Ben Kuchera, writing for The PA Report:
I took my son to Math and Science night at his school last night and saw three kids playing MineCraft on tablets or phones. They discuss what’s happening on their respective servers at lunch. It’s a huge hit, and an innovative platform.
It also would have been impossible on any existing console.
MineCraft may have ultimately come to the Xbox 360, but the game breaks many of Microsoft’s rules.
Influential designer Andy Clarke gives a great talk, and his slide deck all about responsive web design has a lot of smart ideas I’ve never considered before. Granted it’s not nearly the same as a live talk or full day workshop, but it’s worth a quick scan for almost any web designer or developer who wants to refine their responsive skills.
In case you thought all top selling games were first person shooters, here’s Brian Crecente for Polygon:
And perhaps that’s the more important point: Not all video games are for everyone and not all of them are violent. The game industry produces a surprisingly eclectic mix of titles.
Nearly 18 million copies of Minecraft have been sold. While last year’s top-selling games included Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, half of the top games of 2012 weren’t violent. Those non-violent games include sports titles, dancing games, even a Lego game. And that’s just counting games sold in stores in the U.S. When you start to look at mobile gaming, where Angry Birds remains the king of the platform, overtly violent games become even less prevalent.
There’s a reason that this long interview with Vulture‘s Mary Kaye Schilling is getting so talk online. It’s because it’s great, candid, and moves in directions I never would have expected (e.g. Soderbergh loves reading US in airports).
If you’re writing a web app and care at all about the iOS market, startup images are important. Yet when searching around for more detailed help on my Blue Drop weather app, it was hard to get a definitive answer on both code and image requirements for different iOS devices.
But when I stumbled on Taylor Fausak’s site after a few Google searches, the answer was obvious. On this post Taylor goes over proper startup images for just the iPhone 5, but he also wrote earlier about how to handle other iOS devices.
The new gaming site Polygon made a big splash when it launched late last year, and deservedly so. Not only is the editorial content solid, but its web design is bold and well thought out. This post is a very detailed breakdown of the initial design planning workflow, with initial mood boards, wireframes, and sketches.
Steven Bradley of Vanseo Design examines how exactly auto in the context of CSS offset works. It’s an issue that can easily mess up the location of absolutely positioned elements, especially, as Steven highlights, for drop down menus and popups. Worth a read for almost anyone who works with CSS and page layout regularly.
A very well put together pdf/iBook download for web designers. Great tips here on basic color settings to ensure your Photoshop and Illustrator work stays color consistent, proper alignment among vector objects, good use of layer effects and much more.
Ask almost any front end web developer: once you get deep in a complex, ongoing project with a lot of CSS, unused selectors can be a problem. We’re naturally inclined to keep on bulking up our projects with cool CSS3 transformations and responsive media queries, but it’s decidedly unglamorous to prune what’s no longer needed.
That what makes this little Firefox plugin such a good start. It’s far from comprehensive – you only can really search for unused selectors in the immediate scope of the page you’re on – but it has come in handy.
A nice ongoing feature over at Press Play with video essays and written analysis of this year’s Oscar nominees. I especially liked their breakdown of the supporting actress category; with all this attention focused on Anne Hathaway, it’s easy (and unjustified) to forget why the other four nominees are even there, especially Jackie Weaver.