Burning Crusade
Previews at gamespy and ign. Blood elves are the new horde race, apparently to attract more players to the horde with “pretty” characters. I’m not sure what to think of that.
Teamspeex, finally
Playing online multiplayer games on a mac? Ever wondered whether your comrades on windows- and linux-boxes are bitching about you behind your back over teamspeak? Missing out on great loot because you’re completely shut out of your party’s chitter chatter and you can’t stake your claim?
Fret no longer and head over to the teamspeex open beta. Someone has gone to great lengths and finally written a teamspeak client for mac os x! It’s a little rough around the edges, but it works surprisingly well.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re lying in bed, desperately trying to fall asleep because – omfg – it’s 6am already again and you really don’t need to mess up your circadian even more, but of course you can’t sleep, so your mind starts wandering off on some weird tangents and suddenly you catch yourself drafting blog posts in your head. Some of them even sound good. And when you wake up the next morning/afternoon they’re gone.
Fittingly, this post was conceived while lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. And it doesn’t read too good now that it’s in front of me on the screen, i probably shouldn’t make this a habit. Anyway, off it goes for the prying eyes of my readers, october’s been quiet enough…
Is your weblog usable?
Jakob Nielsen’s top ten weblog design mistakes – i’m guilty of at least seven, but i also don’t agree with all of them (mixing topics is bad? Sheesh…). Nonetheless most are good and reasonable.
Video isn’t mobile
Hell froze over again and – wham – here’s the video ipod in all its boxy glory. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though. Sure, tossing in a new feature won’t stop people from buying the best portable audio player in the world, a hallmark of modern design and style icon of our days, but i don’t think that people will actually use the video feature much (update: i should probably clarify that i’m talking about video on-the-go – hooking up your ipod to your tv seems perfectly reasonable to me).
In my humble opinion one of the keys to successful design for mobility is to keep in mind that mobile devices shouldn’t take you out of context, they should be non-immersive in usage. Or as Janne Jalkanen puts it: mobile devices are background devices, whereas laptops are foreground devices (via Russell Beattie). Interestingly this seems to be something the cellphone industry really gets and the personal computer industry doesn’t. Of course there are those who argue that ipods don’t qualify as mobile but merely as portable in the first place, simply because they haven’t achieved the same “bring-along-everywhere” status as cellphones…
While i’m ranting about apple’s new ipods i might as well chime in on the new imacs: integrated camera – it’s about time, hopefully this’ll make it into displays and laptops in the foreseeable future. No integrated dial-up modem – i was expecting to see this happen sooner than later, i wonder if their laptops are next. Front row – interesting to see the imac take center-stage as apple’s media center where everyone expected the mac mini to take on this roll six months ago. Kinda bold to create a living room media hub without integrated tv-tuner – either they’re really confident in their itunes video store or Steve Jobs really hates tv.
Mobile Processing
Few weeks ago mobile processing launched. What’s processing you ask?
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.
Mobile processing brings this programming environment to cellphones. It’s in its early stages and so far only available for windows, but someone already put up instructions on how to get this working on macs (i haven’t tested this yet). As processing builds on java, mobile processing builds on j2me and your programs (or sketches in processing lingo) can therefore be readily deployed to millions of cellphones in circulation. Good news if you’re into mobile applications, the more development options the merrier.
Ning, a social app playground
Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.
I’m still waiting for a beta developer account, so final judgement has to be deferred. Glancing over their developer docs it seems that you’ll need quite some php knowledge to build anything useful, which makes me wonder who’ll end up building stuff on this platform – they offer little more than free hosting and yet another development framework. Web developers probably already have both and it doesn’t look easy enough to get someone without some programming experience going.
Most of the app-ideas on their website are just clones of successful applications like craigslist, del.icio.us and flickr and i’m unconvinced that the web needs more of the same, but i don’t see this getting mass traction anyway (which isn’t necessarily bad). Niche apps seem like a better fit.
The idea of an app-development playground seems really promising for prototyping and experimenting. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.