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It’s been a while since I’ve read about a PS2 game that actually sounds interesting. No surprise this one’s from the creators of ICO. To buy.
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Social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia goes live. I was already in the beta, and liked it (especially the look & feel), but haven’t made the switch from del.icio.us yet. Why? One: no automated posting to my blog and two: no way to manage (delete, merge, spl
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Old(ish) article on a few mobile social networking services. Plazes is also mentioned. Nice overview of an area that isn’t getting much attention (yet).
Month: February 2006
Plazes sidebar redesign
Plazes, my favourite underhyped European web application have updated their sidebar. I like the fact that they changed the ranges shown (here, 1 km, 3 km, 10 km, 50 km). Now I can see all the way to Utrecht from Amsterdam. I also like the new “friends somewhere else” section (see the screenshot). They’ve also clustered people at the same plaze, and (all the way at the bottom) have now included a tag cloud-esque city list. Very web 2.0!
Nerd wannabe
Damn. Nerdiger dan Tom, maar lang niet zo nerdig als Edgar. 32 punten: “Not nerdy, but definitely not hip.” Hoe durven ze?!
links for 2006-02-18
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Naar Voren wijst Nederlandse webbouwers op de nieuwe toegankelijke Rabobank site. Jammer dat tegenover dit technische hoogstandje geen geïnspireerd ontwerp staat. De site maakt qua uiterlijk en interactie weinig indruk op me.
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Who would expect Philips getting good press from no other than 37signals? Ryan points out an idiot-proof universal remote.
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Drew reviews three online collaborative writing tools: “Writeboard, on the other hand truly did get out of the way and let me and my friends get right into it. If they could just sort out the problems making collaboration impossible then I’m sure it’l
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I agree with Regine: I would love to go to the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition in London.
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Campfire launches. I’ve registered, but have yet to try it out. Looks interesting (again) though.
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How social is gaming in a massive multiplayer online game? Not as much as you’d expect — in WoW at least.
links for 2006-02-17
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“You must prevent your products from becoming complex and frustrating. Yet you must continue to innovate to differentiate your product from the competition. Add more, but only if you sweat the details, focus on solutions, and keep it easy-to-use.” — I ca
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Naa Voren wijst Nederlandse webbouwers op de nieuwe toegankelijke Rabobank site. Jammer dat tegenover dit technische hoogstandje geen geïnspireerd ontwerp staat. De site maakt qua uiterlijk en interactie weinig indruk op me.
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Who would expect Philips getting good press from no other than 37signals? Ryan points out an idiot-proof universal remote.
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Drew reviews three online collaborative writing tools: “Writeboard, on the other hand truly did get out of the way and let me and my friends get right into it. If they could just sort out the problems making collaboration impossible then I’m sure it’l
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I agree with Regine: I would love to go to the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition in London.
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Campfire launches. I’ve registered, but have yet to try it out. Looks interesting (again) though.
Rojo redesign
Rojo has redesigned. It all feels a lot cleaner and more compact (as well as slightly faster). Headline scanning’s improved quite a bit.
The one glaring mistake I’ve noticed is that headers no longer link to the original stories, but are some kind of permalink to the post inside Rojo. You have to click a link beside it, labelled “via [feed name]”. Silly choice!
Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour 15 feb 2006
A few shots taken at last night’s Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour are up at Flickr. We had a nice “Battle of the Interfaces” — Scopus and Aquabrowser facing off to see what’s best — search or browse? The results were… inconclusive. But good fun was had by all.
Far more better looking shots are over at Guido’s.
links for 2006-02-16
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Story of the day: Google buys Measure Map, and employs Jeff Veen in the process. A loss for Adaptive Path, but it does give Google some much needed weight in their secret war on Yahoo!
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“it’s hard to build a community around crappy, mundane, and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try.”
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Camino has gone 1.0. I’ve used it for a while as my primary browser, and like it a lot. However, I keep coming back to Firefox for it’s great extensions. Plus: half of the time I’m on a PC — it’s nice to at least browse the same way on both platforms.
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“It appears that there is some debate about the classification of this application, and as it does require user activation, it appears to fall into the Trojan classification, rather than self-propogating through any particular vulnerability in OS X.”
links for 2006-02-15
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“Just as few people can fully master the skills of both graphic design and IA, few people will master the skills of both IA and IxD. It serves both organizations and practitioners for people to specialize.”
Thinking about IxD patterns
Having just posted about a new pattern library; my mind has been occupied a bit by the role of patterns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD problems, I tend to first try to tackle the issue myself. Then, I usually refer to some examples and / or patterns, to see if I’ve missed any obvious caveats. After that, I usually fine-tune the solution. What I like about patterns is that they give a clear outline of the most common way of handling a given problem. I do think that they’ll never be a replacement for some genuine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when interaction designers will be replaced by a huge pattern library…