Category: Links

Found this a while back and am still using it (albeit slightly tweaked; I’m not using a circle but an auto-sizing rounded box). Handy for quick first pass annotations.

I do think Will Wright’s new game will sell. Maybe not as much as The Sims, but certainly more than Black & White. Time will tell…

A look at Intuitect, IxD and IA software which sounds pretty good. It’s an add-on for Visio, which I actually don’t like, because I’ve never liked working in it (although I do it a lot).

A piece on strategies for coping with too many connections in your social network, both cultural and technical. It’s clear there’s no easy solution for managing a large social network.

“in any group process look for the commons, allow participants to participate in identifing defectors; determine what the costs are for such identification […] and encourage participation in the common good by punishing those who do not participate in s

A piece on how humans have a need to feel like they belong to a group and how they can have relationships with fictitious persons (para-social relationships). This can influence the amount of ‘real-world’ contacts you are able to keep track of.

Analysis of group sizes in World of Warcraft and other MMOGs. Difference in size suggests different costs of maintaining relationships and returns from being part of a group.

More analysis of groups in MMOGs: “keeping a large group cohesive requires significantly more time in social “grooming”.”

An interview with designer and developer of Delicious Library, a pretty neat piece of media library management software. The article includes images of early UI designs.

A handy tutorial on how to configure Handbrake to rip DVDs for use on an iPod Video.

“Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.”

A *large* presentation by Brian Fling. Mostly just slides with no annotations, but still good to skim for ideas and a sense of what’s important in mobile web design.

Old but good post that offers the beginnings of a framework of online game player’s motivations.

First in a series of posts by Christopher Allen on how the Dunbar number can be applied to online communities. Enlightening.

Report by Peter Bogaards on an event I helped organize but sadly could not attend. The Web and Beyond was a web 2.0 event by CHI professionals for designers, marketeers and business people.

Khoi Vin, who once did a killer B&A redesign (that didn’t get done) doesn’t like the site’s new design. I agree, and would like to add that a site like this can’t afford to not include a decent print stylesheet…

I recently switched to Google Reader. Until I write a blog post about it, here’s a piece on one of the features I like: personalized feed reading trends.

Veen on his work for Google Reader – the new trends page: “this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.”

“This is going to be one of the great benefits of ambient/pervasive computing or everyware – not the tracking of objects but the tracking and collating of you yourself through objects.”

Nielsen explains the benefits of progressive and staged disclosure.

Régine Debatty reviews a documentary film on underground pop culture created with and through games.

Good stuff on the use and components of recommendation engines, pointing to some new directions that can be investigated.

Short but sweet post on WIkiseek; a search engine that restricts it’s search to Wikipedia pages and pages directly linked to from the Wikipedia.

A review of Mind Hacks and an interview with Matt Webb. I would love to see him write the Persuasive Hacks book he mentions.

A piece on the different laws that apply to different types of networks and their sizes.

IxD guru and Apple veteran Tognazzini takes a look at the iPhone demo’s and to the surprise of many is actually quite positive: “iPhone is glorious, and it is only the beginning.”

A piece by a wiki consultant on the ways in which one can organize a wiki. The most important point he makes is: “planning organizational strategies is really not the place to put most of your energies. Rather empowering people through good tools and perh

Great photo series of Soviet bus-stops. Via Edwin.

WIRED rounds up some of the most interesting films on show at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Includes screenshots.

Jason worries about the lack of tactile feedback on the iPhone. I do too.

Besides worrying about the touch screen, Dan wonders if we need OS X on the iPhone. Does using the OS equal using the desktop metaphor? I agree that would be a Bad Thing on a phone.

Kottke after giving an extremely good summary of all the iPhone hype: “And that’s enough, I think.” More than enough, but incredibly useful and readable thank you!

“Mobile gaming is an expanding industry, and there is an increasing availability of three-dimensional games with fancy graphics. But the takeup of these new games has been slow,”

Article by Kevin Kelly with big concepts flying around; describing the internet as a huge machine that’ll eventually achieve real intelligence.

One old school Mac developer moans about the new generation’s focus on style over substance. I’m not sure I agree with his observations.

A reply to Rogue Amoeba’s critique of the new school of Mac developers. Quite effectively frames the discussion in a historical context.

Always fun to find a post that makes use of one of my favourite verbs: leapfrogging. Gene Smith says Apple are leapfrogging both the current mobile phone industry and the PC wars with their new iPhone.

I might be tagging too many Webb posts lately… This one’s about the value of actually making stuff as a designer: “Thinking through making is about revealing the unknown unknowns.”

Luke Wroblewski is creating a list of (specific) UX tools and software. Quite a few I’ve never heard before. Anyone have any experience with Intuitect? Sounds pretty good…

A short post on the difference between content management and publishing.

A typical Cooper piece (all about design communication) on how the detail of your presentations should match that of your current thinking and understanding of the problem.

Willison concisely explains what OpenID is, and isn’t. Good to have on hand when explaining it to others.

The latest Adaptive Path newsletter contains a nice interview with Tim Brown of IDEO in which he discusses the challenges of cross channel experience design.

Ik heb geen idee hoe oud dit artikel door Jeroen van Mastrigt is maar het vat helder samen hoe de gamesindustrie er aan toe is en welke kansen er liggen. Vooral interessant vanwege van Mastrigt’s geflirt met de internetbureauwereld.

Another useful resource by Peter Rukavina that explains how to set up internet connection sharing between an N70 and a Mac. Good stuff, will give this a try.

Unsatisfied with Rojo’s performance of late this old article prompted me to give Google Reader an other try and by golly has it improved. I wonder when it’ll come out of beta…