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Jimmy Wales talks about the vision behind wikipedia and the future of free culture at the Long Now Foundation.
Month: May 2006
MacBook at a glance
So today I dropped by both Apple stores that have recently sprung up in the centre of my hometown to check out the new MacBook. My thoughts in a nutshell:
The shiny screen isn’t as shiny as the xblack ones on Sony’s Vaios, I actually kind of liked it.
The matte finish on the black MacBook really does get all oily and smudgy, like Derek already pointed out a while ago.
The new keyboard looks great. The spacing between the keys doesn’t bother me since I have big hands, but the flat surface of the keys is an annoyance. Interestingly, the guy at the shop told me that the new keyboard is supposed to prevent the keys from touching the screen when closed – which is the only real problem I have with my current 12” iBook G4.
All in all it looks like a really sweet piece of hardware. Nevertheless I think I’ll wait to see what problems spring up with the first generation and when those are fixed, probably take the plunge.
links for 2006-05-20
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Coates comments on Paul Graham’s XTech talk. Is his take on startups essenially a political one, or does it spring from experience? Coates thinks the latter is the case and goes on to explore suitable places for startups to spring up.
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Danah Boyd worries about new legislation that bans youth from accessing social media sites. Are there organisations aimed at defending social software users’ rights?
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Metcalfe objects to a New Scientist article focussing on the security problems with mashups. He thinks that mashups are too experimental for them to be concerned about hackers and such. Regulation would only stifle their development at this stage.
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Malarkey wants you to upload examples of newspapers to Flickr and tag them newspapertypography.
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Michael Arrington reviews Google Notebook and wonders why they haven’t included tagging. My guess is they’ve deliberately gone with a single category per post-scheme to set GN apart from the competition. However, I agree that this results in a far greater
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Dan Cederholm talks about his recently launched project Cork’d – a social wine tasting site. Great idea, nice clear design, I’ve signed up and will give it a try soon.
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A review of the new MacBook. People seem to disagree whether the following are improvements: shiny screen, new spaced out keys and matte finish on the black model. I’ll check them out myself soon.
Signals from the Leapfrog offices
Or in other words, what I’ve been up to, besides keeping myself busy over at Info.nl.
- Reboot 8 is shaping up to be another great conference. I’m already looking forward to seeing Matt Webb and Chris Heathcote speak, among others. I’m also still thinking about doing something myself, the question is: what?
- While we’re on the topic of conferences, make sure you don’t miss The Web and Beyond – the 10th annual SIGCHI.NL event. I’ve been helping with the organisation and must say it’s promising to be an interesting look at the web 2.0 phenomenon from an interaction design perspective.
- I have a heap of articles and posts lying around waiting to be fed to my del.icio.us account (I actually read all that stuff before bothering you with it). Now to just find the time to tag them all – to think this stuff is supposed to have a low cognitive load!
- Right after visiting Reboot 8 I’ll be off to beautiful Italy for some much needed R&R. Be sure to keep an eye on my Flickr photostream for slightly crappy cameraphone shots of Napels, Rome, Florence and Venice. Looking forward to that!
- Finally, you may have wondered about the “martial arts enthusiast” bit in this blog’s introduction. Between all of the above I’m getting myself ready for some examinations in Takeda Ryu this summer. When I get back from Vienna, I hope to be a certified teacher’s assistant and second dan in Aikido. Wish me luck.
Now back to our regular programming – deathly silence while I get some more client work out the door.
links for 2006-05-12
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“Dr Spock’s Baby Care is a best-selling owner’s manual for the most complicated ‘product’ imaginable — and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven’t even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it’s complic
links for 2006-05-11
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Chris Heathcote will be demoing the Apache web server for S60 at Reboot 8. Looking forward to that one!
Kaeru
Online I usually go by the nickname “kaeru”, which (to the best of my knowledge) is Japanese for “frog”.
I know, it’s a long story…
So today Floris pointed out that I have a namesake who travels around a bit. His vacation shots can be found here.
links for 2006-05-05
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A report of the experimental gameplay session at this year’s GDC. Covering some cool stuff, such as a guitar playing game, a casual rhythm game, a game that lets it’s player up the difficulty while playing, a game that is calm and soothing demanding to be
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Adam Greenfield talks about his book. Most interesting points: designing for everyware will require new kinds of deliverables (even though we haven’t even fully mastered the old ones) and designers will have to be increasingly emphatic and responsible for
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Adam Greenfield summarizes the contents of his book. “The role of designer assumes a new importance in this context—a new responsibility for ensuring that, wherever possible, the ubiquitous systems we make together improve the everyday lives of their us
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Weinberger asks wether with the rise of folksonomies, we’ll still need IAs for organizing content on the web. The answer is, of course – we do. Maybe they’ll become more like JJG’s algorithmic architects, but regardless, there’ll be plenty of demand for p
links for 2006-05-04
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“The most important function for a manager is X = -Y, where X is employee brain use and Y is degree of management. To use the horse whisperer’s advice, The more you use your reins, the less they’ll use their brains.””
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Excellent TV commercial for the Public Health Dept of Belgium on teenage mothers. It emulates the look & feel of a video game. Remediation, anyone?
links for 2006-05-02
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There seems to be a Backstreet Boys meme going on at Google Video. This is one of the funnier impersonations of everyone’s favourite boy band.
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A nice write-up of an IA Summit workshop on how to use comics to communicate the use of an interactive product.
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Mitch Lasky comes across slightly pompous in this report of his talk for the GDC. He talks about Jamdat (EA’s mobile division), chances for small developers, how carriers are not helping to grow the mobile games business, the problem of too much games on
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A cool story on the evolution of the Animal Crossing franchise. How it went from N64 to Gamecube to DS. Nicely illustrates the challenges game developers face when shifting between technology.
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Excellent special on all things gaming. With special attention to consumer generated media, MMOGs and social impact of gaming.
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“The [Doug Engelbart 1968 demo] has been so prescient over the decades because the research team used and adapted the NLS as they went along, inventing idioms as they went. We still have a lot to learn from what they made, but in particular it’s worth loo