As Rogie tweeted yesterday, lots of designers on Dribbble are going crazy with ideas for better looking weather apps. Here’s hoping some of these very clean, minimal works translate into better apps. (I’m a My-Cast user but hate the look of it.)
Why an iPad mini won't work, part two: Marco Arment has issues with an overly crowded UI on a potential 7" variant. I agree and find the UI problems especially troubling for developers. A third iOS platform would foster fragmentation.
Why an iPad mini won't work, part one: Craig Grannell disputes the competitive demand for a 7" tablet based on offerings from Samsung and Amazon.
I’m a big fan of the file-sharing service Cloud for little things like sending screenshots to coworkers. Its core competitor Droplr has always looked interesting but wasn’t an option in the office due to its ads and lack of extended private URLs.
That’s all changed today with the launch of Droplr Pro. Ad-free, stats, private drops and more for $3 a month, $30 a year. Droplr differentiates itself from Cloud’s pro offering with much bigger upload options (1GB vs. 250GB), but at the cost of a hard limit on total storage space (100GB vs. virtually unlimited.) I’ll investigate more later in the week.
Frequently asked questions:
Q: How do I install this?
A: Um… are you stupid or something? Just attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module – and presto!
About an hour after reading that Taylor Clark opinion in Kotaku, I saw a recommend over at Giant Bomb to check out this counterpoint. It’s also quite eloquent:
The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story. The dissonance of the Uncharted series is a famous example: the experience implies two completely different worlds. One is where Nathan Drake is an affable hero, and the other is where Drake murders hundreds of fellow human beings and feels nothing. Though the developers took care to paint over the seams where they could, even the cleverest narrative design couldn’t change how completely incongruous that really is, on a basic, fundamental level.
At that point— with the model already broken, what can you do as a writer? Make your main character a sensitive man and he falls flat: he obviously isn’t sensitive to the fact that he just killed dozens of people. Make him a dangerous psychopath and he’s impossible to like, unless, maybe, he’s out for some lazily justified revenge (oh, look, we just stumbled on the plot of so many games!).
I had a lot of problems with the Jonathan Blow article I cited last week. Yet Taylor Clark, the Atlantic author who wrote the piece, wrote an opinion article on Kotaku clarifying his stance. I find it much more agreeable, especially with this point:
My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It’s not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it’s the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.
Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
Ars Technica’s design refresh is great. I especially dig the Noticia headline font; it gives a soft, approachable look when compared against other tech websites.
Nice analysis by Zach Baron over at Grantland on how The Avengers easily eclipsed the quality of almost everything released in the summer of 2011:
On the likely chance you’ve blocked the months of May, June, July, and August of last year out of your mind forever, let’s try to make this as brief and non-traumatic as possible. There was the colossally ill-advised attempt to make a star out of Ryan Reynolds and a successful movie franchise out of Green Lantern, a beloved comic book with a wholly impenetrable native mythology (something about “the emerald energy of willpower” and the color yellow, I think). In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay forced real-life American hero Buzz Aldrin to salute one CGI robot and nearly raped Rosie Huntington-Whiteley with the creepy animated tendrils of another. And on it went — the sound-stage costume buffoonery of Avengers precursor Thor; X-Men: First Class, a good, kitschy insta-reboot that disappeared into the swamp of a hundred other comic book movies…
Don’t quite agree with his negative take on Thor and especially X-Men: First Class (both are underrated), but Zach makes many excellent points here, both on The Avengers and summer movies in general.