Weblog

Posted at 3:07am on 29 Aug 2008

RBGL Sprites v1.1 Released

We've just released RBGL Sprites 1.1, a major update to our open source 2D game engine for REALbasic.

Posted at 5:16pm on 28 Aug 2008

The Conversation I'm Always Having

What do you do?

I’m a web developer

A web designer?

No, a web developer

What’s the difference?

I don’t design sites, I build them

But you know how to make websites right?

Yes

My aunt needs a website for her home business selling knitted jumpers for cats...

If I build you a website it will look rubbish except in view source mode, take six months for me to build during my evenings and weekends and cost £2000

Erm... how about I pay you in beer?

Sigh... OK

Oh and can you make it green with flashing Comic Sans titles and animated cat clip-art?

No.

Posted at 2:20pm on 20 Aug 2008

Duck Porn

Microsoft Adcenter demonstrates the advantages of inserting human moderators between user-generated content and customer facing systems, as well as providing an interesting answer to the question "who would use MSN Search instead of Google, and what would they use it for?"

It must be comforting for Microsoft to know that although Google is trouncing them horribly for general search mindshare, they’ve cornered the market in nude female midgets and duck porn.

Posted at 10:12am on 15 Aug 2008

The Best Available Ampersand

This man really loves his ampersands!

Still, it's a simple trick and it looks nice so why not? I'll be using this on my sites from now on (when I remember to).

Posted at 11:38am on 14 Aug 2008

The Great Divide

A brilliant article about the importance of integrating engineering considerations at the design phase of a project.

The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. Yes, in theory, the design team should come up with a perfect solution and the engineering team should be smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and neither should ever have to talk to each other. The resulting product would look exactly as designed and would work perfectly. Keep on trucking you radical dreamer. Here’s a quarter for the jukebox.

I particularly enjoyed this:

As an engineer, nothing infuriates me more than hearing a designer talk about something as “an engineering problem”. You absolute bastard. Why are you designing something that you aren’t even sure will work? Why bother opening Photoshop if what you’re producing is little more than a fantasy-world mockup? Do you have any idea how little talent it takes to envision perfect solutions?

And on the flip side...

Not to let engineers off the hook. Guilty as charged, the lot of them. Oh yes, that problem is very hard to code. I’m so sorry you can’t Google a solution for it. Amazon no help either, huh? Forced to come up with your own solution to the problem. Well, that must just suck. Actual creative thinking. Whiteboards and late nights. God forbid you work for your paycheck.

Posted at 11:33am on 12 Aug 2008

Greased Lightning

Amazing slow motion video of a lightning strike.

The lightning can be seen slowly making its way through the atmosphere, searching for a conductive channel to the ground. When it finally finds the surface, a massive bolt discharges back up towards the cloud, following the ionised path of the initial strike.

Posted at 10:34am on 04 Aug 2008

User Interface Design

Old but brilliant post from Joel Spolsky on the subject of user interface design:

When you design user interfaces, it's a good idea to keep two principles in mind:

1. Users don't have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn't read it.
2. In fact, users can't read anything, and if they could, they wouldn't want to.

Posted at 5:23pm on 01 Aug 2008

Shapeways

Another company offering mail-order bespoke manufacturing: Shapeways

I think it's safe to say that its only a matter of time before these 3D printing technologies become cheap enough to use at home. The jury is still out on how long it will take for them to be general-purpose enough to achieve widespread appeal however.

Still, I'm cheered by how much the technology seems to have moved on even in the few months since I made my bold prediction.

Posted at 2:47pm on 01 Aug 2008

Bright'n'Shiny

This may be the most insightful thing I've ever read on Rands' or any other website: The Taste of the Day

Humans suffer from bright'n'shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost.