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“a blog for game designers”. Some great content on here.
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“Ruby, Rails & Other Experimentations by Matt Aimonetti” Interesting looking rails-focused blog.
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“…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.
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“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.
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Bizarre. Physical avatars for absent friends.
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“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…
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“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.
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“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.
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A few handy GeekTool snippets I keep forgetting…
Rattling
30 October 2007
The other night, Matt was showing me his newly unlocked iPod Touch. I was playing with the shell application – just poking around, running top, etc – and rotated the iPod onto its side, just to see if the screen-rotation stuff worked in the third-party application.
After a while, Matt picked up what I was doing – as I poked around, when I found an app that felt like it should have a horizontal view, I would tip the iPod over, wait a second, and then tip it back.
It reminds me of a running joke my parents had with me ever since I was little. I used to pick up Christmas presents and shake them, and if they rattled, I’d assume that they were Lego (Lego, at the time, being the only kind of present I got that rattled). Ever since, we’ve always joked that rattling presents are Lego. And just like I rattled presents to see if they had the potential to be Lego, so you “rattle” the iPod to see if an application has the potential to be rotated.
You don’t necessarily need a visual signpost (an icon or alert) that such functionality is available; you just rotate the device, wait a second, and then flip it back. As a user, you’re interrogating the user to see if that particular interaction is possible. Is that good design? In some kinds of interaction, I don’t think so; you don’t want to poke every button or crawl through every menu just to find out what is or isn’t possible.
With the iPod/iPhone, though, we’re not crawling menus; we’re just interrogating the device to see if it supports a single kind of interaction. We only want a true or false back from it. Couple that boolean response with the simplicity of the accelerometer interface, and these “rattling” interactions come at a much lower cost.
I like rattling as a metaphor for this kind of interaction; it’s the equivalent of responds_to? in Ruby, I guess. What are other good examples of rattling-type interactions I’m missing? And how good are the implementations of it in software or on the web?
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“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.”
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“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.
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“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.”
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“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
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[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.
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“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.
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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.
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“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
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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.
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Like Pyro for Basecamp: a product-specific client as a browser.
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“GreaseKit is successor of Creammonkey. This software adds Greasemonkey-like user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications.” Looks good.
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“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.
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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.”
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Rex Sorgatz on his essay in Wired, where he suggests that “gaming has become the prevailing narrative of our time.”
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“Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people.”
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“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!
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“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.”
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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.
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“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.
Short notice: London Gamer Geeks pub quiz
24 October 2007
As part of the London Games Festival Fringe (and yes, the “Fringe” is important), the London Gamer Geeks are running a pub quiz in their monthly meeting slot.
Given that James, Dan and my good self are your hosts for the evening, this blogpost is my short notice announcement for the event. Anyone’s welcome – the quiz itself kicks off at half seven, but we’ll be at the pub from about half six. Early arrival strongly recommended if you want a table.
Details are at upcoming, if you’re interested. And, as if you needed any more reasons to attend… let it be known that there will be cake.
Here’s hoping for a good turn-out!
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Nicolas Nova on how to integrate pervasive gaming into the environment a little better.
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Forgotten how wonderful(ly dreadful) this collection of interaction cock-ups from Lotus Notes was. Bits of it are just painful.
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“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.
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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…
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“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.”