Links & notes for this month

• • attacks of opportunity
    "a blog for game designers". Some great content on here.
    (tags: games blog indie design theory roleplaying)
  • Rails on the Run
    "Ruby, Rails & Other Experimentations by Matt Aimonetti" Interesting looking rails-focused blog.
    (tags: rubyonrails ruby rails software development programming blog)
  • Helping users retell experiences (Leapfroglog)
    "...supporting the retelling of experiences is important. After all if you’re offering a cool product or service, you want others to know about it. A passionate user is probably your best advocate." More great stuff from Kars.
    (tags: design ia interaction emergent storytelling story play)
  • AskTog:
    "Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding." Great Tog article on keyboard vs mouse interfaces.
    (tags: keyboard mouse usability interaction design)
  • The Ludologist » Blog Archive » When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning he found that he had been transformed in his bed into a little red robot
    Bizarre. Physical avatars for absent friends.
    (tags: robot presence community identity avatar)
  • Zen of Design»Blog Archive » Nine Ways To Misuse Bartle’s Four
    "I see both advocates and detractors often use Richard’s paper in ways that conflicts with my own experience. Here are some of the ways I would suggest reconsidering how you use this important paper." Need to reread the Bartle, wrt social software...
    (tags: games design play)
• • The NUJ and me: a considered response | Greenslade | Guardian Unlimited
    "I cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union I now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. The digital revolution is here and I am digital revolutionary." Roy Greenslade on leaving the NUJ.
    (tags: nuj journalism media digital online)
  • Elsewhere I'm: Relationship Update Stream
    "The Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur." Neat URL, too.
    (tags: api portable socialnetwork updates social feeds)
  • Ultimate GeekTool Setup - Pimp Your Desktop Part 2 at Keynote 2 Keynote
    A few handy GeekTool snippets I keep forgetting...
    (tags: apple mac osx geektool shell scripts)
• • FT.com / Arts & Weekend / House & Home - Back to the drawing board
    "Sketching is not only practical but essential. It is the quickest, most accessible way to find out if a space, a vista, a progression can work and also to communicate it to others."
    (tags: architecture design drawing sketching)
  • A Left-Handed Commencement Address
    "Why did we look up for blessing - instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon." Ursula Le Guin's 1983 commencement address at Mills College.
    (tags: ursulaleguin speech activism commencement)
• • Daring Fireball: Leopard
    "Making backup software that people can’t wait to try, and which, once activated, just automatically kicks in and does its thing on a regular schedule, is like making people want to go ahead and sign up for life insurance."
    (tags: apple osx leopard review commentary backup timemachine johngruber)
  • mudd up! » archive » DEFENDING THE PIG - OINK CROAKS
    "The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…" A thoughtful post by DJ Rupture about the death of Oink from an artist's perspective
    (tags: music oink p2p bittorrent filesharing copyright)
  • Presentation: Gaming the Web: Using the Structure of Games to Design Better Web Apps
    [this is good]. In fact, this is _very_ good and pretty much essential reading. I need to re-read; there were lots of lovely quotations that I wanted to jot down.
    (tags: games design play presentation interaction application)
• • Books for web people recommended by FatDUX
    "These are books that we like or that have influenced us. We hope you'll find our remarks useful." Very comprehensive - probably too much so - but some interesting titles I wasn't aware of amid the sea of more obvious choices.
    (tags: books usability informationarchitecture webdesign web design)
  • RubyRobot Theme for Textmate
    A nice, quite easy-on-the-eye theme for TextMate. Works equally well with Ruby, HTML, PHP (from what I've tested) and separates markup and templating languages visually pretty well.
    (tags: textmate theme development ide editor)
  • ollicle: Auto line-height: a jQuery plugin for flexible layouts
    "In a nutshell, this JavaScript adjusts the line-height of a container (such as a div) in proportion to it’s width, relative to the font size." Nicely implemented typographic jQuery plugin
    (tags: jquery javascript typography web design development)
• • Freeverse: Apps: Think
    Think helps you to selectively focus on one application at once. Not sure I'd use it all the time, but it works pretty well.
    (tags: productivity gtd osx application)
  • Mailplane - Home
    Like Pyro for Basecamp: a product-specific client as a browser.
    (tags: gmail osx software mac client)
  • GreaseKit - User Scripting for all WebKit applications
    "GreaseKit is successor of Creammonkey. This software adds Greasemonkey-like user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications." Looks good.
    (tags: greasemonkey safari webkit browser extension client osx)
  • Sup
    "Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email. It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact- list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more." It's a bit like Mutt-meets-Gmail.
    (tags: ruby email mail client imap)
  • Mailtrap
    Mailtrap helps you test ActionMailer: "Yesterday I mocked up the simplest, dumbest, Ruby SMTP server you can imagine. It speaks just enough SMTP to allow ActionMailer to make a connection and send it a message."
    (tags: rails ruby rubyonrails mail testing smtp email)
  • Fimoculous.com - misc - Gaming The System
    Rex Sorgatz on his essay in Wired, where he suggests that "gaming has become the prevailing narrative of our time."
    (tags: games play writing design culture society)
  • James Governor’s Monkchips » The Notes application, Do you Faceback yet?
    "Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people."
    (tags: facebook tags socialsoftware ia)
  • PictoChat: The Movie - Vox
    "A man with only a PictoChat session has to convince the authorities that a major international incident is unfolding. Spies, diplomats, terrorists, SAS-style rescues. And a DS in almost every shot." Any way you look at it: genius!
    (tags: ds pictochat pitch movie)
  • jwz - PSA: backups
    "Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly know better by now, I am here to tell you about backups. It's very simple."
    (tags: backup osx mac howto rsync)
  • Vitruvius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Vitruvius is most famous for asserting in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas - that is, it must be strong or durable, useful, and beautiful.
    (tags: architecture history vitruvius creativity making)
• • Mac SOAP Client
    "SOAP Client is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you access and debug WSDL & SOAP-based Web Services from the comfort of your desktop." Yuck, but might be useful.
    (tags: soap api app osx development software tools)
• • Pasta&Vinegar » Blog Archive » Pervasive gaming, laser-games and the "skatepark" model
    Nicolas Nova on how to integrate pervasive gaming into the environment a little better.
    (tags: pervasive play games environment design)
  • Interface Hall of Shame - Lotus Notes
    Forgotten how wonderful(ly dreadful) this collection of interaction cock-ups from Lotus Notes was. Bits of it are just painful.
    (tags: interaction design usability software ux lotus notes)
  • Lost Garden: Lessons about failure
    "If you want someone to fail, you want them to fail fast, before they spend a lot of money... [Miyamoto] would just say, 'Find the fun, and I'll be back in three months to take a look at what you have.'" Good advice.
    (tags: design failure fun play games)
  • Tasks bundle for TextMate – The Pug Automatic
    Bundle for TextMate that lets it edit (and use) the Taskpapers file format. Nice, simple. Might be effective, but there's always that problem of distribution... so I might still be in Backpack for time being...
    (tags: textmate bundle plugin gtd todo tools)
  • If you aren’t writing Matchers, you aren’t using RSpec » Grinding Rails
    "The default RSpec syntax is good, but it can’t be everything to everyone. If you’re not writing matchers, you’re missing out on the full potential of RSpec."
    (tags: rspec bdd rails ruby testing rubyonrails)
• • Better Living Through Bookmarklets [JavaScript & AJAX Tutorials]
    Simon does a nice big tutorial on writing bookmarklets. Which happens to be exactly what I need right now...
    (tags: bookmarklets javascript development programming web tutorial howto)
• • Bake A Cake, You Know I'm Coming
    "...I think the trick of Portal is that the AI NPC is really the player. The NPC addresses the PC in the same patronizing tone I address characters I control when they... slide off the platform I tried to land them on."
    (tags: leonardrichardson portal quotation ai games npc design)
  • ongoing · Portal
    "It’s amazing how deeply embedded in our collective consciousness is the notion of the lethally impersonal corporation with a dead marketing voice."
    (tags: portal games quotations marketing)
  • Subtraction: If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software
    "Lotus Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes itself as freakish software. This is a campaign that can only make sense in the ... world of enterprise soft
    (tags: enterprise software design advertising marketing product)