This bookmarklet lets you play Asteroids on any webpage. (via)
NYT Opinion Pages, redesigned
Khoi Vinh discusses his last project at the New York Times before he quit his job as design director of nytimes.com: the redesign of The Opinion Pages.
The Nieman Journalism Lab thinks it’s moving in the direction of an app-inspired design:
The web redesign looks an awful lot like an iPad app: stories set into big touchable-looking blocks; non-standard web typography; more white space and more room for graphics than 99 percent of newspaper websites offer.
Considering how visually crowded and noisy many large commercial web properties are, that might be a good thing.
Soylent
A word processor made out of people:
Consider my mind blown. (via)
Postcards from the Future
Processing for Android Tutorial
CreativeApplications.net has a thorough tutorial on getting started with Processing development for Android. I will have to take a closer look at this.
Later: Create Digital Motion has another tutorial for Processing on Android.
Mozilla Seabird
Mozilla Labs Concept Series presents the Seabird concept phone:
I find the process much more interesting than the phone though.
Ten Years
Ten Years by Brett Jordan. (via)
The September Reading List
I’m a huge fan of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s The Sunday Papers features and i also enjoyed doing the Reading List after my vacation in August, so i figured i might as well try my hand at turning something like this into an ongoing, semi-regular feature.
So here it is, the September Reading List. A selection of noteworthy articles that i’ve enjoyed but not written about during the last month (with bits of August thrown in for good measure):
- My piece on iPad magazines for Icon’s September 2010 issue. Matt Jones of BERG (who created the Popular Science iPad app) writes about the future of digital magazines.
- Secrets of the Little Blue Box: A 1971 Esquire article by Ron Rosenbaum about phone phreaking. Reading this opened my eyes about numerous idiosyncracies of early cyberpunk.
- Grading the Teachers: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?: The L.A. Times analyzed which teachers help students learn and which hold them back. It’s interesting how some critics of this analysis claim that standardized tests are a poor metric for a teacher’s performance without questioning the validity of standardized tests to assess student’s performance.
- Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds: Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair takes a look at the greek debt crisis and how it came about. Prior to this article i had not known about the Vatopaidi scandal.
- War Games: Video Games That Bring Afghanistan Home: The New York Times discusses the depiction of contemporary war in modern video games such as the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor franchises.
- How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker: The Guardian demonstrates that as long as you don’t care who you’re stalking, Foursquare can tell you a scary amount of details about arbitrary strangers.
- Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined: Trends and current examples of transmedia storytelling.
- The internet: Everything you ever need to know doesn’t tell you everything there is to know, but it’s a decent start.
- Consumed – Objects with Back Stories: The New York Times looks at early incarnations of internet-of-things services and platforms. Not including Thinglink seems like a curious omission.
- Forking is a Feature: Anil Dash discusses the cultural significance of forking, not just for software development, but other creative endeavors as well.
- Revenge of the nerds: Should we listen to futurists or are they leading us towards ‘nerdocalypse’? The Independent reports from the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! The Inside Story of the Facebook Movie: I remain skeptical about The Social Network, despite reading largely positive things about it.
- Apple Blinks in the Living Room: Can Apple untangle the unwieldy mess of rivaling standards and technologies in the living room? Khoi Vinh doubts it.
- Where Realtime Worlds went wrong, part 2, part 3: Unsparing analysis of what went wrong during the development of APB, by Luke Halliwell, an ex-developer at Realtime Worlds. An interesting study of software development failure.
- Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup: Basically exercise, diet, meditation, time management. NSR meditation sounds interesting to me.
iPad vs Kindle
I get asked this a lot: “should I buy an iPad or should I buy a Kindle?” The TLDR; answer is: no, you should buy both.
iPad vs Kindle « Tempus Fugit by Mark Jaquith.
Finishing a Game
Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame) shares 15 tips on how to finish a game. Sound advice, and many of his tips are not limited to games development in their applicability:
We’ve all had that feeling about at least one game, comic book, movie, etc., that comes out: “Gee, I could do better than this! This is overrated.” But it’s important to take a step back and realize that, hey, they put in the time to finish a project and I haven’t. That’s at least one thing they might be better than me at, and it’s probably why they have the recognition I don’t! If you treat finishing like a skill, rather than simply a step in the process, you can acknowledge not only that it’s something you can get better at, but also what habits and thought processes get in your way.
