If you love gaming and follow gaming news online, you probably already know about the Giant Bomb crew’s amazing skill as critics, writers, and podcast hosts. But if you don’t, or even are vaguely into games but dig well edited videos, the work Giant Bomb’s Vinny and Drew put into this one is staggering. One hour of top notch analysis, funny asides, great editing and lots of behind the scenes footage.
There’s been a lot of debate on the iOS 7 visuals, especially among designers. I myself fall a bit in the middle – there’s some icons I can’t stand, but largely I’m trying my best to reserve judgement until I actually get a stable beta build on my phone. But designer Khoi Vinh correctly identifies one major problem I have with iOS: the typography. Helvetica Neue Ultra Light was never meant to be used this across the board, especially at such small sizes.
John Teti, writing for The Gamelogical Society on Microsoft’s E3 presser:
If the people on Microsoft’s Xbox team thought of their audience as human beings, they would have acknowledged some of the elephants in the room—like the Xbox One’s extraordinarily confusing used-games scheme or the privacy concerns regarding the always-on Kinect camera, which have only become more urgent as the nation realizes how thoroughly we are being surveilled. If they wanted to speak to people, Microsoft’s executives would not have ticked every box on their Buzzword Bingo card twice over. They know this talk of an “entertainment revolution” is bullshit, and we know it’s bullshit. Yet still they make us sit through this inane emperor’s-new-clothes charade, as they talk at length to nobody in particular.
For a few hours after Microsoft’s presser, right before Sony started presenting, I had already slightly moved away from leaning Microsoft for my next console. All I could think was, you’re not going to address anything the gaming public have been piling on you? Then fuel the fire with endless violent sequels on shooters, and racers we’ve seen before? Little to any indie presence? And then set the price at $500? The presentation was well paced, and there were a few exclusives I could get on board with. But John identifies exactly what left such a bad taste in my mouth.
A common hassle for any developer who writes CSS3 is knowing when to prefix (e.g. -webkit-transition, -o-transition, etc.). When does a vendor fall out of date? Cutting edge Sass developers already have a pretty clean solution for this via pregenerated mixins like Bourbn or their own custom solutions. But if you don’t have that, this Sublime Text plugin is the next best option. Check it out.
The always reliable Harry Roberts on CSS optimization writes a lot of solid points here. But it ultimately comes down to this:
Make sure any classes you write aren’t loose; make sure they’re always well named, and scoped if they need to be.
To put it another way, as I’ve always told classes I’ve taught and colleagues I’ve mentored, good CSS class names are underrated. Choose wisely.
Especially on the eve of iOS 7 fairly radical visual redesign in a more colorful, minimal, and “flat” direction, it’s worth looking at Yahoo’s latest web framework for inspiration. I dig the framework’s simplicity, it’s heavy use of prefix classes and normalize.css.
Tech writer and former Hypercritical podcast host John Siracusa really sets a high bar with his post regarding the likely fates of the XBox One, PS4 for and Wii U for the next console generation. Bottom line, it’s hard to guess who will come out on top now, but I agree completely with John’s belief that there isn’t going to be an “even divide” between these consoles.
If I were a betting man today, I’d say the Wii U will fall far, far short of the XBox One and PS4, both in terms of hardware and games sold. But it’s extremely hard to say now either Sony or Microsoft have the edge. We’ll learn more next week at E3.
Given the stellar quality of Zurb’s web framework Foundation, I’m going to try this “responsive image solution” out on some side project, just to see how the internals come together. But the syntax is a bit worrisome, a bit like the srcset attribute, but not all close to the picture element, which I’m currently favoring. I’ll still keep an eye on this one.
Developer “m50d” on Github:
A cup of coffee might not be worth £2. But happiness is, and that’s what I’m buying. If you want me to buy your thing for £2, it had better bring this much joy into my life. Otherwise, I’d rather have another cup.
The New Yorker’s Matt Buchanan:
When I spoke to Google designers across a number of products over the past couple of months, they rejected the idea that this was a top-down revolution. They described it instead as a conversation across the company. While an ascendant Larry Page “put the emphasis on beauty and gave us the freedom to go beyond,” said Gilbert, there’s “no organizational authority making it happen.”
Whatever the real story, from grass roots to a top-down skunkworks factory, it’s working. A year or two ago I wrote off Google’s design chops, especially on an aesthetic level, as dull and uninspired. No longer.