Teradome.

kung fu grippe: Entitled to Care

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:40:41 -0500

Marco.org - News flash
…
Straw man, Marco.

It’s not a question of entitlement. It’s a question of clear vision about the inevitability of painful, weird change, and whether we can each find the courage to face it without folding.

If anyone’s acting “entitled” right now, it’s the many…

“But” they’ll say, “But we’re the media. We’re *culture.* We don’t deliver seltzer or make horseshoes.” Yes. Yes you do. You make the content equivalent of seltzer. Start delivering something else, please.

HP Slate makes an appearance to show off Flash, stays for a rock...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:52:02 -0500

HP Slate makes an appearance to show off Flash, stays for a rock concert — Engadget

I think the fact that the keyboard is in a window with an application title bar and close button says it all.

Macs as the back-end

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:50:41 -0500

I’d be willing to say that this year might be the last year we see major front-end changes in Mac OS X.

Last night it struck me that the Mac desktop is now the equivalent of the tuning console your car mechanic might use to make fine adjustments to your car’s internal systems when you bring it in. The car, obviously enough, is now the iPhone OS.

I don’t think Apple wants to, or even could, eliminate Mac OS X entirely, but they’ve made it painfully obvious with their iPhone OS devices that the common, consumer-facing computer is not going to be running the windowed OS as we know it today.

Apple needs Mac OS X to be that turning panel. It’s the OS for people who make stuff, and focusing on creative arts is what they’ve always done.

But the pressure to make the OS sexy is gone now — the Snow Leopard release is practically proof of this. What’s important now is to make Mac OS X a solid professional’s development platform, and part of solidifying this has been keeping iPhone and iPad development on Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is the back-end to create the iPhone OS front-end, and both are premier experiences.

Soon, the premiere iLife experience won’t be on Mac OS X, it’ll be on iPad. Not immediately — Apple still needs to sell laptops — but it will happen. The only question remaining is when, if ever, iPhone OS metaphors start appearing on Mac OS X, and when these devices change from current laptops to future tablets.

Courier Pagestream UI demo - Uploaded by engadget The...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:26:00 -0500

Courier Pagestream UI demo - Uploaded by engadget

The devil’s in the (shipping) details, however. These renders look awesome, but I’ll reserve the full 2010 Awesomeness Prize until we see some hardware and a live demo.

(For starters, most of the pen usage shown in the renders are hands floating over the device, but none of the writing shows the user resting their hand/wrist down on the surface in the way that most people write. It’s these small ergonomics/usability details that add up and usually put Microsoft stuff behind Apple’s.)

We Miss Sony - Gizmodo Agreed. Odd how much more powerful...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:10:00 -0500

We Miss Sony - Gizmodo

Agreed. Odd how much more powerful PlayStation is as a brand that Sony itself, at this point.

One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:10:58 -0500

One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband:

This is fascinating and worthy of discussion in our industry. Collectively, we’ve screwed up. Badly. What can we do to make computers attractive to the third of our country who don’t use any of our stuff?

Make them less like cars and more like radios.

Remove the maintenace, tweaking, under-the-hood nonsense, and replace them with extremely clear features and use-cases.

(This is why I will be recommending iPads to pretty much anyone who asks, by the way.)

Wisconsin senator critical of NBC handling of online access to Olympics - latimes.com

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:38:24 -0500

Wisconsin senator critical of NBC handling of online access to Olympics - latimes.com:

Yeah, I’m critical of it too.

Kohl said he doesn’t understand why NBC doesn’t offer viewers the opportunity to pay directly for online access to all Olympic coverage.

“I fear that that this practice of locking up certain content only for pay-TV subscribers may be a preview of what is to come with respect to TV programming shown on the Internet, particularly in the context of the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger,” said Kohl.

First glimpse at Symbian^4 YAWN edition. Ok, here’s the...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:45:23 -0500

First glimpse at Symbian^4 YAWN edition.

Ok, here’s the intrinsic problem with Symbian.

In many cases, it’s fine. Updating it is fine. Modernizing it is fine. What’s not fine is that they waited 5 years to do it, and they’re still playing catch up.

What’s here is what everyone else is already doing. Period. Nokia may have a strong brand, but every year they don’t catch up to modern UX standards is another 30 or so handsets that people get to see and potentially switch to.

I wonder how well this shirt sells. May have to update it to...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:24:00 -0500

I wonder how well this shirt sells.

May have to update it to “S60 Users Do It With Grandfathered Technical Support” soon.

"Our industry has continuously produced games with themes and action for teenagers, despite..."

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:19:14 -0500

“Our industry has continuously produced games with themes and action for teenagers, despite statistics that show that gamers are around 30 to 35 years old. It’s high time for our industry to produce games for adults.”

- Guillaume de Fondaumiere, co-chief executive of Quantic Dream

What's so great about Heavy Rain

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:02:00 -0500

Wow, I don’t understand why people keep missing what is significant about Heavy Rain. The latest article I’ve seen claimed it and Wii Sports were not that different.

Now that we’ve all shouted “well, one has a narrative, for starters,” let’s get to the meat of this post. Why are people not “getting” Heavy Rain?

Believe me, this is not something that needs getting. Many people are not going to like it. The complaints seem to stem from the opinion that it is not a game, because the player has no agency in the plot, and the choices you make have very little to do with the story’s outcome.

But let’s step back from this for a second — this is an interactive movie — and so the goal isn’t to let the user control the characters to change story events, it is to let the user steer the characters into and through story events in order to heighten empathy.

Much of the Podtoid cast had their biggest problem with the selection of the Crime Scene chapter for the PSN demo. There was little you did except wander through an overgrown lot near some train tracks, and hit R1 several times to find a few hidden items. You can’t even leave the area until you find them all.

Yet the Crime Scene chapter could easily be seen as scavenger hunt, or even some sort of word search puzzle. Sure, it’s not a great game, but it is one. What Heavy Rain aims to do is have player live in between the lines of the script, sitting close to character intent and finding ways to transfer character emotion into the player by having them virtually walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s raining, it’s miserable. There’s a lot of officers getting in the FBI agent’s way, and he doesn’t want to be wandering around looking for evidence because it seems like he’s hiding something himself. The search game of the Crime Scene is a perfect juxtaposition to him because it is slow and tedious and allows the right kind of introspection on the character to occur as he is mostly alone with his thoughts.

If Heavy Rain fails, it will be because it is simply not a good narrative. If it can’t create a story worth caring about, and if it can’t offer characters that are believable or sympathetic when they are controlled, then no amount of interactivity can save it. It’s a movie after all, and there’s a specific story to be told. If it succeeds, then it should create a level of intimacy with its people & events that hasn’t been reached before.

I’ve heard the game reviewed as “emotionally draining.” Sounds like it did its job right.

BBC: A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:04:00 -0500

BBC: A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services:

designinginnovations:

Bronwyn van der Merwe, Head of Design and User Experience at the BBC, explains the development of their new design system. Thorough.

Agreed; This is a great article. I can’t imagine how exciting it must have been to be a part of developing the new system.

➤ Facebook stumblers

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:39:00 -0500

dwineman:

Many people have Google set as their homepage, or just go there automatically because “that’s where the internet starts.” The difference between the address bar and Google’s input field is lost on them. They’re both things where you type stuff to get places, and it takes a huge amount of sophistication to see past that superficial semantic equivalence. Want a Facebook login? Type that! Wherever! You’ll get there somehow, even if you have to click an extra link. Who cares?

The cognitive load of remembering where to type what is just not worth it to most people when it only saves you a single click (most of the time).

I had quite the conversation about this story at home on Sunday as well. Here’s what I think are also major factors to what happened:

People don’t want URLs: Really, why bother understanding the difference between .com or .net when Google is there? Remember, we’re talking about people introduced to the web after near-perfect search was introduced. Most of “us” learned our internet skills well before web search existed. Hell, even Tim Berners-Lee has apologized for making URLs more complicated that they should be; This is why AOL keywords worked.
People use what we’ve given them: Automatic searches in the location bar. Default start pages with oversized search fields. Search toolbars and text inputs in the upper right. The truth is, unless you want to learn how to write code, you will follow the path of least resistance to get what you want from a browser. Don’t blame them for using the tools you added to make search easier. It’s encouraged behavior, really.
People use Windows, on the whole: And remember, when you type “facebook” you have to hold down a button to visit “http://www.facebook.com” and not “http://facebook/”. The default behavior is broken in an era where computers are not being used primarily in university computer labs. Newer browsers fix this problem, but AFAIK Internet Explorer still has this behavior.

All it takes is one broken experience with a location bar, for a user to get a satisfactory experience from the search bar instead. And even us experts do it too: We try to guess the URL for a product (like Basecamp) and it doesn’t work, so we search.

Now why the hell would a non-expert ever think “Hmmm, let me try and guess this page’s location?”

And after a successful search, why would they think “Hmmm. Let me memorize this code for the page’s location, instead of repeating exactly what I did next time I want to come here.”

No really. Why?

So let’s stop blaming people for not being “smart enough” to figure out our secret website handshakes and start focusing on making it easier to get them to content.

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy Totally...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:02:21 -0500

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy

Totally agree.

"One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital..."

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:21:07 -0500

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real.”

- William Gibson

As recorded by w3schools.com. /via

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:39:40 -0500

As recorded by w3schools.com.

/via

Last thing I'll say about Avatar

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:32:00 -0500

Apparently there’s some Avatar backlash after it took the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Drama. In my buddies’ Chatterous room, we had an epic argument about whether or not Avatar was a good movie. Obviously we netted out that it all depends on your definition of “good,” and how you set your standards for movies. This was my “closing statement”, modified with some of my preceeding thoughts to be a complete blog post:

You can say Avatar is a thrilling action movie, like an Indiana Jones film, where you have fairly one-dimensional enemies like Belloq & the Nazis. But there’s a number of things: first off, Belloq isn’t that one-dimensional, he has a history with Jones and he has a desire for the Ark that supercedes what the Nazis want with it. Ultimately, he’s using them, he gets moments to say so, and that fills in his character.

Secondly, his antagonist role is supported by the Nazi forces which are FAR from one-dimensional; Even if you present Nazis as pure evil, all of WW II comes along with them as subtext, it’s unavoidable. James Cameron doesn’t have this “shortcut”, he’s got to paint everyone in. But instead of drawing clear groups on the Human side he drops the conflict in as entirely Human vs Na’vi, even if Jake, Grace and useless unmemorable third guy are outliers.

The bad guys in Avatar are just bad guys because they’re bad. They want money, and we never actually know what the Unobtainium is used for. Does it push the story along? Sure, if that’s all you want. The general/captain/additional unmemorable character wants nothing more to execute his orders, he doesn’t even get the benefit of being tired of being on Pandora and wanting to go home, he just loves getting to shoot crap down and revels in the destruction he creates.

And this coming from the director who got a honestly moving performance from Arnold Schwartzenegger as an unstoppable killer robot.

It’s not that the storytelling is simple — Hell, Ponyo is a simple story, but it’s also real & honest, and frankly even more imaginative and inventive than Avatar — it’s that Avatar’s storytelling is just flat-out lazy. And that, to me, is a bad movie…or at least a movie that shouldn’t be winning Best Picture awards.

The numbers are ridiculous: In terms of getting new...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:38:00 -0500

The numbers are ridiculous:

In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the single most effective photo type for women.

/via OKCupid’s The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues - CNN.com

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:18:00 -0500

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues - CNN.com:

Spoilers ahead…:

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

“One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality,” Hill said.

This was my primary complaint about the plot of Avatar, even above the whole Mighty Whitey fantasy it lives within: It portrays humans as wholly cruel without good reason, where the outliers of this future either die, or discard their humanity entirely.

By “cruel without good reason,” I mean that squashing a native culture is not in any way balanced by a statement about how the “unobtainium” is necessary to keep humanity alive, or keep Earth going, or anything. The most horrible things in our history were still done in misguided attempts to try and do something good for someone, insanity aside.

It’s clear if Earth is a dead planet (which it’s not made clear, which is part of the problem) then having this material as an energy source is part of a desperate attempt to keep humanity alive. There’s a bigger story behind why a corporation/government would go to such extremes to get this material than just “this shit makes a lot of money.”

I could be wrong: Cameron certainly wants to make a political statement that these kinds of atrocities happen in remote, isolated places where corporations are operating without government oversight, and where reports of such activity will never make it back to the people who could force them to stop. Maybe they are cruel for no reason after all.

So the characters we root for are all aliens, and the humans are without hope. How should the audience related to these characters? They can’t. That’s what this article is highlighting — those who agree with our protagonist are left feeling the only option is to change sides, not to change policies, or beliefs, or habits.

I think Cameron wanted to make the Human -> Na’vi change a symbolic message of “you need to completely change the way you live if you want to make a change” but the human condition is so realized on the one side, that I think this point is getting missed by a lot of people, and what’s left is just plain misanthropy.

The real point about privacy

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:32:00 -0500

Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Anonymous Facebook Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look. I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?

Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.

Rumpus: What did they do?

Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.

Source: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/