Saturday, December 27th, 2008
Evolution of game controllers
Impressive visualization of various game controllers and their mappings/ergonomics, spanning numerous years and console generations. via Dan Benjamin
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Tilt-Shift Monster Trucks
Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Film personality test, cont’d:
- No Country for Old Men
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- none
- Mallrats
- Kill Bill
- Full Metal Jacket
- Boogie Nights
- none
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Flickr is plotting geotagged photos to generate contours of continents, countries, cities, neighbourhoods with impressive and interesting results. I guess this is just one of many interesting things you can do with 90 million geotagged photos.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
New Windows 7 taskbar dock
Early screenshots of Windows 7 (e.g. at ars technica or Gizmodo) suggest some meaningful usability improvements coming up in the next big windows update. These screenshots actually look like something I could enjoy using, something I had not expected anytime soon from Microsoft.
Still, it’s easy to understand why Appleinsider published these screenshots in an article titled “Microsoft’s Windows 7 to bring Apple-tinged design changes”. Little things like how joining a wifi-network is handled are reminiscent of how things have been in Mac OS X for years, but those are just minor details.
The similarities between the Mac OS X dock and the new and improved taskbar really stand out, however:
- Big application icons have replaced the old buttons containing a small icon + text description. Same as the dock.
- There’s only one icon button per application, whereas in the past every single window had its own button. Same as the dock.
- Icons can be rearranged. Same as the dock, though this isn’t so much a rip-off as it is common sense, pressing the question What took them so damn long?
- Jump lists (see screenshot) can provide quick access to common features. Just right-click an application icon and its jump list pops up. Exactly the same as the dock.
There are also some interesting additions and improvements, like the window thumbnails, which pop up when you mouse over an application icon, or the unobtrusive icon borders which indicate the number of open windows, but overall the similarities are striking. It’s hard to imagine that some design team at Microsoft came up with this design without at least faint inspiration from its competitor.
Of course this is only beta and things are bound to change before Windows 7 ships, but I sincerely hope that some semblance of the new “taskbar dock” makes its way into the final product, if only to see the reaction of die-hard classic taskbar proponents.
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Friday, September 19th, 2008
SPORE development prototypes
Maxis has made a number of SPORE development prototypes publicly available:
One of the ways in which we explore possible design directions is by building simple, playable prototypes that we can play around with to get a sense for a particular system.
Usually these prototypes are never seen by the public, but we thought some of the more intrepid players out there might enjoy playing around with a few of our early Spore prototypes.
I haven’t had a chance to try SPORE (and EA’s draconian anti-piracy measures are a big deterrent to buy the game), but this should provide some interesting insights into the developement process of this highly anticipated and ambitious game.
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
The most interesting bit about Google Chrome
Google has grown tired of the web browser ghetto, all its applications crowded together into a single, often unreliable container. “Real” applications don’t have to put up with this. They live and die on their own terms. Their chrome is elegant, sleek.
Google isn’t interested at all in “being a citizen” or part of a platform, they are interested in being the platform. If you look at the way Chrome is designed, it’s not so much designed to be a good browser, as much as it is a good operating system for web applications. Google’s desire is very much the same as Microsoft’s, except abstracted a little higher up the stack. They want to own the platform upon which web applications are built, just like Microsoft wants to own the platform upon which desktop applications are built.
Friday, September 5th, 2008
Introducing CaptionKiller, because WordPress captions are bad
After some consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that Wordpress’ new image captioning feature, introduced in Wordpress 2.6, is bad. Not that I have anything against image captions in general, but I believe that design and implementation of this feature in WordPress 2.6 (and for a lack of change also in 2.6.1) are flawed and potentially harmful. Here’s what’s wrong with it:
1. There’s no way to turn it off
Once you’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.6, the new image captioning feature is turned on by default. This means that Wordpress will suddenly create different markup when you insert an image in one of your posts and it’s rather unlikely that your theme will handle these unforeseeable changes gracefully. Things will look weird and you’ll have to adapt your theme’s CSS to account for this change. There’s really no way to avoid this and I personally consider this kind of upgrade policy shortsighted, disrespectful and offensive.
2. It discourages people from adding alternative descriptions to their images
Well, that last sentence in the previous paragraph is actually not entirely true. There is a way to avoid this weird, potentially theme-breaking new feature: if you don’t specify alt-text (an alternative description) for an image, WordPress will insert your image the old-fashioned way, without captions and all those weird divs that come with them. That’s why I called this new feature potentially harmful in the beginning of this post: because it might encourage people to avoid alt-text for images altogether, just so their CMS won’t fuck around with their site-design and mark-up. I guess we can all agree that discouraging people from adding alternative descriptions to their images is a very bad thing, for accessibility, meta-data-related and possibly other reasons I can’t think of right now.
WordPress’ moronic captioning behavior is certainly related to their design decision to just use alt-text descriptions for image captions and I could probably rant on how I think an image caption and a text description are not necessarily the same thing (although often they are, admittedly), but I guess that’s all debatable and up to one’s personal preference, so I’ll leave it at that.
However, the lack of an easily accessible user setting to turn the new captioning feature off is undeniably a big oversight, and I therefore decided to do something about it. After an hour of research and 1 minute of coding I ended up with the following, dead-simple plugin: WordPress CaptionKiller. It’s an astounding 4 lines of code and I thorougly hope it won’t be needed anymore come WordPress 2.6.2, but in the meantime there might be some who find this useful. Please note: this plugin only works with WordPress 2.6.1. If you’re still using WordPress 2.6 and want to turn off captioning, I would suggest reading this or this, though I haven’t tried these methods myself.
Friday, August 29th, 2008
Eurogamer has a nice Free Realms video walkthrough online. This game looks like it will be big, should be interesting to see how their monetization plans work out compared to a traditional subscription model. Free Realms appears to forego the user generated content model, which seems to be a favourite among casual and social virtual worlds lately, taking a more traditional mmog design approach - rightly so, i’d wager. While i’m certainly intrigued by the notion of user generated content in persistent worlds, i’m not quite convinced that crowd-sourcing game design can work on a broad basis, though i’d love to be proven wrong.