managed objects

Big Spaceship's co-founder/CEO Michael Lebowitz on Digital...

Great essay.

Apologies for it being a bit quiet around here lately. I've been preparing for an international move and I haven't felt 'immersed' enough to post anything original. I want to try and not just re-post links I find... (OK, ignore this post...)

PS. Oh yeah, in case you didn't know, I'm moving to Sydney in a few weeks.

For people that make websites. Click the banner to do the survey yourself (it takes 3 mins).

... is compelling viewing.

My Head Floating from iaintait on Vimeo.

More from the floating head can be found at Crackunit.

Haven't downloaded it yet but there's a huge gap in the market for something like this.

Unobtrusive user testing for Mac.

Check it out

makes you feel good

Apologies for the lack of considered analysis or narrative around here. I'm in a bit of a schizophrenic mood at the moment.

Come along for the ride!

• Casual game design blog - All about designing casual "wide, not deep" experiences.
• 10 ways to make a bad casual game
• Physical Computing on Vimeo - Great collection of inspiring videos. (see below)
• OpenFrameworks is updated - C++ library for creating interactivity on the screen an in the real world.
• The Politics of the English Language - Classic Orwell essay

Mixist @ HCI Korea from seulki kang on Vimeo.

This is so geeky, I just HAD to re-post it...

See here

Thanks Nilesh

What will you do? Remember: you can draw, paint, scribble or scratch to make your mark on My Penguin. Frame it, read it, give it as a gift or hide it away on a shelf at home.

Feels great for the brand. It's tangible and good. See here

Courtesy: RubbishCorp

Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams.

Read here

This book - Mental Models - again by Adaptive Path, looks great as well.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Why isn't real tv as good as this?

LittleBits of electronics for quick prototyping fun. All held together with magnets! Magnets are the wave of the future... Watch the video!

Cheers Andy

The Magic of Prototyping. There's nothing really new here - anyone that's tried to use wireframes to communicate application functionality knows where they come up short. It's still worth reading though.

I've done a fair bit of this but prototyping in code still seems to be too close to the edit for effective exploration of interaction ideas most of the time. Sitting down and drawing feels more natural to me and after seeing the way artists are responsible for presenting storyboards to directors at Pixar, I've been inspired to improve my drawing skills so I can get better at exploring and communicating complex interactions in a more physical way - you know, with sticky notes etc. Then after you have some ideas that need more exploration, then sketch them in code. That feels more 'right' to me, for now.

I think there is a place for some software to make interaction prototyping a more natural, organic experience. Using a gesture interface or a Wacom tablet perhaps? You just know it's coming don't you...

This is a great idea from the UK government.

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated.

... We're confident that you'll have more and better ideas than we ever will.

Yep, probably.

Go there now

They provide a list of data sources too

The world's first balloon race across the internet is over. Thanks to everyone who played, you rock!

Looks great.

If you're just getting in to version control, this will help a lot and if you're a pro, it'll help too. A 14 day free trial is available - Check it out (see what I did there?)

Is something we should all do... Find out how.

Hey balloon racers!!! Leave me a comment with your balloon name and I will give you maximum boost!

Follow these tips to give yourself a better chance of winning big!

AKA drunken crowd shenanigans.

What happens when a crowd of beered up cricket fans get a bit bored with the cricket? Well, mexican waves are the norm, but how about plastic beer mug stacking?

This 2 metre tall tower of empty beer mugs was passed around the stadium for a while and kept on growing as it went. The stewards finally stopped it but it could have gone for a lot longer. The crowd was loving it!

It was a viral beer mug tower.

You select the time you have - and they create a message for you. Very clever stuff.

Have a look

tip Iain

If you're here already, you can probably see them flying across the screen now anyway...

Balloon racers, leave me a comment and say hello when your balloon crosses this site! Good luck!

Those clever peeps at Adaptive Path have created an awesome book called Subject to Change. It's my bible.

If you're interested in making digital products and services and doing it well, you should buy the book now. (no, this isn't an Amazon affiliate link)

So, everything at WWDC (besides what is already in the public domain and the keynote) is locked up under NDA, so I can't describe anything i've seen, suffice to say that there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Tomorrow, Michael 'Wave' Johnson is doing a talk on how Pixar develops software for their production pipeline with small teams. I've seen him speak before and it should be a pretty interesting talk - he's been doing Cocoa since the year dot.

Ohh and for some uber geek news - you know all that fixed point stuff I was going on about a while back? Apparently I am mistaken. The iPhone CPU has hardware support for floating point math. No need for fixed point conversions.

This is my serious geek look. Nahh it's just very sunny in San Francisco and my puny Londonized eyes have forgotten what it looks like, hence the squint.

$25 for this sushi plate... quality.

Well, the keynote's finished and now it's time for business. A couple of interesting things came out of the keynote - besides the usual things.

• Alternative models for application distribution (besides the App Store). Enterprises can distribute to a closed community of iPhones and you can distribute to ad-hoc groups of up to 100 people.
• GPS included Now we can get serious about location based services.
• 70 or so new countries
• $199USD equivalent price for all currencies
• ActiveStink (Phil Shillers word, not mine) support

Yeah Digital Shed. Something from the future...

From CNN Money:

"Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos."

Bwhahahaha

More from us crazy Pokers

Play Balloonacy

Wheeew, i've just finished my latest project... and today we (Poke) launch Orange Spot the Bull 2008. It's bigger and better than last year's GPS enabled game. This year we have a younger bill bull - Winston - and we're tracking him and his friend, Henry - with 3 live video cameras.

The aim of the game is to pick the square that Winston's going to be in at 3pm and if you pick the correct square, you go into the draw to win a pair of Glastonbury tickets. You can also invite up to 3 friends to play and increase your chances. The game runs every day for 30 days (i think).

Play now

Where's the D in D&AD

Great article about being good. Make stuff that people want, don't focus on money too much ==>> you will be successful.

Read it and bleep

Cheers for the link Andy.

Apple's developer conference,WWDC has sold out for the first time ever, no doubt due to the dual focusses on Mac and iPhone this year.

I'm heading off this year for the first time too. It's going to be a pretty hectic week but it'll be great to meet more Cocoa geeks.

Dreamhost have a reputation for being a nice bunch of folks and I've just had a great experience that I thought I should post about.

I recently ended my hosting arrangement with them (because I wanted to set up my own hosting environment) but I still had my wife's blog hosted with them up until a week or so ago.

Last week I decided to bring her blog over to my slice and I diligently backed up everything before I switched off the Dreamhost hosting setup... except the Wordpress database! I was up shit creek and I felt like I was in no mans land for a while...

Anyway to cut a long story short, Dreamhost came to the rescue and happily provided a back up of the database for me when I really needed it, and I wasn't even a customer anymore. Thanks guys, I really appreciate it.

If you're a fan dynamic languages, you'll find this article interesting... If you don't care, then there's nothing to see here, move along... :-)

'Unlimited', the 'worlds longest webpage' project I worked on last year won the peoples choice for Visual Design / Aesthetic at this years Webby's... Not bad.

We're also up for a D&AD award for Unlimited and my other big project from last year, SpotTheBull. Hopefully we'll do all right on the night...

Application Economics
Will interactive agencies please make themselves useful

Read here

thanks Tom

schulzeandwebb.com

Lots of good thinking and smashing ideas.

Via the OpenScreen project... see here and here

Maybe we'll see some sort of high performance hardware-accelerated Flash player on the iPhone one day after all?

So I've started to check out what's involved in making games on the iPhone, you know like OpenGL ES, Open AL etc - the usual stuff... In amongst my fooling around, I've started to create a Vector class for doing some basic physics. While I was researching how to do that correctly, I came across a realization. The ARM processor of the iPhone and iPod Touch doesn't have an FPU (Floating Point Unit) so to get any decent performance out of a game, i'll have to get to grips with Fixed Point maths (again).

If you're looking to get up to scratch on that too, this might come in handy.

There's a helluva lot to learn for anyone making the move from the desktop to the iPhone... Well it's not as simple as a lot of people have made it out to be.

I think this is the most geeky post i've ever written.