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All Posts, page 24

  1. Games need to take a Minit and think about their huge worlds
    eurogamer.net

    Sam Greer, for Eurogamer:

    Some games are so big, and yet we engage with such a small percentage of their space in a meaningful way. When time isn’t an obstacle, why not have miles and miles of samey fields? “More is better” is such a common characteristic of big budget titles and the result is big spaces, filled with repetitive content and scarcely anything memorable. Our interactions with so many gaming worlds is passive. Even when they’re pretty enough to make us stop and snap a screenshot we’re still not learning them or unravelling them. They just want to get us to the next item on a checklist.

  2. Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible
    meyerweb.com

    Eric Meyer experiences internet access in rural Uganda:

    For geosynchronous-satellite internet access, the speed of light become a factor in ping times: just having the signals propagate through a mixture of vacuum and atmosphere chews up approximately half a second of travel time over roughly 89,000 miles (~152,000km).

    But that’s not the real connection killer in most cases: packet loss is. After all, these packets are going to orbit and back. Lots of things along those long and lonely signal paths can cause the packets to get dropped. 50% packet loss is not uncommon; 80% is not unexpected.

    A local caching server, meant to speed up commonly-requested sites and reduce bandwidth usage, is a “man in the middle”. HTTPS, which by design prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, utterly breaks local caching servers. So I kept waiting and waiting for remote resources, eating into that month’s data cap with every request.

  3. Exclusive excerpt from upcoming book by ex-Apple engineer explores first iPhone software keyboard design process
    9to5mac.com

    Ken Kocienda recounts the process of designing the iPhone keyboard:

    I started to think about improvements, and to help me keep my keyboard goal literally in sight as I sat in my office, I measured and cut out a small piece of paper, about 2 inches wide by 1.3 inches tall, a little smaller than half the size of a credit card turned on end. I pinned up this little slip of paper on the bulletin board next to my desk. I looked at it often. This was all the screen real estate I had available for my keyboard.

  5. Mission: Impossible - Fallout ★★★★★

    2018 film

    Watched 4 August 2018

    There is a shot in this film that, for a split second, managed to trick my brain into believing Tom Cruise was about to die. I didn’t smile and think “that’s cool.” Folks, I audibly gasped in a movie theater.

    (I’m talking about the helicopter scene)

  6. Mission: Impossible ★★★★☆

    1996 film

    Rewatched 3 August 2018

    It’s clear why kid me thought this was the coolest thing ever. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the iconic moments I remembered still hold up. What I wasn’t expecting was for the rest to be so… messy? The more expository scenes feel very half-assed, to the point of being a bit silly.

  10. The Witness ★★★★★

    2016 video game

    Played 22 July 2018 on Mac

    I played it in fits and starts, but I was charmed every time, and always envious of the brilliant ideas on display. The design is just so economic and straightforward, yet presents so many possibilities for variation. Deserves to be in some design museum’s permanent collection.

  12. Akira ★★★★★

    1988 film

    Rewatched 16 July 2018

    Kaneda uncovers his iconic red bike.

    I will never not be amazed that this movie exists. There is a very rare quality to the animation work here — you never forget it’s hand drawn, yet it’s always alive.

  13. CSS grid in Internet Explorer 11
    adactio.com

    Jeremy Keith:

    Frankly, the whole point of prefixed CSS is that is not used after a reasonable amount of time (originally, the idea was that it would not be used in production, but that didn’t last long). As we’ve moved away from prefixes to flags in browsers, I’m seeing the amount of prefixed properties dropping, and that’s very, very good. I’ve stopped using autoprefixer on new projects, and I’ve been able to remove it from some existing ones—please consider doing the same.

    Browser prefixes seem to be slowly going away. I stopped using Autoprefixer last year and haven’t missed it.

  14. Taking Back The Web
    adactio.com

    Jeremy Keith at Webstock 2018:

    I also think we should remember the original motto of the World Wide Web, which was: let’s share what we know. And over the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot of amazing, inspiring ideas from amazing, inspiring people and I hope that you would be motivated to maybe share your thoughts. You could share what you know on Mark Zuckerberg’s website. You could share what you know on Ev Williams’s website. You could share what you know on Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey’s website. But I hope you’ll share what you know on your own website.

  15. Brutalist Web Design
    brutalist-web.design

    David Bryant Copeland writes a manifesto:

    Brutalist Web Design is honest about what a website is and what it isn’t. A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one.

    A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you.

  16. Frick Filler
    youtube.com

    Game designer Jan Willem Nijman:

    I gave a 4-minute talk at @AMazeFest about how making long games is unethical, watch it here

    I love this idea:

    We should all design our games like bus rides — they should have multiple stops along the way. If someone is happy with your game, they should be able to stop playing at that point. Give your game that ending after two hours. Give it that ending after ten hours for the people who want more of it and want to find all the secrets. Give it, like, the 100-hour ARG with speedrunning, trophy, whatever shit, but let people quit your game in a way that makes them happy.