09.11.13 |
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Author “Shanley” on Medium:
What about when we reward acts of heroism — recovering from severe outages, working unreasonable hours, emerging triumphant from a death march? When such acts of heroism are very visible and rewarded, do we end up with a situation where people are incentivized to manifest the very conditions of catastrophe that allow them to be heroes? At what point are we actually incentivized to create unrealistic deadlines, work at an unsustainable cadence, even cause production issues?
09.10.13 |
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I have read far too many posts in recent months on how to incorporate responsive web design into a design workflow. Most cover what I already know, but leave it to designer Jacey Gulden to shake things up:
By nature, a mobile device is narrow, and it forces the content to be presented in a single column. The linear display caused by this narrowness forces the designer to give priority and hierarchy to certain pieces of content that is much less apparent when a site is viewed on a wider screen.
Because of this, many designers have started experimenting with a new kind of mockup that involves content hierarchy rather than design layout. Designers give numerical values to elements of content that correlate to where those items might appear in a stacked column layout. This way, design is less constrained, but the content is always presented in the best way possible.
I’ve heard the “content hierarchy first” advice before but rarely in such a clear manner.
09.09.13 |
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Capcom just released this documentary free on YouTube. It’s gotten a lot of praise online with its extremely high production values (as expected from the production studio Area 5.) Anyone who’s into gaming, especially Street Fighter fans, should watch this.
09.06.13 |
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Nathan Rabin over at The Dissolve is just on fire with his “Forgotbusters” column, an examination of high grossing films that now look dated culturally. This review of the movie adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun is especially biting. For instance:
In a sequence that plays unmistakably like a clueless middle-aged white person’s conception of what a culture clash between the Japanese and denizens of the ghetto might entail, [main protagonist] Smith has his inner-city friends menace the Asian thugs that are after them in a manner that would feel more appropriate in a wacky comedy than the stirring wake-up call Crichton intended.
09.06.13 |
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I’ve seen a lot of tech buzz about this app and deservedly so: it’s a hell of a lot easier for developers that have HDPI to open up a special “non HDPI browser” via this app vs. trying to switch resolutions repeatedly. Well worth a look.
09.05.13 |
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UI designer Joshua Porter:
The reality is that Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum. They’ve tested and tweaked the same product page over and over and they’ve optimized it as much as possible. They can’t improve it significantly at this point without making a big change. But they can’t make a big change because the only changes they can make must increase revenue (or some closely related KPI). So any big change is a very, very scary thing when that page is driving billions of dollars in revenue. So it makes sense that Amazon only makes small changes to their product page design.
Early in my web career, like many others I was fascinated by Amazon’s web design and leveraged it occasionally to fuel e-commerce decisions. But when you fast forward to where we are today, it’s positively shocking how little Amazon’s design has evolved. Joshua really nails why.
09.05.13 |
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Longtime video game journalist and designer Jeff Green, discussing his issues with more complex multiplayer games like DOTA 2:
The problem of course, was and still is the barrier to entry. If all the players in a particular game are skilled and experienced, then it just makes it that much harder for a new player to find his or her footing, to gain any experience or confidence. And there is little to no tolerance by a lot (but not all) experienced players to put up with noobs on the team. Especially in games where everyone takes it totally seriously and winning is everything.
Gaming has changed for me in two ways over the past few years. First, as work and other life commitments take more time, there’s just less time for gaming. And as part of that, I’ve got far less patience for complex or twitch based multiplayer. I want to have fun and relax, not get stressed out every time I start a match of Call of Duty.
09.04.13 |
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Designer Julie Zhuo:
If you give an engineer a design to build but you’re not confident how well it’ll work out until you get to play with the implementation, make sure you let them know that there’s a good chance things will change. Nothing is more annoying to engineers than staying up all night to finish an implementation only to get a memo in the morning that Whoops! The whole design has been transformed! And now they’ll have to throw away all that production-quality code they put painstaking attention into.
A thousand times this. Having worked on projects on both design and development, this point has come back to bite me personally quite a few times. If you’re a developer, make sure you’re clear on what stage the design is at.
08.30.13 |
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TV critic Maureen Ryan, writing for The Huffington Post:
“Breaking Bad” is an undoubtedly a great show, but, as is the case with too many television dramas, for while there it didn’t really know what to do with its female characters. The AMC drama clearly struggled to make Skyler and Marie Shrader (wife of DEA agent Hank Schrader) anything but subsidiary figures who rarely moved into — or deserved — the spotlight. Their behaviors and reactions were easy to predict, and if the writers didn’t show consistent interest in their emotional lives and the women’s inner depths, why would viewers care about them, let alone have positive responses to them?
While I can’t express myself as eloquently as Ryan does here, I got the same feeling when reading through Anna Gunn’s NYT editorial. Gunn makes a lot of good points about some of the extreme Skyler haters on the show. But especially in Breaking Bad’s first few seasons, Skyler just wasn’t that fleshed out as a character; she was at times pretty easy to root against (Mad Men’s Betty, as Ryan writes about later, shares a very similar problem.)
08.29.13 |
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Norman Chan, Tested:
And therein lies what I think is a significant difference between how battery life should be managed and valued between the Nexus 7 (along with other small tablets) and other mobile devices. For the majority of Nexus 7/iPad Mini owners or potential buyers, my guess is that these small tablets are secondary devices that complement other computers. Unlike a full-size tablet like the iPad or Nexus 10, I don’t think the Nexus 7 is appropriate as most people’s sole computer. As a consequence, secondary devices are by definition not as critical in day-to-day use as a laptop or smartphone.
I couldn’t agree more with Norm here. I’ve been putting a Nexus 7 through it’s paces for work testing over the past few weeks, and it drops its battery life significantly faster than a 3rd or 4th generation iPad. But even with some pretty intense web browsing, YouTube videos and jumping between multiple apps, I don’t think I ever saw less than seven hours of battery life. In short, two really long spurts of secondary use over two days between charges. That’s excellent.