"Prototypes for Mac turns your flat mockup images into tappable and sharable prototypes that run on iPhone or iPod touch." Nice.

"My dream cloud interface is not about booting virtual machines and monitoring jobs, but about spending money so my job finishes quicker. The cloud should let me launch some code, and get it chugging along in the background. Then later, I would like to spend a certain amount of money, and let reverse auction magic decide how much more CPU & RAM that money buys. This should feel like bidding for AdWords on Google. So where I might use the Unix command “nice” to prioritize a job, I could call “expensiveNice” on a PID to get that job more CPU or RAM. Virtual machines are hip this week, but applications & jobs are still the more natural way to think about computing tasks." Yes, this. And: lots of people _think_ the cloud works like this, but it really doesn't, yet. Parallelization/adding computing power is more practical, but it's not been made easy like a bunch of other things have (so far).

Now that Net Yaroze has closed its doors, Edge catch up with some former Yaroze developers; they have some interesting things to say on the state of games education in particular.

"[Our heroine's] name is Marta Louise Velasquez, and she’s quite possibly the most unpleasant female lead character in the history of gaming. She’s also what makes TD2192 worth remembering." Indeed, I have many. She did not lead a happy life, I'll give Richard that.

"Critical thinking is the key to success!" Professor Layton is on Twitter. Officially. This is good.

why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment – even discussion – we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience." Dan Taylor explains Shownar from the BBC's perspective

"Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months. We’ll learn a lot having it in the public eye, and I hope to see it as a key part of discovery and conversation scattered across BBC Online one day." Matt talks about Shownar on Pulse Laser.

"Shownar tracks the online buzz around BBC shows. It's an experimental prototype and we want your feedback." What I've been working on in the first three months at Schulze & Webb, and is now live. Exciting!

"there's a new form of graffiti in town, and it's extremely pleasant. so pleasant that i can't imagine even the harshest critics of regular graffiti getting wound up. i mean, who in their right mind would come face to face with a sweater-wearing tree and do anything but smile?"

"…there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness." Lovely idea. Wouldn't mind trying this at some point.

"There are many reasons one might want to book a commerical space flight, but fleeing Earth just to reclaim rights on a crappy thrash metal midi track you made in Guitar Hero: World Tour when you were 16 and had way too much free time is never going to be one of them." EULA fail.

It's something a bit like the first 2-3 minutes of Mirror's Edge. But in LittleBigPlanet. People are great.

"I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user […], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.

"There’s a lot of great technology imagery… Here’s a sampling of stills depicting the awesomeness:" Beautiful. (If I had to have a favourite film, it would still be The Conversation).

"Normally, one of the first things that admin will do when they set up their blog is to go and remove the Hello world! post. But for this blog, we’ve decided to keep it. The feeling a coder has when they see “Hello world!” for the first time on the tool or system they’re creating is a great feeling. You’ve just given birth to something. It’s still young, fragile, and only a hint of what it someday will be. But it’s alive. Something you’ve made with your own two hands is starting to breath. It has begun."

"Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks." That's interesting.

"Marketing is a strategic function about delivering customers what they want. It isn’t a jazz hands and rubber chicken and t-shirts. It is the heart of successful companies…"

A few notes on Flickr's queueing systems.

Cultured Code do a large behind-the-scenes look at how they designed their Things iPhone UI. Lots of detail, lots of working shown. Even if you don't agree with the choices they made, it's excellent to see somebody sharing at this level of detail.

"The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis…" Awesome.

"OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks."

"Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner." Interesting-looking prototyping/wireframing tool.

"The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational." Sounds fantastic.

"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body?" Lovely infographic, ever-so mildly NSFW. Hint: hip-hop talks a lot about bottom.