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"The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran." This is very good.
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Lovely article exploring the various ways of implementing 2D movement in platform games (though some of these tips/methods apply to all 2D games, when you think about it.)
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"In this context, Google+ is not the company’s most strategic project. That distinction goes to Glass, to the self-driving cars, and to Google Maps, Street View, and Earth—Google’s model of the real, physical world. Maybe in twenty years we’ll think of Google primarily as a vision company—augmenting our vision, helping us share it—and, oh wow, did you realize they once, long ago, sold ads?" This is good. I like the distinction between pictures and vision a lot.
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""And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear: and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be any thing, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in short-hand with my own hand." Well put. Well done, Sam. Well done, Phil.
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"Hammer.js is a javascript library that can be used to control gestures on touch devices." Very nice. And: it has a jQuery plugin, too.
Happy Birthday, Hypercard
31 May 2012
Ars Technica has a short article for HyperCard’s 25th Birthday.
I’m not sure I quite buy the notion of HyperCard as proto-web-browser. But I totally buy Atkinson’s original goals with it:
“Simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information”
It was not the first thing I wrote software in – that honour goes to GW-BASIC, I think – but it was the first tool I made something useful and unprovoked in. I was eight or nine when I discovered it at school. It made it possible to realise what was in my head, not what was in a book.
And it was the first thing that made designing the visual interactions of software easy for me. Software isn’t just arithmetic and lines of code – it’s something people use. HyperCard made sure that the visual end of software was usually the first part of a stack you made, not the last. (I was always disappointed that Visual Basic looked like it did this, but it didn’t quite live up to expectations).
Look at XCode now, with its integrated Interface Builder; that’s one of the many legacies of HyperCard. It showed the average computer user (not the average programmer) that interaction and interface was important to great computing experiences, and gave them the tools to poke around.
It is a tiny percentage of the reason I do what I do now, but a memorable one.
Workshops are measured in years
30 May 2012
I’ve been making a lot of things recently, both at work and at home. And as a result, I’ve been having to buy tools.
Not a lot, but a steady trickle: discovering I need one of these, or one of those. A box of screws or bolts here; some wire there; a different kind of this to fit a particular need.
I’m trying to artificially acquire odds and ends.
This is hard. What, I think, I’ve been needing is a workshop.
But you can’t buy a workshop. A workshop isn’t a set of tools in a room.
It’s everything else, as well: offcuts; spares; old bits of wood; weird bits of plastic with strange holes in; broken things with one useful part to be cannibalised; hand-made jigs that fit particular things.
There is no shelf in B&Q or Maplin marked “this, that, and the other“, and yet that – more than anything else – is what I’ve been needing recently.
You can’t buy leftovers, spares, or “just the right thing”.
And given that, I think a workshop isn’t measured in the volume of tools it contains, the number of shelves, or the lengths of its benches.
I think it’s measured as a duration. A one-year workshop. A five-year workshop. A ten-year workshop.
Ten years of making things, and ten years of all the entropy that goes along with that: spares, duplicates, improved versions of things, swarf, offcuts, and thingummys.
When you view it like that, it’s no wonder I’m always finding new things I’ll require. I’ve only got a baby workshop (and let’s face it, the tools are in a closet and I’m drilling and sawing things on my dining room table – it’s hardly a workshop, is it?)
But babies grow up.
And it’s a reminder why, when I visit my parents, I can almost always find the bits and bobs I need, or the right tool for a job, or a part I didn’t even know the name of – because there’s a thirty-year workshop waiting for me.
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"So, given this [zero-button, move and look] interface, whence interactivity in Dear Esther? I say: from an understated but deadly-precise sense of attention design through spatial design.
You walk along the beach; a path goes up the bluff, another along the strand. You go one way or the other. There are no game-mechanics associated with the choice, and a plot-diagram analysis would call them "the same place" — you can try either, back up, and go the other way. But this misses the point. Precisely because the game lacks keys, switches, stars, and 1ups, it has no implicit mandate to explore every inch of territory. Instead, you want to move forward. Backtracking is dull. Worse: given the game's sedate walking pace, it's slightly frustrating. (They left out the run button for a reason, see?) Moving into new territory is always the best-rewarded move, and therefore your choice of path is a choice. You will not (unless you thrash hard against the game's intentions) see everything in your first run-through." Cracking writing about immersive, environmental storytelling in Dear Esther, and why it's clearly a game.
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"…he still remembers his frustration at encountering "sliced-up ghettos of thought" – sculpture, architecture, fashion, embroidery, metalwork, product and furniture design all in separate departments – "which I don't believe are absolute. It's just the way we categorise things and the way we chose to educate people."" Quite excited to see the Heatherwick show.
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"Super-simple baseline .mobi templates. Here ya go."
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It's basically a satellite that's an external Android peripheral, and they're chucking it into space with a phone attached. Impressive.
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"In publishing we now talk about immersive narrative, mainly because we are tense about the future of books. People who love reading are in it for exactly that: to soak themselves in story. To forget whenever possible that there even is a story outside the book, particularly the bubble-busting story of how the book was made. As a reader, I cling to the sense that this all but transcendent experience comes directly to me from one individual imagination. The feeling I have when reading fiction—of a single mind feeding me experience and sensation—is seldom articulated but incredibly powerful. As a reader, I don’t want fiction to be a group project." But, as the article points out, the role of the editor(s) means it always is. A lovely article about books, publishing and fiction.
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"Hazardously drinkable." Need to make this at some point.
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"As a programmer, we tend to take sysadmins for granted. The few times I've been without a good sysadmin have really made me appreciate what you guys do. When we're venturing into an environment without a sysadmin, what words of wisdom can you offer us?" A good list.