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"LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF" Like Skitch but spitting out animated gifs; I'm really interested in animated gifs as a documentation format.
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"Sheetsee.js is a JavaScript library, or box of goodies, if you will, that makes it easy to use a Google Spreadsheet as the database feeding the tables, charts and maps on a website. Once set up, any changes to the spreadsheet will auto-saved by Google and be live on your site when a visitor refreshes the page." This is good.
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"All it takes to get a website going for a repository on GitHub is a branch named gh-pages containing web files. You also don’t need a master branch, you can have a repo with just one branch named gh-pages. Here is what I think is really cool, if you fork a project with just a gh-pages branch, you’re only a commit away from having a live version yourself. If this repo being forked is using sheetsee.js then everyone is a fork, commit and spreadsheet away from having a live website connected to an easy (a familiar spreadsheet UI and no ‘publish’ flow because Google autosaves) to use database that they manage (control permissions, review revision history)." Very smart.
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Hosted statistics tool with attractive interface and smart API. Not cheap for its single-tier plan ($99/mo), but looks like it might be worth a poke.
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"Xtreme Mapping 1.4 is an advanced editor of MIDI controller mappings for Native Instruments' Traktor DJ software." I'm always amazed how bad Traktor's mapping editor is, given how much you can do; this looks like a powerful way to build more complex mappings.
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via @aanand, and because I forgot to bookmark this when I read it the first time. Good, straightforward points.
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"I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation." It is a really good list (I say this mainly because the first thing on the list is RequestBin, which is the thing I always forget the name of).
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"Popularity rules, and fitness for purpose is secondary. We even make up a little rationalization about this: “Our code must be easy to read for the next programmer, so we pick idioms that will be familiar.” That would make stellar sense if idioms are forever, but they aren’t. They come and go like trends in pop music, and Ruby Archeologists can accurately date a business application by examining its gemspec file." I liked this line of thought.
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This is marvellous: Tog on magic and software, and what one can teach the other. The stuff about perceived time periods, and also on distraction, is particularly great. It's not just about the functionality: it's about how you present it; showmanship all the way down. (And: I like the reminder about the kinds of honesty that are important, in order that dissimulation still works0.
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Excellent, thoughtful article from John Allspaw on what experience in software engineering really looks like. Valuable reading both for software engineers, and also for the people who work with them.
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Valve really are incredible; just watching the UI and technology for this in action is a little jawdropping. (Also, one for my friends who work in After Effects/3D prototyping and video…)
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"If you ever needed a thorough introduction to the series or the new stuff in Final Showdown, look no further. What top American VF player LA Akira teaches in his appearance on UltraChanTV is more than spectacular. More than 4 hours of video goodness fit for beginners as well as more advanced players." So. Much. Virtua. Fighter. (That tip about holding G+P for both blocks and auto throw escapes is a useful one. Throw escapes got so much easier!)
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Excellent slides from Paul with some super-solid points, and a few tools I'd not encountered (Papertrail, notably).
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.