity.
In those cases I use https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner-gui to clean up the svg file after export.
