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Cool tool that generates a Pecha Kucha presentation based on your last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks. I can imagine this would be fun to do on an event. Via Peter.
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An interview with the designer of alternate reality games such as I Love Bees (for Halo 2) and The Beast (for Spielberg’s AI).
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Large interview with Will Wright, designer of Sim City, The Sims and now Spore (a game I’m really looking forward to playing). Lots and lots of cool stuff on the future of games here.
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Nicolas Nova puts down some thoughts on the interview with Will Wright in Popular Science. He zooms in on trends like user generated content and games as procedural education.
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Greg Lastowka thinks some of the most interesting themes from the Wright interview are “cooperative gaming, educational gaming, game development finances, strategies for integrating user-generated content, what went wrong with The Sims Online, and what WW
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First in a series of articles on selection, opinion and comparison systems. Great resource for social software designers.
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
links for 2007-02-26
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Finally a blogging platform made specifically for tumblelogs. I’m planning on playing with this the coming week and review it later.
Leapfroglog slightly screwed
Due to a screwed up WordPress upgrade from 2.1 to 2.1.1 this blog is now slightly borked. Most notably, the custom theme I so painstakingly created is lost, as well as all the images in the posts that were not included via Flickr. I’ll see if I can rescue some stuff from old backups. Until then, you’ll have to do with the default theme (most of you won’t notice considering that you’re reading the blog in your feed reader anyway).
That’ll teach me to do an upgrade while ill…
Update: I’ve managed to restore most of what I lost during the upgrade. If you come across anything funny, please let me know. Regular blogging will continue from this point on.
links for 2007-02-24
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Matt and Jack are out of control. Here they let loose a semiotic square on the concept of comics. The result is hard to read and even harder to understand, but obvious proof that these guys are either genius or insane (probably both).
links for 2007-02-23
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This modal dialog box script might come in handy the next time I sit down and do some coding…
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I’m bookmarking this mainly because I’m missing this feature in Reader too. Where can I sign the petition?
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Pretty looking plain GTD templates for use with a Moleskine.
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R. Emory Williamson-Lundberg has gone to the trouble to do a lengthy write-up of his GTD system and it’s inspiring, funny and very useful. I took away a few good ideas from this one.
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Ahhh… I’m running into too much interesting new GTD stuff lately. Here’s a GTD system implemented in Ruby on Rails. Looks pretty.
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This workshop sounds really good. There’s a very small chance I might be able to attend it. Otherwise I’ll wait for the write-ups, slides and podcasts (crosses fingers).
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I agree with Christopher Fahey that we should be flexible in choosing our ways of communicating interaction designs. I agree to a large extent, although some standardization and templating (in the form of a toolbox) can come in handy.
links for 2007-02-22
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New Hipster PDA templates by Paul D. Lagasse, including a template for makers to help sort yarn?!
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A detailed guide on how to print Hipster PDA templates on 3×5 inch index cards using a HP printer on MacOSX. Hope this trick works with my old Laserjet 1000…
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Latest preview of the 37signals app (more or less a light weight CRM system). Not sure I need this, but who knows!
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Rosenfeld goes back to basics and presents a simple approach to large enterprise IA redesigns.
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Rosenfeld proposes to talk about updating a site’s design without using the word ‘redesign’, to avoid falling into a boil the ocean approach.
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Morville’s prediction of the future of IA points out the importance and value of the international IA community, the odd apparent rivalry coming from the IxD community, and other insights.
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A hype-ish piece focussed on mash-ups and Yahoo! new product called Pipes.
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An open source GTD application written in PHP. Might give this a spin on my own server. Who knows – perhaps this’ll replace my Backpack!
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Series of great articles on getting an keeping your email inbox to zero and increasing productivity.
links for 2007-02-20
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I was just talking to Peter about the black magic behind FeedBurner’s subscriber stats when I came across this post. Gives a little insight into how web based reader subscriptions are measured.
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Saffer reviews Lynch’s book on transcendental meditation. I found the recent interview in Fortean Times tantalising, now I guess I need to get the book!
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Triggered by a Where 2.0 talk by Kevin Slavin on big games, Nicolas Nova philosophises about the real meaning of location and how we should take it beyond simple GIS data.
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Area/code make big games: “Big Games are large-scale, multiplayer games that include some form of real-world interaction.” Reminiscent of alternate reality games such as Ilovebees.
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Cool piece by jack of all trades Garrett Dimon on the origins of his recent redesign. I’m familiar with Tufte’s work and am actually most interested in the underlying system Garrett uses for including all the imagery.
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Interesting Ruby on Rails blogging tool.
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Stowe Boyd offers a better definition of social media that Scoble does but goes a bit over the top for my tastes; too naive and too focussed on polarizing consumers of old and users of new media with the term ‘edglings’.
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Brandon Schauer thinks iCal sucks and I must agree (although I do think his Mac might be a bit underpowered; but on the other hand: since when do we need processing power for calendaring?)
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Gene Smith discusses how his (and my own) idea of what a system is differs from a recent post by Merholz’s recent post on systems design.
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Links to five useful articles on presenting, creating presentations and being a presenter.
Super short Nozbe review
Nozbe is a web app that allows you to organise your to-do’s Getting Things Done style. This morning I spent a little while giving it a spin. I decided to sit down and enter a bunch of actions I have in my Hipster PDA (a Moleskine Memo Pockets and a bunch of blanc index cards) into Nozbe. First impressions:
- Nozbe is a cool concept. I have really been waiting for a multidimensional productivity web app. They got this part right! (Projects and contexts are included.)
- I like the book excerpts that explain the different GTD concepts such as projects, contexts and actions.
- I’d really only consider using Nozbe if it’d include a mobile variant (otherwise my actions are only accessible when I’m online behind a computer).
- Nozbe forces you to enter each action in a project up front. This is, I think, a misreading of Allen’s ‘gospel’ and increases the cognitive load when quickly entering an action. I’d have actions be forcibly linked to a context but give the user the option to add it to a project. (I worked around this by creating a ‘No Project’ project and adding actions to it before reorganising.
- Contexts are fixed, which is a shame. Please, please, please let me create my own contexts, tagging-style. So I can have actions linked to multiple contexts (which again reduces cognitive load).
- Don’t show the duration menu by default when entering an action, keep it clean. I’ll add durations when I want to, but don’t force me to.
Productivity apps are hard to get right because everyone has such a personal workflow. A good app takes that into account and offers many ways to do the same things. So again, Nozbe guys: the app is a good start, congratulations on the good effort! However it could benefit from some more user-centred thinking and design. Try to get a feel for the context of your users and tweak the interface accordingly!
Update: For those who hadn’t noticed, I found this tool via the excellent Lifehacker blog. Nozbe have their own spartan blog too.
Another update: The excellent GTD blog Black Belt Productivity does an in depth review and comes up with some of the same points as I did plus a whole bunch more.
Let’s see if we can post from IMified
So I’m giving IMified (www.imified.com) a spin and have just added the WordPress service to see if it works. For those that haven’t heard about IMified yet; it allows you to do a number of things through instant messaging (MSN, Google Talk, whatever). For instance add stuff to your Backpack account, or like I’m doing now, write a blog post. Let’s publish this to see what happens, hitting ‘return’…
Update: Looks like it’s working! I had to manually insert the link to the website and also go into WordPress to add some categories, so it’s only really useful when you want to fire off a quick note. As a bonus, here’s the Adium window with a transcript of the IMified session.
links for 2007-02-17
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Omroep.nl werkt al enige tijd aan een Nederlandse Digg-variant.
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An open source iPhone killer?
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A new productivity app called Nozbe uses Allen’s GTD as a starting point. I’m going to give it a spin and see if I have to ditch Backpack!
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A new Terry Gilliam movie. Looks like he’s recovering from a spell of bad mojo…
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Excellent little WordPress plug-in that generates unique monster images for each commenter on your blog.
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“MonsterID is a method to generate a unique monster image based upon a certain identifier (IP address, email address, whatever).”
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“Sxipper is a free plug-in for Firefox that lets you log into any website with a single click. Sxipper saves you time by keeping track of all of your user IDs, passwords, and the personal data you share every day over the web.”
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idproxy.net uses Yahoo!’s API to sign in with a Yahoo! account, then lets you create one or more OpenIDs (of the form something.idproxy.net) to use with sites that support the OpenID standard.
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Jon Udell argues that common parts of social network sites should be extracted and integrated into the internet’s general infrastructure. The only thing standing in the way of social networks gaining critical mass after that is fatigue.
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Tim O’Reilly asks: “Where is the Web 2.0 address book?”
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Metcalfe doubts whether users really want integrated social networks. I think we can integrate networks without taking away the control users have over their different identities. It’s a question of design.