Archive: December, 2012

Face-off: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on Wii U

Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter:

In every COD game we’ve looked at since Infinity Ward’s groundbreaking work in the original Modern Warfare, we’ve seen an Xbox 360 advantage over the PlayStation 3 versions. Up until now, our supposition has been that the architecture thrives on the more powerful Xenos graphics core in the Microsoft platform. However, in Wii U we now find ourselves looking at a console with what we’re told possesses a significant bump in GPU performance over the old AMD design in the 360, and yet the veteran hardware still commands an easy lead. Lack of experience with the new console and work-in-progress dev tools will play a part in these results, but it could well be that the Wii U’s lackluster CPU is also a contributory factor.

Gaming is a lot more than sheer horsepower and tech stats (just ask Apple), but this is very bad news for the Wii U. How will it compete against new consoles from Microsoft and Sony next year?

Awaken the productivity beast in Alfred

As I’ve said repeatedly here, on Twitter and elsewhere, Alfred is simply amazing. I can’t really think of any other single app that has impacted my daily workflow so significantly for the better. Pedro Lobo over at Mac AppStorm goes over some of the baiscs.

Games are art: Rock Band, and its history, prove it

Ben Kuchera writes a compelling argument for why select games should be considered art (though before I read this Rock Band was not necessarily in that list). This was my favorite part:

This is why you can’t argue for or against games as an art form without taking the time to play through the games themselves. I’ve seen clever people at cocktail parties claim that a few shapes on a canvas can’t be art, and this is usually combined with a sneering contempt for what passes for “art” in our modern times… although it seems like that argument has been going on for the past century or so. There is an intense difference between seeing an image of a Jackson Pollock painting in a book and coming upon a Jackson Pollock painting in a gallery.

Sub-pixel text rendering

From Mac/iOS app developer Bjango’s blog, a solid primer on why sub-pixel antialiasing – still fairly common on Chrome and the PC world – is on its way out. This part really surprised me:

WebKit on OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when animating, often resulting in a visual glitch when it starts and stops, unless standard antialiasing is set using CSS. OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when using CoreAnimation’s layer backed views.

Now I know why some of my CSS3 font animations can run a bit off; turns out it was for good reason.

Configuring Sublime Text 2

Developer Ross Hunter writes a good starting point for some Sublime basics you’ll want under your belt early when starting off with this powerful text editor. That Sublime ‘fuzzy finder’ kicked off with Cmd+T is a life saver.

Code smells in CSS

This article compiles a great set of tips on what to avoid when writing solid CSS. His advice on absolute values is a must read. I haven’t read much from author Harry Roberts before, but after reading this excellent article, I’m following this guy closely.

Designing with code

Designer Jeremy Bell from Teehan + Lax:

Throughout my entire career, every company I’ve worked at has separated designers and developers into separate departments, each focused exclusively on their discipline…Technology is continuously reshaping the canvas on which we design, and yet these two disciplines continue to be treated as disparate.

Jeremy goes onto to map a new approach for their company, one where designers work in HTML, CSS, Git and a fully self contained development environment. If you thought “design in browser” was a fantasy, think again.