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"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.
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"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."
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"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.
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"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.
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"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.
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"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.
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""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."
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Fantastic, all of it.
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Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.
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"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.
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"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
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"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.
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"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.
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"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.
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"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.
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I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.
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"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.
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"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.
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Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
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"We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
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"This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop…" Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
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"This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
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"# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
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Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
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"Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. … [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
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Jordan Mechner is serialising – and backdating – his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
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"In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
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"The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
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"Being able to go back and fix your mistakes is not the same as being forgiven for them. Maybe that’s what all those storybooks were trying to tell us." Lovely.
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"If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while." Merlin Mann is very sensible.
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"It seems to me that Tim and the nameless characters of the epilogue represent archetypes of some kind. They don’t stand in for every man and woman, certainly, but they’re emblematic of a certain kind of dysfunctional relationship, one where “I’ll protect you” turns into “I’ll control you.”" A smart, sharp reading of Braid, that understands its gameiness.
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"The mouse is a continuous pointing device; the finger is discontinuous. That’s a profound difference that I wish I were able to clearly understand and explain." PPK on how MobileSafari responds to Javascript's mouse actions.
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"I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think _because_ they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you." John Walker on the problem with BioWare's attitude to morality, and some potential solutions.
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"Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player."
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"I've heard that Japanese developers, who have traditionally held American game development in low esteem, have a great deal of respect for Bungie, and you can understand why. Bungie has done for shooters what Nintendo did for platformers: they've turned the visceral joys control and motion into the centerpiece of the game."
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"Thomas Finchum, an American diver competing in Beijing, describes the view from the 10-meter platform at the Water Cube." Incredible, interactive panorama from the top board in the Water Cube.
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"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.
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"One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates… It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition."
Symphony finally launches
08 December 2005
Symphony, the slightly-awaited publishing/blogging app from 21degrees (who don’t have a website – it now redirects to Symphony) that’s been under wraps for yonks, finally launches. According to the marketing gumph, it gives you the “power and flexibility to make your dream website a reality“.
Maybe – but I’m not sure it’s going to when it’s using XSLT, of all things, as its templating language! It’s not too complex, but it is a fussy, very un-plain-english way of defining templates. It’s a similar problem to the one I have with WordPress, which just uses PHP functions rather than any abstract templating language. Neither are particularly difficult, but they are fussy, and they’re not like HTML – which is something many people may know.
In fact, looking at it again, their use of XSLT to make a “for-each” loop is just horrid. So in short: nice idea, but I can think of an awful lot of people who’d be put off by XSLT, no matter how compliant it is.