I’m a fan of Dan Mall’s design work, but he rarely comments on more tech heavy issues like web performance. Yet that’s exactly his focus on his latest blog post where he talks through the impact of a responsive design refresh. It’s not exactly scientific; Dan mostly is refreshing Firebug a few times to get his numbers, but I appreciated the approach and the thought process. It’s an encouraging read for performance novices.
Some excellent hiring advice from designer Paul Adams over at the Intercom blog. I especially liked his commentary on visual design:
Some commenters put forward that visual design is the primary thing that draws people in and is therefore the most important layer. This is not how I think about it. Visual design is certainly incredibly important, but people are also drawn to something with a promise of value – what the product is, what value it could deliver – in other words the work of the higher level design layers. Time and again we have witnessed ugly looking products succeed (for example Craigslist), and beautiful looking products fail.
I enjoyed this New York Times A1 story on the health care exchange web portal launch; it highlighted a lot of problems that can plague any tech launch.
But Mr. Chao’s superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services told him, in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him…Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.
Put politics aside. It’s a classic case of inflexible business requirements smashed up against mounting technical problems. Many of us have been there, and the results are rarely pretty.
Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed.
Massive release with little fallback or rollout strategy? Recipe for disaster.
Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.
Sounds like there’s not enough load testing and QA isn’t thorough enough to catch regressions. Yikes.
Grantland gaming writer Tom Bissell penned a really interesting and memorable Grand Theft Auto V review a few weeks ago. Bissell clearly enjoyed his playthough but had a mixed experience overall. I don’t know if I agree with him based on what I’ve played, but even at an early stage I completely agreed with Bissell on this point:
I understand the basic sense of fatigue with which people are approaching it. Once upon a time, playing a GTA game was like sitting next to your offensive Republican uncle at Christmas dinner. He was definitely a dick but also smart and interesting, and his heart was fundamentally in the right place. These days Uncle GTA is a billionaire with an unchanged shtick, and he seems a hell of a lot more mean-spirited than before.
After I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 7, new wallpapers were in order. I wanted something simple and relatively flat to fit in with the new OS design. I went through expected searches on Dribbble and other design heavy areas, but in the end my favorite source was an old standby: Simple Desktops.
Mind you, most of the downloads are more geared for traditional desktop displays, not iPhones. But with a few minutes in Photoshop (usually with me first centering the logo and then cropping it with the proper pixel dimension) I was good to go. Highly recommended.
I’ve read my share of CSS Flexbox tutorials and feature sites, but none that had the finesse and clarity that developer Philip Walton pulls off here.
I mostly have confined my Flexbox work to just smaller side projects or Chrome packaged apps, given the specifications limited compatibility among all modern browsers (Safari has a bit of catching up to do with Chrome but we’re almost there.) But damn do the showcase examples here make it tempting for future implementation. Even with fallbacks, the code here is just so clean and semantic.
Last week at my day job our team released a newly refreshed Pocket for web. (If you’re at all curious why my blog posts stopped dead midweek, it’s because my life has been fixated on launch and support issues. Thankfully there we few.) It’s been my main development and design focus for months. There’s a simplified navigation, recut reader view, keyboard shortcuts, and everything is noticeably faster. If you’re already a fan of save for later services, or you’re curious but never jumped in before, I’d encourage you to check it out.
Having had a few hours to play through the opening third of GTA V, it’s the acting and voices of the three lead protagonists that propel the story forward. That’s exactly why this extended talk with the three game actors really is interesting. Here’s Steven Ogg, a.k.a. Trevor, on his work in GTA:
This was not me sitting in my underwear in a booth watching some character that was like Trevor and saying my lines. No. That was me up there in my motion capture suit with the camera directly in my face and the light in my eyes. It’s a huge thing. It’s not just voice acting. You put three years of your life into something like this and you certainly, if nothing else, want the recognition of what you’ve done—it is an entire performance that has been “captured”—your body, your face, and your voice. It wasn’t just three years of talking into a microphone. It was three years of shooting a movie that was motion captured.
Andy Greenwald, writing for Grantland (warning spoilers for the series finale ahead):
In the end, there was no art. Only science. And this was sort of the problem, wasn’t it? After five-plus years of watching everything break bad, the finale gave us 75 minutes of watching everything break just right. There was plenty of sweet coincidence and even sweeter revenge. The timing was deliberate, and immaculate…
But was it equally satisfying? I’m not so sure…There’s been a great deal of talk these past few weeks about how Gilligan is a moralist, but I have to say, I have my doubts. After last night, I’d say he’s an aesthete, one who admires clean lines and elegant design above all else.
This is pretty much exactly some of the problems (or questions?) I immediately had scattering about my head after wrapping the finale. Enormously enjoyable? Yes. And as always, the visuals and acting worked extremely well. But it felt a bit too tidy in the end.
Then again, maybe we’ll all have dramatically different feelings days, weeks or even years later. Already my feelings are starting to change on Breaking Bad’s earlier years, mostly for the better and some for the worse.
Mark Serrels writing for Kotaku:
And make no mistake, a device like Kinect — the device Microsoft is hellbent on shoehorning into our living space — must be seamless if the Xbox One is to capture the mainstream audience Microsoft is lusting after. In short: I have very little confidence in Kinect’s ability to respond quickly, efficiently or consistently and that’s an issue.
But the major issue is this: if you want to purchase an Xbox One, Kinect is being forced upon you. You are paying extra for a device that, two months from launch, feels like a rough, unfinished product. You don’t have a choice and that’s problematic.
I don’t want Kinect to be dropped; it’s got incredible potential. But from all accounts it seems like Kinect is half baked, tech not taken seriously by most gaming developers. What launch XBox One games are even using a fraction of the Kinect’s potential? Without that extra level of polish it feels rushed, rough and something I don’t want to pay extra for. Another reason my preorder is still for the PS4.