05.04.12 |
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Web developer/designer Jonathan Christopher:
We can’t help but to be influenced by headlines like Instagram getting bought for $1B. As ridiculous as that is, as much of an outlying circumstance it is, we can’t help but to want something like that to happen to us. Seeing something that ridiculous happen almost makes it seem like “small” dreams of one day getting a $1M payout that much more realistic, almost deserved in some way.
Ultimately it seems to me that big payouts have become the definition of success in our industry, and to be blunt I think that sucks.
05.04.12 |
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Gamers With Jobs‘ Cory Banks dives through analysis on GameStop’s used game market. It’s clearly huge; Gamestop sold $2.6 billion of used inventory during fiscal year 2011.
Having seen many indie game stores close in the past few years, I found Banks’ conclusion sobering:
No matter what, used games aren’t going away anytime soon. Gamers will continue to trade in old titles, while publishers will continue to develop more reasons to buy new. You’ll think of GameStop as the place next to the Orange Julius in the mall. EA will think of them as the big brother with the baseball bat and a bad attitude.
And either way, GameStop wins.
05.03.12 |
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As compiled by the FontShop editorial board. Each font is ranked with a description and series of images that illustrate the evolution of the font from its inception to modern times.
05.03.12 |
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This slide from a tech talk by Instagram’s Mike Kriger says it all. You can have fast tech, but sometimes clever design allows you to pounce on that tech earlier in the user experience.
05.03.12 |
Technology |
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In the iOS and Mac app stores, newcomer generalist apps are dead. Long live the new wave of hyperfocused apps.
This point was inevitable given both stores have reached a saturation point. There are so many calendars, text editors, todo lists, weather forecasts and photo editors – to name just a few categories – that it’s increasingly rare for any newcomer to stand out. Several success stories emerge early (e.g. Omnifocus and Todo for todo lists, Camera+ in the photo department) receive positive coverage, gain a user base and iterate. Meanwhile most competitors flounder and struggle.
Yet developers are opting out of this Darwinian cycle by going very deep, singular and focused with their app functionality. I wouldn’t use the term “minimal” because some are loaded with options and customization for power users. “Hyperfocused” fits better as each app’s direction is simple and straightforward. Where a generalist app might have ten features, a hyperfocused app has one, but executes that one feature with depth, polish, and well thought out design.
Not every app of this style can be a winner – their very focus makes them divisive – but a few have clicked well with my workflow: Drafts and Dark Sky for iOS and Take Five for the Mac.
Drafts
Unlike other more generalist text editors that expect a setup process for new documents, Drafts presents you with a blank document and keyboard on every launch. There’s no required taps for a new document location or file type; open the app and you’re ready to type with little lag. Drafts at its core feels like the default Notes app with a serious speed and UI upgrade and that alone should appeal to many.
But speed is only a fraction of Drafts full functionality. A tap of an icon below the document reveals a full action list. You can copy to the clipboard, email, send to a Dropbox folder, tweet the content and send the text to other iOS apps. I use it almost every day for ideas capture, drafting Tweets, sending interesting links to Dropbox and writing extended emails.
Dark Sky
For weather I’ve had the My-Cast app on my home screen for over a year. Its got plenty of information and accurate, but generally a bit sluggish and the visuals need serious work. Also before heading outside I have to tap through several screens just to determine if there’s rain in the immediate future.
Enter Dark Sky, an app that’s singular purpose is to tell you if it’s going to rain in the next hour. After starting the app you get a graph and text description that measures the severity and chance of rain. The app excels in its detail – the graph can convey at a glance when an incoming storm will peak or when short gaps in the rain will emerge. Text descriptions are highly descriptive (e.g. “light rain for 14 min”). If you want something more visual, a great looking radar is a tap away. The whole package is fast, accurate and reliable. It’s found a nice home on my second iPhone screen.
Take Five
I’m a heavy iTunes and Spotify user on my Mac, yet the UI of each app is cumbersome and bulky. The row based, options everywhere design works well for heavy lifting but 95% of the time I just want to know the details on what’s currently playing.
To address this UI bloat, several iTunes and Spotify mini player apps have popped up. I tried both Simplify and Bowtie, two popular options. Yet while both did the job, I wasn’t crazy about their memory footprint and occasionally rough visuals.
That led me to Take Five, an option by Iconfactory, the design shop responsible for Twitterrific, xScope, and Flare. It’s a now playing visualizer pared down to the essentials: album art, song, album, and artist. Yet in targeting such a simple feature set, IconFactory delivers a really well thought out experience. Its got best in class visuals with a cool blue and black color palette. Keyboard support extends to a show/hide hotkey for the music app you’re using, be it iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, or five other players. You can turn on a Growl-like auto notification that pops up the mini player briefly when the track changes (with Spotify’s often shoddy Growl integration this is an especially useful feature.) Take Five’s main ‘hook’ is in its pause functionality; with a keyboard shortcut or icon click you can pause your music and have it auto fade in after a set period (hence ‘Take Five’). It’s a cool perk for quick breaks.
05.02.12 |
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There’s a lot of big tech sites out there, but for very in depth comparison pieces, Ars Technica is unparalleled. Their hit streak continues with this look at a Apple/iTunes branded mastering technique to squeeze better quality out of MP3s. A lot is covered here, including basics on how music is moved from a master copy to CD or MP3.
05.02.12 |
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A List Apart’s Eric Meyer interviews Mozilla lead Tantek Çelik on his plan for Firefox to support webkit prefixed CSS properties. After reading, I’m even more puzzled on what Mozilla’s plan is long term here. So, Mozilla is targetting Webkit CSS prefixes in Firefox, but only “specific ones”? Then they may utilize Webkit prefixes on just mobile Firefox, but not necessarily the desktop?
Meyer hits on a huge point later in the interview:
The promise of vendor prefixes was that implementations could be tested in the wild and problems corrected before behavior was formalized. That paid off handsomely with gradient syntax, for example, where totally incompatible syntaxes were tried out, and eventually a unified syntax was found. This plan seems like it imperils that ability—that, once vendors start supporting each others’ prefixes, we may as well drop prefixes altogether.
05.02.12 |
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A decidedly not cool move by Apple here. Note that Apple is not rejecting Dropbox and Rdio API integration as a whole (that’s front page, “bring the pitchforks” kind of news); instead it’s about the way their APIs authorize users. In particular:
If the user does not have Dropbox application installed then the linking authorization is done through Safari (as per latest SDK).
Once the user is in Safari it is possible for the user to click “Desktop version” and navigate to a place on Dropbox site where it is possible to purchase additional space.
Apple views this as “sending user to an additional purchase” which is against rules.
This is a stretch, at best. As the cloud storage wars among these big players heat up, this kind of sidestepping by Apple looks especially shady.
Update: A lot of other bloggers have pointed out that Apple’s 11.13 rule that restricts external purchases has been around for a while. Others say it’s a simple fix on Dropbox’s part. I think both, while true, somewhat miss the point. First, it appears Facebook Connect is in a similar predicament for authentication (you get bounced to a web page where it’s possible after several clicks to purchase or sign up), yet didn’t get rejected, which implies Dropbox is being treated differently. In addition, just asking Dropbox to fix or patch doesn’t excuse overzealousness on Apple’s part.
Bottom line, it’s one thing to reject an authentication web page that has a direct buy/sign up link on the first page – I see Apple’s concern there – but it’s another to reject sign up/buy several clicks away.
05.01.12 |
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Giles Richards for The Guardian:
At eight, Jann [Mardenborough] thought he might have a chance of making it as a racing driver. Steve, an ex-professional footballer, had taken him to a kart circuit, and before long the owner took notice and told Steve his son was a natural. But finance proved the stumbling block. The local track closed down and the nearest alternative was in Bristol. “I stopped when I was 11,” says Jann, “because it got too expensive.”..
In the middle of 2011, Mardenborough had entered an online competition on Gran Turismo 5 that offered one final shot at the real thing. Out of 90,000 other virtual racers, he made it into the top eight in Europe and won the chance to test himself against other gamers in a real car at Brands Hatch. That he had kept it to himself for so long was entirely in character for a boy who did not like to make a fuss. “At that point we had no idea what it was,” admits Steve.
Seven months later, in January this year, Mardenborough, who’d never set foot in a racing car, was at the wheel of a serious piece of kit in the Dubai 24 Hour race – and at the beginning of what appears to be a very exciting career.
Wow.
05.01.12 |
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This Atlantic piece on famed Braid creator Jonathan Blow has been passed around heavily online, but I finally got around to reading it this weekend. I’d recommend it, if nothing more for seeing author Taylor Clark – someone who’s clearly not a gamer – try to assess the “hard core” gaming scene from a fresh journalistic angle.
That said, Jonathan Blow comes off as pretty unpleasant. The guy clearly has a near messianic view of his own importance in gaming; he knocked out an “objectively better game than Pac-Man” on his Commodore 64 as a teenager? Total illusions of grandeur.
Also Clark makes too many generalizations of the industry. He’ll start out with something semi-reasonable:
Even the industry’s staunchest defenders acknowledge the chronic dumbness of contemporary video games, usually with a helpless shrug—because, hey, the most ridiculous games can also be the most fun. (After all, the fact that the Super Mario games are about a pudgy plumber with a thick Italian accent who jumps on sinister bipedal mushrooms doesn’t make them less enjoyable to play.)
But then he goes onto a whopper:
But this situation puts video-game advocates in a bind. It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to name anything it has produced in the past 30 years that could be called artistic or intellectually sophisticated.
I’d be as fast to chime in about the general intellectual laziness about the current gaming industry as Clark. But 30 years of lack of artistry or intellectual sophistication? Completely false.