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Robots made out of sans-serif fonts. Squee!
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Not quite sure what point Poynor’s trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples – architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I’m uncomfortable with in this.
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“When I first learned this at RubyConf I thought this was mind-blowing. I have since never used it.”
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“Click-draggable. Range-makeable. A better calendar.” No IE6 support, but it’s not half bad so far.
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“…if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about making money. What you’ve got is a description of a charity.”
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“Syncopation from Sonzea provides a hands-free solution to keep your iTunes® music collection synchronized across multiple computers running Mac OS X.” And this is what might make a Squeezebox practical chez nous.
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“The only price comparison website worth drinking to as well as the only travel and short-break holiday guide you really need.”
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“Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws”
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“You never see anyone with a degree eating a fry-up; they’re too intelligent to consume it, says Times restaurant critic.” What rot. Terrible article, lots of lazy journalism, somewhat sensationalist. Grr.
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“We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It’s about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it.” Interview with Rockstar’s art director on building cities.
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“In 1984, the British Conservative government banned scores of horror films under the Video Recordings Act. … They became known as Video Nasties. … There are 73 Video Nasties in all, and I aim to watch them all.”
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“BusySync lets you share iCal calendars on a LAN and sync iCal with Google Calendar.” Well, if it does that, that’s pretty nifty. Worth checking out.
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“The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world’s best repository for raw data — a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table.”
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Tom Carden links up a few more visualisation blogs he’s following that you might not have heard of.
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“The easier way to monitor servers and web applications.” Single-server plan is free; looks like it could be very handy indeed.
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Linked a thousand times over, but some great stuff in the main body. Alas, a shame to see the intertards lay into a very fair Michael Bywater, who at least showed up to the comments.
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“I’ve never been satisfied with folks trying to build services that generate ‘eyeballs’ just to ‘monetize’ that traffic with ads.” Charlie rightly lays into the monetizers.
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“Dweller is a simple roguelike targeted for Java enabled mobile phones” lovely – straightforward, classic ASCII Rogue on your j2me mobile. Two thumbs up!
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Simon Wistow with a sensible, insightful post – starting from Andy Baio’s remarkable discovery of Milliways – on how the web (and bloggers) need to grow up, and how telling smart people “you don’t get the web” isn’t actually an answer at all. Bravo.
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“masquerade – an OpenID server based on Ruby on Rails.” Server, not client-library. Looks quite nifty, and well worth knowing this is out there.
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“In the great pantheon of contractual obligation records, there is the noisy, the brassy and the phony. And then there is Van Morrison’s Bang Records Sessions.” Worth a listen, for sure!
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Silly, overproduced, over-expensive video to pep up the Microsoft sales team for managing to get their heads around the sheer number of SKUs for Vista. This is what Big Companies think is a valuable use of money
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“…the fact that Flickr has users who are passionate and articulate about what they love about the site is an asset. It’s also potentially a headache.” A great piece by Tom Ewing on debates about brand values with an engaged audience.
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“Over the Air presentation by Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger of Future Platforms about the PrimeSky project they did for the Royal Observatory at Greewich.” Lots of well-executed ideas piece together impressively. A good example of how to think this way.
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Some great points here, especially 1, 2, and 3, which apply equally to many forms of design.
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“A JavaScript and regular expression centric blog” – worth it for the title alone.
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“A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.”
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Some great talks here, and fantastic video – high quality, and slides throughout. Impressive conference, and great to be able to download it.
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Disney are shutting down VMK despite its continued success and large userbase; as a “promotion”, it’s run its course. Some of the comments are very affecting. Lessons to be learned about the implicit contracts you create when you build worlds.
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Yahoo expand their Exceptional Performance best practice; there are some interesting new tricks in here that might seem counterintuitive, but you can actually implement “right” if you think about it. Great that somebody (else) cares about this stuff.
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“Here are all the recordings from Webstock 08 and Webstock06.” Comprehensive, and from the looks of things, nice high-quality formats.