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"You know the [dark days] when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web war born, back before that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked."
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"…doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly."
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Ooh - a decent search tool for cc'd Flickr images.
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"This would be something different though potentially - not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art."
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"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.
01
October
2008
October
2008
Links
Tagged as:
boom, business, bust, commission, communitymanagement, creativecommons, creativity, design, downturn, flickr, gtd, manufacture, marketing, mattjones, moderation, photographs, photos, planning, products, projectmanagement, projects, purchase, quality, schulzeandwebb, search, socialsoftware, speed, startup, strategy, web.
02
November
2006
November
2006
photography
Tagged as:
barcelona, flickr, me, photography, photos.
Barcleona, now online
Montserrat
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.
So I finally finished processing all my photographs from Barcelona (or, at least, the 1/4 good enough to make it online). They’re available in this photoset at Flickr. Really pleased with many of these, even though they’re not at all popular on Flickr itself. Probably something to do with my inability to join a bazillion groups.
Now, onto the next set of photographs from two months ago that need uploading…
More photos from Etech
Julian Bleecker (landscape)
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.
I’m slowly getting my pictures from ETech online; the last batch left will be of my time in San Diego after the conference. These ones are slightly better than the ones I uploaded first - in part, because I’ve processed them a bit more. This is one of my favourites - of Julian Bleecker - from the afternoon where we took break on the pool deck. Fun.
09
February
2006
February
2006
design
Tagged as:
futureofwebapps, personal, photos, summit.
Web apps - the wrap-up
Well, that was pretty great. Tom’s talk was pretty staggering - lots of ideas I’ve been following over the past year or two all coalescing together into one big lump. Very excited by that; really need to sit down and think it over when I’ve got some space. Cal, Joshua, and Ryan were all also excellent; Ryan’s talk especially, given its real-world, raw-data approach. Lots to think about.
I pointed out on the (slightly sarcastic) IRC back channel that it’s not necessarily the individual facts coming out that mattered - many people knew them already (like “don’t forget to cache”, etc) - but the context, the stories, the examples that wrap around them. Context is so important, and the summit put masses into context in a really exciting way. Shame there wasn’t more networking, but I had a good night afterwards, and it was nice to see a few old familiar faces, like Meg and Cal again, as well as meeting Rod for the first time.
My photos from the event are now online. Pretty pleased with the way they came out, given how far I was away from the stage, and how (relatively) slow my lens was.
Links & notes for this month
- "On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing." Some good writing from Steven Poole on games and chores.
- "My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications." Some really good insight, presented in a very clear manner. DanC is, as usual, on fire. Need to digest this slowly, but it certainly overlaps with a lot of my thinking.
- "...the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world -- a fascinating prospect." This captures a lot of the great things about FC2 well, and in an even-handed manner. The lack of handholding is jarring, but the possibilities it opens up are wonderful. For a tense, hectic, genre, it's interesting to see an entry that's by turns soothing and surreal, amidst the malaria, bushfires, and wholesale slaughter.
- Just like magic. Lovely.
- Spot-on, as you'd expect.
- "I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is - probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with." Blimey.
- "Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
- "Losing is an opportunity that individuals deserve, and allowing the state to sweep in and save you from the consequences of your own actions robs you of a certain kind of agency." Fantastic article about the difference between win/lose and quit/finish. Lots of good stuff in here - a must-read.
- "An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
- "Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
- A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available - particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
- "A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
- "Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar...'" Awesome.
- "Developing this site was very different from any other project I’ve worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow celluar connections. Here are a few of the lessons we learned (sometimes painfully) while developing this site." Really excellent article from code.flickr on building their new mobile/iPhone site.
- Jolly good (and nasty) stick-figure assasination game; involves a lot of patience, but nicely executed.
- "Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."
- Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
- "We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
- "This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop..." Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
- "This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
- "# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
- Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
- "Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. ... [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
- Jordan Mechner is serialising - and backdating - his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
- "In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
- "The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
- "We need a National Videogame Archive. Luckily, we've just started one. We're going to preserve videogames for the nation. For better or worse. Forever. It's going to be brilliant..." Oh, that it is. Jonathan Smith on *every single bloody thing* that's perfect about Micro Machines 2 on the Mega Drive is a highlight so far.
- Commander Keen on the DS. Heck yes. One of the first games I spent a *lot* of time playing.
- "DS brut is an open source hardware prototyping platform for the Nintendo DS, developed by and for electronics enthusiasts, artists and game developers. By connecting the Nintendo DS to the outer world, the game console can be easily hooked up to a variety of sensors (e.g. GPS receivers) and can itself control all different kinds of actuators, servo motors and others."
- "The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."
- "The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."
- "How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.
- "The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator."
- "Each issue of this unique title is 3,840 half-inch-square panels of nothing but dots talking to each other. The concept is that everyone is drawn so far away that all you can see is a dot. And the dots do stuff. Like smack each other, or give birth, or die. It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing."
- Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
- Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
- Jaw well and truly on the floor.
- "Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
- "An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
- Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine - the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.
- Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?
- "Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!
- "So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.
- "The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.
- This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.
- "And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
- "The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."
- "Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."
- Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).
- "Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.