-
"You know the [dark days] when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web war born, back before that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked."
-
"…doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly."
-
Ooh – a decent search tool for cc'd Flickr images.
-
"This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art."
-
"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.
-
This might come in handy sometime.
-
"Restore harmony by clicking the tiles until no open end is left over."
-
Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.
-
"Maybe it's the tusks, and the horns. Running with a dangerous crowd. You have to admit, dark elf boys are kind of wuss. And let's not even talk about gnomes. Or maybe it's part of the separation process. Getting away from your parents. For sure I can't ever visit her in the Undercity."
-
"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.
-
"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it… you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?
-
Wonderful.
-
"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people… Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."
-
"Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity… Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.
-
"Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.
-
"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."
-
Yes.
-
"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.
-
Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.
-
Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.
-
"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.
-
"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.
-
"Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control." Open source, Merb-based video platform that anyone can use – runs on top of Amazon EC2, S3, and SimpleDB.
-
"These concepts are not complicated by Cern standards. We are entering a zone which is weaponised to boggle."
-
Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.
-
Yes, this is going to come in handy.
-
"This javascript function can then read in the current content of the text area, format it using a trimmed down version of textile, and then set the content of a DIV with the resulting HTML. The end result of all this is live comment preview, with textile formatting." Live textile preview functionality.
-
"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. … Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.
-
A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.
-
"It's just an Nintendo in a toaster, but I like it."
COI Browser Standards Draft – my response
10 September 2008
The COI have recently published a draft of their browser guidelines for anyone developing a public sector website.
Frankly, I’m very unimpressed; they’re dangerous, vague in certain areas and over-specific in others, and promote some terrible ideas. I’d urge any designer or developer with an interest in this area to download the document and read it – it’s really not very long – and then leave feedback on the document with the COI through the appropriate form. The public have been asked for responses, and we have the scope to respond; if you feel as strongly about what’s in the document as I do, I hope that you will.
My own response follows.
As a web development professional, I’m very unimpressed with this consultation document, and would go as far as to suggest that some elements of it are actively harmful.
I appreciate the attempt to codify the need for effective browser-compatibility for all public sector websites. That said, the manner in which the document suggests which browsers to test is very poor.
All browsers are different, even though the HTML and XHTML specs remain the same. The purpose of browser-testing is not to ensure that sites look identical in all browsers; the purpose is to ensure that the site is usable in all browsers.
As such, lists of browsers to be tested in are dangerous; the best we can aspire to is to write good, valid code that is functional in all browsers, and priortise appearance for the most modern browsers.
I take exception to the notion that the browsers to be tested on are those which have >2% share of visits on a website. 2% of hits on a very popular public-sector website might account for a sizeable proportion of users, and to exclude them (especially if the lack of testing in their browsers leads to impared functionality) could well contravene the Disabilities Discrimination Act. Also, note that these statistics are not necessarily accurate, and may contain spoofed or inaccurate user data.
Going beyond the 2% hurdle, it would not be feasible to test in all browsers. The best solution is probably a form of graded browser support, much as Yahoo recommends, which itself is reviewed and updated over time, and which guarantees a minimum functionality in certain families of browsers, full support in others, and makes it clear which browsers simply are not supported. Browsers do not cost money; they are not complex tools to install, and developers should not be limited simply because a certain percentage of users on their website continue to user Internet Explorer 5.
Browser support should not be a series of boxes to check off, and it should not be specified retroactively based upon current users; it should be based upon accurate specifications and usage patterns, to ensure that public sector websites – many of which already have high production costs – are sustainable, maintainable, and functional for years to come.
As such, this preliminary draft has a long way to go before it accurately represents the state of web usage, not to mention web development, in 2008.
-
"This week’s 1UP FM is a fascinating round table/interview with Jonathan Blow, David Hellman, Rod Humble, and Sean Elliott and Nick Suttner from 1UP… If you’re at all interested in Braid, experimental game design, or the ethics of games you should go listen now." In the meantime, Ben Zeigler has provided some excellent annotation for us all.
-
"Over the last few years, there has been a big shift in power and success away from independent studios, and towards in-house, publisher-owned studios. This has been driven by several things, sound economic reasons, competitive reasons, and because the strong independent studios had done a good job at creating a slew of new IPs (which publishers were eager to snap up, as always). In my experience relatively few people in the games industry realise this… So, what’s next? What’s going to happen over the next 3-5 years?" Adam on the business of the games industry, and what's facing it next.
-
You're a little robot. You're also indestructible. Use bombs to bounce yourself around the level, but don't run out. Lovely little flash game.
-
In which an entertaining man plays a hacked, super-hard Super Mario map, swears at his TV a lot, and still manages to be pretty good at it. It's a nice illustration of the problem-solving process, and it's rather funny. "This is worse than Panic At The Disco. This is worse than Ann Coulter."
-
"The No Game is a party game with only one real rule."
-
This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming…
-
"Sequel Pro is the perfect tool for working with database-driven websites and applications." Leopard-only MySQL management application; forked out of the long-neglected CocoaMySQL.
-
I need to think on this more; there's a lot of meat in it, and some interesting commentary, but suggesting that "the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting things" I find somewhat insulting. I'm frustrated because it feels like Blow is pushing for people to find the "correct" interpretation, rather than any valid criticism they can back up. Still, there's also some excellent stuff in here, but it's the first thing he's said that's rubbed me the wrong way a little (and I'm not just talking about the 'bullshit' comment).