Monthly Archive for January, 2010
My good friend Brian Meidell decided to go up against the iPad, and launched the site for his new game Deep Blue Sea 2, yesterday. It looks amazing, and Brian is one of the most talented guys I know, so you can bet you it’ll play just as well. The game is coming in march for both Windows and OS X, but head on over and check it out now and sign up for a notification mail.
The irony of me lauding how a closed proprietary device is helping oust a proprietary technology is thick, but honestly I couldn’t be happier that Flash seemingly isn’t supported by the iPad. Gruber has written much about Flash and Apple, and he’s a clever guy, so if you haven’t read his stuff yet, you should do yourself a favor and consume his site start to finish, but here’s my take.
Maybe he’ll shed some light on it himself at some point, though he’s probably under some crazy NDA. But before people start slinging mud at Apple for ‘ripping off’ the ‘wooden shelves’ look for the new iBooks app from Delicious Library, consider that Mike Matas who designed that interface for Delicious Monster worked for Apple for a couple of years (leaving in july of last year).
Update: “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.” #
I always feel obliged to link to Michael Kaminski’s articles on Star Wars because a) he has no RSS feed and b) because they’re so freakin’ good! This time he’s written an article I’ve personally wanted to read for a long time, which pulls together everything available about Marcia Lucas (which is at the same time more than I’ve found in the past, and less than one would think was available). Insightful and heartbreaking.
I bought this beautiful poster from Martin Ansin last year, but didn’t receive it until just the other day (it’s a long way from Uruguay). I can’t wait to put it up on the wall I’ve got in mind for it.
PS: You can contact Martin if you’re interested in buying his posters. Both the art and the print itself are phenomenal.
Jeremys fantastic site Huffduffer has been around for a while, but it wasn’t until just this week I finally got around to using it, only to find out I should have done that a long time ago.
In short, it’s aggregated awesome, in podcast-form. Want an example? How about this amazing lecture on the values of science fiction, and why the success of Star Wars has had the genre fighting to get out of its shadow ever since its opening titles. Or this interview with James Cameron on growing older and vacationing in the Mariana Trench? Oh, hadn’t had enough? How about Gruber doing what he does better than anyone, talking about Apple? Skip past the 20-minute intro-o-horror to save 10 sanity points.
You can thank me later.
I’m smacked up, backed up and my crew’s all smashed up… at work, and whatever spare time I have flows into things that don’t rhyme with ‘fighting or this grog’ so you’ll have to do with this Adidas commercial.
It’s been a while since I was last properly hooked for a film, but I gotta say, Inception is looking bad ass.
I’m lucky enough to have force-fed myself enough roleplaying games and science fiction comics to have picked up English to a level where I’m often more fluent in it, than I am in my mothertongue. And for the purposes of of blogging about those two particular subjects, whatever grammar, puntuation and structure snafus that happen to find their way onto this blog are less a real worry than they merely distracting (and at times embarrassing).
But if one were to take writing more seriously, be it for personal, academic or straight-up professional reasons, a friend of a friend of mine recently started a site that’ll do just that, hassle-free.
I don’t generally plug things on this site unless I truly like them. And until I tried Wordy, I honestly didn’t know what use I could have for it. But listen, Wordy gets it.
It’s on-demand copy-editing, and it’s ultra slick. No hassles, no clutter, no crap. I took it for a test-run on a chapter from a book another friend of mine is writing, and the experience couldn’t have been better. If for nothing else, you should check it out just to marvel at the elegance of how they’ve set up the site and how clear their process and goal is.
Particularly interesting to some of us, is that they’re working specifically on a WordPress plugin, which should make it even easier to use. They’ve also got a blog (in Danish).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some K2 code to clean up.
I met up for an interview with the gracious Tina Daunt in Santa Monica (oh wonderful Santa Monica) during our US roadtrip, first slated for the LA Times, before they started firing people left and right, now up at Huffington Post.
The new 2010 theme is slowly starting to take shape, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what that’ll be about. Meanwhile my, until recently, neglected second child, K2—a spiritual followup of sorts to Kubrick — just went 1.0 before the holidays, and we’re well on our way towards a great 1.1 release.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I should have started a long time ago coming in 2010, and I can’t wait to unveil them as we get nearer to summer. Yes, one of them is a new WordPress theme.
It was great, while it lasted, honestly pretty crazy for a while, and I very much enjoyed it; but its retirement is timely, if not overdue.
Kubrick, by the way, was born in the summer of 2004, which makes it almost five six years old this year. I would never have thought it could have lived for this long.
Thanks Stanley. And sorry.
Because I’m a far lazy slob, and it’s high time I get my ass in gear1, I paid my first visit in years to the fitness center yesterday2. Wait; wait, don’t go. This is really a tech-related post, just wait for it.
So I brought my iPhone, because that thing goes with me everywhere; and because despite the deafening music played by a live DJ (because that’s how the trendy people like to train, donchaknow), I was kind of hoping I could listen to some of my own music, or maybe even an audiobook.
I notice on the step-abdomenizer-leg-conjagulator-train-master-machine a wire with a plug that looks pretty much exactly like a dock-connector. “Hmm”, I think to myself, “that looks exactly like a dock-connector. I wonder…”, and plug in my iPhone. And sure enough, the touch screen turns into an interface through which I can choose my music or even play video.
That in itself is awesome (and the reason I need you to tell me what video podcasts you follow), but the coolest part is that it actually saves the workout data as a Nike+ dataset onto the iPhone. Go home, sync it and you’ve got your workout data right there alongside your usual Nike+ data (should you have any).
Aside from the fact that it’s a shame something like this has to happen on proprietary technology, it’s still very awesome and if nothing else extra incentive to get couch potato web-dev losers like myself down to the local gym.
Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.
I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.
The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.
And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languages1 in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.
Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.
Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.
Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.