Links from 2010

An entire generation seems to have become used to experiences clogged with menus and text, spammed with awkward cutscenes, choked by voice acting, mangled by incongruent narrative, segmented by load times, stalled by informational messages. These elements serve to undermine the aesthetic coherence of the work -- they can dilute the magic, they can interrupt the flow, they can disrupt the basic audiovisual communication, they can break the spell.

"Django allows you to serve static files through your sandbox. By replacing Django's standard static "serve" function with the one below, you will be able to serve images locally, but look for them on a remote URL if it's not found locally."

Platform-specific considerations for web content in Safari on iPhone OS devices, with specific information for iPad.

People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.

This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."

Cleaner. Much cleaner. Proper unit testing. Real reusable components across applications. An ORM rather than a just a series of functional query helpers. Tighter conventions (q: how often do people using Python argue about bracing styles? a: they don't). We can update then test a Django core change without worrying about having to take apart our applications, and if we do need to make a change, it's easy to do because there's less, much more readable code. Every member of the tech team can meaningfully contribute because there are fewer specialized or hacked together pieces.

When you start dealing with people with unpredictable lifestyles and with income that might be variable month by month, you can't just use the same computerised systems of default and interest that you use for people in regular salaried employment. Muhammad Yunus's microfinance model, which operated in parts of the world where everyone's lifestyle was precarious, had shown that. You had to know exactly who you were lending to, and establish more intimate and flexible models based on that knowledge.

A user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want.

Some notes from the session Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 presented by Jaime Griesemer from Bungie.

All deployments need to be automated. No ad-hoc, one-off deployments allowed. If you do allow them, they can quickly snowball into an unmaintainable, unreproducible mess.

At a time when the limits of the more traditional capitalist model of shareholder ownership stand cruelly exposed, John Lewis's ongoing success is increasingly prompting all three main political parties to point to it as a possible template – for other companies, for schools, hospitals, even local councils.

Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change.

Reasonable arguments against the current state of @font-face. "I want sIFR to die as much as the next person but I’m still too apprehensive to use @font-face embedding in my projects. Without being able to present a simple, open, self-hosted path on how to include custom fonts on a site, I can’t see clients signing-off."

Remote/crowd-sourced software testing (using a community of testers, not random people) . Like the sound of this.

Free and alarmingly pleasing.

Aims to develop a dedicated web-based resource for information relating to London's historic parks, gardens and other green open spaces.

A framework for generating realistic and valid high-volume test data for your system under test (avoiding the Datalite anti-pattern).

The Magic Mouse does not contour to the users hand. So, being a product designer and manufacturer, I decided to see what I could do to fix it.

"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."

Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy.

Why, then, did we throw everything we'd learned out the window when it came time to design achievements? I think that's what bothered me about early Xbox Live achievements more than anything — as goals, they violated too many game design guidelines. Too many of them wouldn't make any sense as in-game goals for progressing through content.

"A player's motivation is more complex than "to have fun." Think on it closely and you'll agree – everyone plays to scratch a particular itch, and some games serve some itches better than others. While plenty of the details are complex and subjective, it's possible to divide play motivations into four different groups."

More disturbingly, [Jonathan Safran Foer] only considers a world where people are in a position to make choices about what they eat. Eating Animals is written by a well-educated, well-fed person for well-educated, well-fed readers. Nor does he contextualise his argument. It never ranges beyond the confines of America. He doesn't seriously examine why people might want to, or have to eat meat, or what meat means to individuals or societies. He proposes no solutions other than mass conversion to vegetarianism, although it doesn't seem to occur to him that the damage done by factory farming doesn't begin and end with animals but embraces all foods.

It starts here, with a lacklustre establishing shot of a significant location.

The St John Hotel will comprise of a restaurant, open for breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea and pre-theatre dinner through dinner to the early hours. There will be fifteen bedrooms to include the top floor suite and a bar for restaurant and hotel guests and their guests.

Harold McGee (author of "On Food and Cooking") is blogging. Brilliant.

Various forms of speech bubble effect created with CSS2.1 and enhanced with CSS3. No images, no JavaScript and it can be applied to your existing semantic HTML.

The ? character in the URL will be replaced with #! characters. Not all users will be directed to the new URLs, and the change will be implemented gradually over time. This change is part of a larger AJAX rewrite of the YouTube web site. The old-format URLs will continue working indefinitely when used for browser navigation, so if your web site has existing links to YouTube video pages, you don't need to worry about them breaking.

Since HTML5 is getting more attention by way of marking up our new pages, and the only way to get IE to acknowledge the new elements, such as <article>, is to use the HTML5 shiv, I've quickly put together a mini script that enables all the new elements.

"There's a little-watched video on Maroon Five's YouTube channel which documents the torturous, tedious process of crafting an instantly forgettable mainstream radio hit. It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called Makes Me Wonder), and how it doesn't have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: "I'm sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly he proceeds to do."

In mid-December 2009 I set out to ask a few of my favorite record labels (including Ad Noiseam, Herb, Hidden Shoal, Highpoint Lowlife and n5MD) some general questions about their operation and uncovered responses that exceeded expectations. Find out some of the inner-workings of these imprints, how they view demo's, release material and relate to their roster of musical and visual talent.

Last Sunday, while checking into the Hill Street Cafe in Burbank using the foursquare iPhone app, I idly wondered, “Can I become the mayor of the North Pole?” So I tried checking into a nearby 7-Eleven. It worked. I tried the Griffith Observatory about 5 miles away. It worked. I tried Disneyland, which is about an hour away. It didn’t work, but I now had an afternoon hacking project.

All meetings should be like this. More at the NBGIiPhone channel.

It’s time for a CSS3 @font-face browser sup­port table. One that doc­u­ments spe­cific­ally how browsers act when either the whole font fam­ily is spe­cified (reg­u­lar, italic, bold, bold-italic & small-caps) or only the reg­u­lar ver­sion of the font is spe­cified.

Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it.

An unreliable water driven sequencing device

"The Python Module of the Week series, or PyMOTW, is a tour of the Python standard library through short examples." Nice.