04.11.12 |
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Yannick Lejacq, writing for Kill Screen:
Each of these games operates less from a real sense of story than a suggestion of a narrative. Temple Run is little more than an endlessly long expansion of that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford runs away from the boulder (except instead of a boulder it’s a bunch of angry spirit-chimps that are chasing after you). Canabalt, by contrast, sort of feels like the early scenes of The Matrix or The War of the Worlds. Something bad is happening and it involves giant evil robots. You’re not sure why you’re running, or where you’re supposed to go. In both, you just keep going. Instead of words, there are only frantic footsteps and the occasional grunt of effort.
Well written, fairly thought provoking essay on the simplicity of both popular iOS games. Yannick also makes a case for the addictive qualities of running, both in game and in real life.
04.11.12 |
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Jean-Louis Gassée:
How long before customers look left, look right, see everyone with the same phone or tablet and start itching for something different? My friend Peter Yared contends that the trend has already started in the UK where the “18-25 class” now favors the smorgasbord of Samsung devices as a relief from the iPhone uniform.
I appreciate what Jean-Louis Gassée is after here but the argument doesn't quite stand up.
Apple's strength derives from its focus, iterating on a few core products endlessly. Multiple iPhone sizes don't mesh with that philosophy.
Besides, the iPhone gets a cosmetic refresh almost every year to keep things interesting. If demand gets high enough, Apple could always crank out a few iPod like color variations alongside the requisite white and black.
04.10.12 |
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Christina Warren, Mashable:
To be clear, I could not be happier for the Instagram team. They earned their success. The service is worth every penny. I’m genuinely glad that the team will get to reap the benefits of its hard work.
And buying Instagram was a great business decision from Facebook’s perspective. As I remarked on Twitter, why try to build a competing photo app when you can just buy the best and most viral?
Still, as a user, I can’t help but wonder: how long before Instagram becomes just another Facebook app? How much time until everything that made the service so special disappears into the ether?
As an early adopter, I’ve watched far too many of my favorite apps and services suffer. They have shut down or evolved into something completely different after being acquired by a bigger company.
04.10.12 |
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Clever, streamlined note taking app from Agile Tortoise. Its speed is really slick; I’m able to write a quick note almost as fast as I tap the icon, and it’s exportability to Markdown really comes in handy for WordPress on the go. With a single action I can easily fire off a message as a tweet in Tweetbot, a nice touch.
Nevertheless, a lack of Dropbox integration is pretty much a deal breaker for me at this point. I can manually copy clipboard contents over to Notesy, but it’s cumbersome and it largely defeats the speed benefit this app has over others. I really liked Ben Brooks’ suggestion on an integration path:
I want Drafts to have a button that I can send the .txt file for the Draft to a folder in my Dropbox. Not every note needs to go there, but I want to be able to send one if needed.
If Drafts gains Dropbox functionality in a later version, I’d probably give it another shot. Then again, my workflow is far more Dropbox centric than probably most. It’s well worth a look for almost anyone else, especially at its very reasonable $0.99 price.
04.10.12 |
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Tech writer Garnett Murray:
[Facebook’s] design sensibilities are minimalistic, but that doesn’t make them any less excellent. The problem is that while they do an excellent job of hitting their desired goals with design and products, they don’t set their goals high enough to begin with.
Exactly. My editorial today was more positive in terms of wins for design and development. Yet Garnett nails more eloquently (and with more force) reservations I touched on near the end of my piece.
04.10.12 |
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Designer Oliver Reichenstein on the redesign of Information Architects:
In the course of simplifying the site, we connected reading time to the scrollbar.
When you scroll down, "Reading Time x Minutes" turns into "Remaining x Minutes" At the end of the page it says "Thank you" and offers the choice to go to Home or to the Blog Article Overview.In order to not disturb the continuity of reading the reading time counter stays hidden if you scroll less than 1 1/2 pages.
This is exactly the kind of obsession the web industry needs. Not for every job or every site, granted, but you need an outlier to change the game.
04.09.12 |
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Lori Houston, O’Reilly:
The last question touches on a bit of early O’Reilly history. Edie Freedman (now O’Reilly’s Creative Director) was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles–sed and awk?–that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.”
While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. “That’s sed and awk!”
She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.
I’ve always been curious why O’Reilly books have always been synonymous with animals on the cover; now we know.
04.09.12 |
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Ian Grey, writing for Press Play:
To me, Rouge! Is a traditional musical, except with twice as many shots run at the speed of a trance remix. The Transporter is a Euro-trash version of a John Woo cartoon. And Friday Night Lights with graceful camera? Nope. Boring. We’d never be able to slink into those sizzling Texas mini-worlds on network time. And I’ve not yet mentioned Paul W.S. Anderson’s jaw-dropper of a surprise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, one of the greatest uses of multi-level geometry and spatiality in cinema I can recall seeing, where oneattack scene features twenty or so color-coded Milla Jovoviches attacking hundreds of color-coded bad guys, and it’s not even a high point.
Chaos, I think, has been evolving.
He’s got a point. Much maligned “chaos cinema” would technically embrace the Bourne films. And 28 Weeks Later. True, the ratio of bad to good films in the chaos canon is staggeringly high, but let’s not completely overlook what’s great.
04.09.12 |
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Laurie Segall, CNN:
Johnnie Manzari, a prominent user interface designer for more than a decade, says he gets weekly phone calls from people asking him to recommend good designers.
“There’s a huge demand for finding talent,” he says. “Just like with engineering, one of the reasons it’s been so difficult is there just aren’t many people that are that good. Not only are people looking for designers more than they used to, but the bar they’re willing to accept has gone up.”
Several of the industry’s power players have been on design-focused shopping sprees.
This whole article reeks of being about six months to a year behind coverage in tech news sites like Engadget and Hacker News. Many traditional “engineering heavy” companies, most notably Google and Dropbox, have seen their design focus ramp sharply upward as soon as early 2011. Around then or by that summer, there were a lot of websites and apps that saw a serious bump in usability and their aesthetic quality.
I’d argue a interesting issue, largely sidestepped by CNN, is why design salaries still don’t equalize that of developers, at least in more entry level positions. It’s a hard nut to crack, yet I find the disparity, given design’s (much deserved) increasing prominence in tech land, increasingly difficult to justify.
04.09.12 |
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I'm increasingly seeing placeholder label free forms proliferate online; it's inevitable given the Apple Store's heavy usage and the form style's compact, minimal approach. Yet in the process, developers shouldn't forget the basics; nice tip here by 456 Berea Street.