In the midst of a ‘super summary’ site resurgence (e.g. Evening Edition), I stumbled upon Sidebar – 5 cool, relevant design related links post every day. Normally such a site wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, but look at the curators here: Chris Coyier, Sacha Grief, and many other talented web designers.
As Rachel Helps explores in this brief Kill Screen Daily post, what if we put ourselves on an “information diet” for video games? What if our focus moved away from games with “repetitive loops” (e.g. Call of Duty, Bejeweled) and instead games with stories that change based on user interactions, that evolved and grew as you go through them?
For the last three days I’ve been at User Interface 17, a web design conference in Boston (it’s also why posts here have been sparse recently.) Overall I had a really good experience, one of the highlights being Luke Wroblewski’s extended workshop on multi-device design. In addition to Luke being an excellent speaker, he’s also a prolific writer and he wrote up some notes from some o the other talks at the conference.
I’ve linked here to Aaron Gustafson’s talk about progressive enhancement, but there’s more if you check out Luke’s writing section.
Macworld author Dan Moren brings up some relevant iCloud weaknesses. At its heart, there’s one huge problem:
Tying files to apps has its advantages, to be sure. But Apple’s way of implementing has a cost: Sharing files between applications is more difficult and unwieldy now than it was before.
Caitlin Johnston, reporting for Poynter:
Baan made the image Wednesday night after the storm, using the new Canon 1D X with the new 24-70mm lens on full open aperture. The camera was set at 25,000 ISO, with a 1/40th of a second shutter speed.
“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.
I knew the instant I saw that amazing Manhattan shot that it was low light and shot fairly quick. But 1/40th of a second?! Tells you how far camera technology has come.
One of my favorite and most heavily used apps iA Writer just got a big update with its 1.4 version release today:
Inspired by our deep experience designing for the web, we’ve given Writer for Mac a responsive design, changing the font size based on window width. This maintains the text’s typographic proportions, zooming in and out without reflowing the text. I don’t know why it took us so long to find this obvious solution. However, given that no one else has done it, the simplicity of this solution is perhaps not as obvious as it seems in hindsight.
After playing around with the update for a few minutes I can’t find an immediate need for the three different breakpoints iA Writer offers; 95% of my time I feel like the largest font size/width is optimal. We’ll see how that evolves over time.
Tech writer Bob Cringely:
What Steve Ballmer and Microsoft need to do is clean up their act, quietly trim expenses, maybe even sell a few product lines, and start to seriously stash away cash toward the post-Windows, post-Office world of 2018.
Yes, post-Office. What else can be meant by bundling Office with Windows RT than its value is headed to zero?
If Microsoft can continue to pretend it is big while actually becoming small, they might end up in 2018 with a small residual product line sitting atop $100 billion in cash.
I’m pretty hooked on a workflow of plain text lists synced with Dropbox. That said, Clear for iPhone is pretty slick and now that they actually will be introducing syncing via the Mac…it looks a bit tempting. Available next week on the Mac App Store.
Mobile gaming on devices like the iPad and iPhone will (or already has?) supplanted consoles as the flagship, mainstream gaming device going forward. That’s what makes this podcast episode of BYOT (Bring Your Own Topic) so interesting. The very knowledgable Dan Hsu sits down with Andy Yang and Gabe Leydon, two experts in the mobile gaming sphere. Lots of talk about monetization, free to play and more.
If you’re a developer or designer and use a text editor regularly, knowing keyboard shortcuts is a huge productivity booster. This quick primer over at the PeepCode blog is a nice starting point.