Catalina, an Open Source Music Video
Catalina music video by Moullinex, created using a Kinect, Processing, Cinema 4D and After Effects:
Moullinex – Catalina from Moullinex on Vimeo.
Here’s a making-of, including Cinema 4D models and Processing code. (via)
Nokia’s Corporate Culture
Adam Greenfield shares some fascinating insight into Nokia’s corporate culture during his time as head of design direction at the company. I found this bit interesting:
It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons: they’re, I daresay, not even neurocognitively equipped to do so. And yet this is what happened when I was at Nokia and, I would imagine, is happening still.
I daresay with a modicum of regret that he’s probably right about many engineers being neurocognitively ill-equipped for making design decisions…
Pixelfari
Pixelfari transforms browsing into an 8-bit expierence.
The Ephemeral Cloud
I could have sworn i had linked to this back in December after the Delicious-shutdown-kerfuffle, but apparently i haven’t: Connor O’Brien laments the ephemeral nature of the cloud:
We push our lives into the internet, expecting the web to function as a permanent and ever-expanding collective memory, only to discover the web exists only as a series of present moments, every one erasing the last. If your only photo album is Facebook, ask yourself: since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?
He’s right of course: it would be hopelessly naive to trust in cloud storage to preserve our data, but we shouldn’t overlook that there isn’t a single alternative technology that isn’t bound to evaporate at some point over time (cf. the Dead Media Project). Preserving data costs time and money and it requires effort – that’s how it’s always been…
I find his assertion that on the web, every moment erases the last quite interesting. Reminded me of this bit by William Gibson:
If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
Celebrating frontiers in Game Design
Excellent piece by Dan Cook on the state of and near future trends in game design. This struck me as particularly interesting (emphasis mine):
The plethora of screens: eReaders are really just the tip of the iceberg. My electric toothbrush has a screen now and I play a game on it every night. Anything with a screen can play games. They don’t need to be fast screens. They don’t need to be big screens. Great games happen in the player’s head. All we need as game designers is some basic feedback systems and an input method. With that, we can put games anywhere.
Superfluous Instructions
Khoi Vinh recently wrote about the use of instructional screens for explaining a user interface, a recently growing trend especially on iOS and supposedly other touchscreen interfaces as well. One example that i had noticed myself is the introductory screen for the Pulse newsreader:
It doesn’t look bad on first glance, but i doubt it serves its purpose very well. As Khoi suggests, these parenthetical interfaces run up against an immutable law of interface design, that people don’t read interfaces.
Touchscreen interfaces enjoy a certain reputation of being intuitive and approachable, so at first it might be baffling that these interfaces suddenly need to employ these ornate help screens. As Khoi concludes:
The most important idea at the heart of every iPhone, iPad and, to a lesser but still significant extent, every Android device is that they need no explanation. You pick them up and use them. No training course, no certification, and certainly no manual. The apps that run on them should be the same way: just launch them and start using them.
Unfortunately, touchscreen interfaces are often anything but intuitive, as Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen convincingly argued in an article for interactions magazine last year. If you look through the examples provided in Khoi’s piece, most of the problems and challenges these instructional screens try to solve can be traced to poor affordances, poor discoverability and lack of consistency and standards.
I think it’s rather remarkable that Apple managed to ship the iPhone without the need for help screens. I can’t think of a single application shipped with the iPhone that has a help screen, aside from the iPhone user guide hidden among Safari’s bookmarks that no one ever reads.
Readability
Readability – Enjoy Reading, Support Writing from Arc90 on Vimeo.
After my recent complaints about poor reading experiences on the web, i would be seriously remiss not to point out the launch of the new Readability service: The project started out as a humble javascript bookmarklet that reformats webpages for more comfortable reading (similar to what Apple does with Safari Reader, but Readability came up with the idea before Apple). Now the newly launched accompanying online subscription service gives you the option to compensate writers and publishers on a completely voluntary basis by agreeing to a minimal monthly fee of $5, 70% of which will be distributed among the authors and publishers of content you read. I’m not entirely convinced this will work, but i certainly wish them the best of luck.
One thing is slightly annoying about this relaunch though: Apparently the Readability team has decided to hide the original bookmarklet that started everything, as i couldn’t find any prominent links on the website. Even though the bookmarklet doesn’t earn them any money this strikes me as a poor decision, because they could leverage widespread adoption of their bookmarklet to draw new potential customers into the service. In case you can’t find it, the Readability bookmarklet can still be found here, free of charge. And if you’re looking for an alternative, Instapaper also offers a bookmarklet with similar functionality on its extras page, supposedly based on the original Readability code. I personally like the Instapaper bookmarklet better.
Speaking of which, i’m actually somewhat worried about the future of Instapaper. Instapaper offers the same basic functionality as Readability without paid subscriptions, and now its founder Marco Arment is closely collaborating with and acting as an advisor to Readability…
Anyway, for a few more thoughts on the service, i like what Readability developer Richard Ziadne, Anil Dash and Jeffrey Zeldman (both advisors to the company) wrote.
The Great Gatsby for NES
The Great Gatsby for NES is a lovely piece of alternate history game design fiction (is that actually a thing?). Thankfully playable not just on NES but as a flash game in your browser, it’s surprisingly fun. (via everyone)
Spotify Radio
This Spotify radio by Jordi Parra is a thing of beauty. I think i’m most impressed by the packaging, it demonstrates an extraordinary level of refinement and polish. (via)
BoxCar2D is a fun little flash toy that evolves cars using a genetic algorithm.
