Alan Becker’s Animator vs. Animation is a very nice bit of work.
If you’ve used Flash or any similar design tools, you’ll enjoy this.
Some more light entertainment
June 11th, 2006
Diet Coke and Mentos
June 10th, 2006
What do Mentos mints do if you mix them with Diet Coke?
THIS. It’s fabulous.
Thanks to James Duncan Davidson for the link.
How to kick Silicon Valley’s butt
June 10th, 2006
Guy Kawasaki has some interesting observations on what makes Silicon Valley work, for those wanting to replicate its success. Some of them are quite unexpected:
High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids—I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it’s easier to “make it big,” and you want it to be hard to make it big.
Vienna
June 10th, 2006
Vienna is a very nice RSS reader for the Mac. And it’s free.
I used to use a separate RSS reader in the early days of blogging, but stopped when Safari supported all the basic functions I needed, and did so very nicely. I’ve often considered switching to Firefox as my main browser, but I haven’t seen any extension which does RSS as neatly as Safari.
Vienna might just be nice enough to persuade me that a dedicated reader is a good idea again, though, which would free me to consider other browsers. Worth a look, anyway.
One (well-designed, $100) laptop per child?
June 10th, 2006
Like many others, I have a lot of questions about the OLPC project, but they do seem to be working hard and thinking carefully about the design. From the hardware specification page:
The wireless antennae are diversity antennae, and rotate upward using a rugged dual moulded nylon plastic design. When used rotated above the LCD, the antennae work significantly better than conventional built in antennae in existing systems or in Cardbus cards. This significantly increases the area each machine can cover in the mesh, and generally increases network performance. When closed, the antennae cover the audio and USB connectors to help keep dirt out of the connectors…
The machine is rugged. The most common failures of laptops are disk drives, fans, florescent back lights, power connectors, other connectors, and contamination of keyboards. Our machine uses flash, eliminating a disk, has no need for a fan, uses a rugged LED backlight rather than a florescent light, and uses a sealed rubber keyboard. It uses 2mm thick plastic, where a typical system might use 1.3mm. External connectors are carefully molded into the plastic for greater strength. The power connector is carefully chosen to be much more durable than usual, and again, the case is moulded carefully around it for greater strength. There are extremely few connectors in the machine, primarily just connecting the keyboard assembly to the motherboard (which is behind the LCD display). This eliminates most of the cables and connectors you will find in most laptops. We will be testing 500 systems to destruction this fall to identify anything we can do to increase further its ruggedness. There are internal bumpers to protect the display, and we are investigating external bumpers on the outside of the case for additional shock protection….
Novel dual-mode extra-wide touchpad, with dual sensor technology. Supports pointing… plus drawing and writing. Supports fingers, or a pen, pencil, or stylus…
[I’ve ALWAYS wanted one of these – Q]
Ah, to have the resources to do really thorough design…!
Optical illusion
June 10th, 2006
Here’s a very nice one.
The element of surprise
June 9th, 2006
A while back, I wrote about the danger of putting too much emphasis on what customers say they want. I’ve just come across this quote which is rather nice:
Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal — they blog a lot — but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”
[The emphasis is mine.] This is from a TIME magazine article which has disappeared behind a premium firewall, so thanks to Nick who posted it as a comment on Kathy Sierra’s site. Nick added:
Stick to satisfying expectations and they’ll end up being the limits you’re chained to!
Woody Woodpecker
June 5th, 2006
We’ve had a colourful visitor in our garden over the last couple of days.
Click for more pictures
Travel Time Maps
May 29th, 2006
When I was playing with in-car systems at the AT&T Labs, we always wanted to do maps which were coloured according to the time it took you to get to a certain location, or distorted to show time rather than distance. We never got around to it, sadly. Fortunately, Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg did.
They have all sorts of nice variations on the theme, too. The fact that much of it is based around Cambridge makes it particularly interesting for me.
Imagine a collaborative project where everybody is feeding their road speed into a central database and you can get this sort of data in real time, centred on your location, wherever you are. That would be a fun project for somebody…
And has anybody done this for the airlines, I wonder?
Thanks to John for the link.
Subversion screencast
May 29th, 2006
Mike Zornek has produced a very nice screencast which introduces you to version control in general, and the Subversion system in particular.
Little Miss Muffet
May 27th, 2006
My brother sent me a birthday card recently with a picture of a spider on it. Inside he had written:
Little Miss Muffet,
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And said, “What’s a tuffet?”
The chicken or the egg?
May 26th, 2006
If you thought the solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem was a great achievement for British science, then how about this?
Professor John Brookfield of the University of Nottingham has answered the question of Which came first, the chicken or the egg?.
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