March 2010
42 posts
2 tags
http://thebobloblawlawblog.blogspot.com/ →
Such a wasted opportunity.
Resquare for iPhone →
This is my current “move my hands and make small decisions” game. It’s a little bit like Blocked, if you’ve ever played that game. This one’s certainly different, though — the idea is to take the shapes that you’re given and make a square out of them.
The game’s free for the first level (so you can test it and see how you like the mechanic and the...
Slideways for iPhone →
Makes a pretty slideshow of images based on a Flickr user, Flickr Explore, an RSS feed or a webpage.
This on an iPad would be great. On an iPhone, it’s still pretty cool. I mean, come on, it’s a dollar.
1 tag
iPad Guided Tours →
There was something in the first iPad video that got me — the way the people typed on the on-screen keyboard. I thought it might have been a one-off thing, but it crops up occasionally in these guided tours too. It was some weird hunt-n-peck-but-with-two-or-three-fingers way of typing. It looked totally uncomfortable.
Using my middle finger to type ‘o’? What the fuck is that...
“This weekend I was back to the project: wrestling with MS Word formatting and...”
– Andrew Fitzgerald, cracking wise in an update to his Kickstarter project.
1 tag
http://web.archive.org/web/20080822184333/http://ww... →
Should’ve thought of this before.
If I was Merlin, I’d tell 5ives.com to redirect to the archive.org version. At least then people could see the old stuff instead of just a Wordpress login.
Just a thought.
“You mean it’s not connected to the internet? That’s like a...”
– Me, watching Steve Jobs say “Although this product is born to network, it also is a beautiful standalone product” as he introduces the iMac in 1998. In 2010, a computer without internet connectivity is just a very expensive paperweight.
Length of title sequences in sitcoms over time
Is it just me or did title sequences in sitcoms get shorter between the ’90s and now? I did a bit of non-scientific research to try and find out. My results for the ’90s are probably a bit biased towards shows from then that I watched often (and therefore remembered well enough to include in the test). I threw in a few oldies as well for good measure just to really drive home the point...
Five Reasons I Want 5ives to Come Back
It was really really funny.
It introduced me to one of my favourite songs ever. (From memory, the category was “Five Songs I’d Like To See A Couple Have As The First Dance At Their Wedding” or something.)
I can’t make my own funny lists of five things.
See what I mean? That last one was barely even a reason!
And that one definitely wasn’t a reason! And...
Origins of the Apple Human Interface →
Warning: this thing is long and a bit technical (know what Smalltalk is? Then this is the lecture for you), but if you’re interested like I am, it’s worth it. Chuck it into your Instapaper and read it in bits.
That was a binary pun.
I’m considering collecting all this early Lisa/Macintosh-era Apple stuff I’ve got bookmarked. Maybe its own Tumblr or something?
2 tags
2 tags
First Principles of Interaction Design →
Fitts’ law dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out.
The proof is explained in A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts:
Microsoft, Sun, and others have made the decision to mount the menu bar on the window, rather than at the top of the display, as Apple did. They made this decision...
saxparts:
Meat Loaf — All Revved Up With No...
Watchmobile-dl screencast on Vimeo
mobile-dl is a kind of Instapaper for rich media.
You’re out and about, away from your computer, and you see on your iPhone that someone made a video you want to watch. You don’t have time (or bandwidth) to watch it now on your phone, but you do want to watch it later.
Using your iPhone, just add the URL of the video file (or audio file, or anything...
4 tags
Inside Macintosh Volume I
This book arrived today in the mail.
I kinda have a thing for the original Macintosh. There’s so much history surrounding it. There’s the stories, the signatures, the ad, the demo. This thing is an iconic product.
To help developers stand on the shoulders of giants and make great applications for the Mac, Apple published Inside Macintosh in 1985. Much like Apple’s...
Arcade Fire — Wake Up (Live at the Enmore...
Articles [iTunes Link] →
Looks great, gorgeous icon, and works like a charm — but here’s my favourite feature:
Geolocation + Wikipedia = “Show me things around me that have Wikipedia articles written about them.”
Genius!
http://mindgrapes.net/ →
I can’t remember where I heard about this, but, seriously, this is one of my favourite single-page websites.
Jack: Jack Welch has such unparalleled management skills they named Welch’s Grape Juice after him, because he squeezes the sweetest juice out of his workers’ mind grapes.
Liz: That doesn’t even make sense.
Jack: No, it doesn’t, does it. I wrote it down in the...
http://movieclips.com/ →
For a year, the team at MOVIECLIPS has worked tirelessly to collect clips and make them completely searchable by actor, title, genre, occasion, action, mood, character, theme, setting, prop, and even dialogue. This makes it simple to find a scene fast.
I am not being even slightly facetious when I say that this website fills a very real void in my life. So many conversations I’ve had...
"Open to View" vs "Open to Edit"
Some files can be opened in two perfectly valid ways: opened to be viewed and opened to be edited. The two big examples I can think of are images and HTML files. You either want to look at an image or you want to edit it in Acorn or whatever. You either want to load a webpage or you want to edit it.
Is there some easy way that I can tell OS X to open a file with a different program using some...
http://fiatdev.com/2008/07/29/quicklook-preview-for... →
Markdown plugin for Mac OS X’s Quick Look. Super handy.
“Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five...”
– Seth Godin. This is one of the things I try to remind myself when I’m sweating programming or writing or something else — the fact that you actually think and care about getting good at this stuff means you’re already ahead of 90% of the pack. Not that I’m congratulating...
Idea
Idea: a t-shirt, on the front of which is an Alien (you know, the one in-between the facehugger and the holy-shit-that-thing-is-fucking-huge stages) bursting out from what is seemingly the wearer’s chest.
No jokes, no witty one-liner on the back, no snarky cross-reference to a video game — just a simple homage to a classic film.
(I did 0.0 research before I posted this — if...
February 2010
42 posts
http://www.martinjetpack.com/ →
And people say we’re not in The Future yet.
http://oonce-oonce.com/ →
Warning: full-page Flash.
Totally worth it though.
http://github.com/philc/vimium →
Chrome + Vim = Vimium.
Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.
Tried it this morning and it works great. If Chrome was my main browser, I’d probably be all over this.