David Emery OnlineArt Deco
While researching art deco style work for one of the projects I’m working on I came across some really nice pieces of design; I love the combination of simple, elegant lines while still retaining texture and utterly beautiful typography.
A good source of inspiration, if anyone is looking for some!
Source: Art Deco
Read more ➔Interface Missteps
As well as all the other stuff released at the WWDC this week (see Sandvox below), OverTheEdge Software released Unity , which is a game development environment similar to what I hoped to create with Everest (It turns out it’s more then a one man job).
The product looks pretty good, with some very powerful features such as full integration with both Maya and Photoshop; shader support so you get really nice graphics and best of all built in physics, which really adds a lot to a modern game.
However, they seem to have seem to forgotten about the interface.
I’ve seen this in a lot of high-end 3D apps such as Maya, and to a certain extent in Apple’s Pro apps (they know what they’re doing, however) – and Unity is certainly priced high-end at $249 for the indie licence or $999 for the pro. With the apps I’ve mentioned – on the whole – they have fairly good reasons for their odd interface ticks, but this is a brand new mac only app, so why have they completely ignored the Apple interface guidelines?
Unity: Just ‘cause Final Cut Pro is...
So Many Geeks! Run for your lives!
Yesterday evening I went to the London Geek Dinner and it was pretty good fun. The food was nice enough, and the company was pretty good too.
It was quite interesting though, as a fair few people were talking about blogging in a business sense, and about what the “next big thing in blogging” will be – failing to see that blogging was simply the last big thing, and that the next big thing will probably either be something utterly unrelated, or something that’s related only by lots of people with blogs being the first ones to notice it.
Blogging as an innovation is done.
Get over it, and start thinking about something else.
Also amusing was the worship of Scoble – I got a feeling that their was a significant amount of people there simply to try and meet him, which is a bit odd really. The guy seems nice enough, but a bit gung-ho for my liking – I think that’s probably a product of him being American, and also being an evangelist for Microsoft...
Read more ➔Sandvox
Lost in the wake of the mactel announcement was the unveiling of Sandvox by Karelia Software , the creators of the excellent Watson.
I am the creator of a couple of the themes (Aqua and This Modern Life), so I have a slight vested interest, but I think the app looks pretty cool – I really like the sound of live, in-page editing. That’s how making web pages should be – none of this type-in-a-text-field-hit-preview-repeat rubbish. The UI – from what I can see behind the sand – looks quite nice too.
Not quite sure what “Sandvox” is supposed to mean, though…
Read more ➔Apple Pie
Well, it’s all official now; Apple is moving to Intel! I know of no-one, myself included, that believed the rumours (which were exactly right), so I’m a little surprised – I had assumed that IBM and Apple’s relationship wasn’t that bad, at least, not bad enough to do what it has done, anyway.
Some thoughts, in handy point form:
- For me, as a cocoa developer, this looks like a pretty simple recompile – the same will probably go for pretty much any cocoa app that doesn’t do anything to complicated. For big, old apps like office and photoshop, it probably will take a bit of doing – but they’ll manage it without to many problems.
- When the new intel-macs come out, they won’t run any games well, if at all – as most mac games are pc ports, they’re hacked together to make them work. These hacks will fall to pieces when moved to intel.
- The plus side is we will probably be able to run pc games semi-native (wine-style), or at least boot into windows (shudder). If this is easy to accomplish, this may mean we don’t get any more mac game ports – normal...
File Formats; Or: How big an ego Microsoft has
So, Microsoft have stunned the world and announced that the next version of Office will have three new file formats, .docx, .xlsx (try saying that 3 times quickly…) and .pptx; and that they are all based on xml, and all “open” and play well with others. All the info and a nice video is up on Channel 9 (as seen on tv Scoble).
One of the main points made in the video is that they are using xml, with all the components – images, embedded objects etc – of the file being stored alongside the xml in a directory structure which is then zip-ed to make it smaller. They go how this means you can change parts of your document dynamically by editing the xml, or swapping out images etc, which is all swell and great…
... except Apple have been doing it for years.
The new office formats (they have different schema, but essentially are built the same way) are almost exactly the same as the file formats that Pages (Apple’s word processor) and Keynote (Apple’s presentation app) use. However, both these formats (.pages and .keynote) utilise the “bundle” mechanism available...
Read more ➔All Good Developers...
... care about interface design. Brent Simmons , is a very good developer – he and his wife are the force behind NetNewsWire – and he’s been posting up a series of articles on his blog about the current state of the Macintosh interface post Tiger. They are a must-read for anyone who is designing mac apps – in fact any kind of interface design; the point you should take home is that this is how much you should care about the interface of your program, so much so that whenever you add a new object to your interface, whether it’s a split-view or a save button, you need to think about it, look at what other apps do, look at whatever guidelines there may be, as opposed to using whatever is easiest.
My pet peeve introduced in tiger is with the System Preferences – a lot of people (or at least, people on the internet – do they count?) have been attacking Apple for only adding “bling” features to Tiger – i.e. things that look good on demos like dashboard and spotlight. Now, I think this accusation is pretty way off base, with Tiger having a whole...
Something cool from Microsoft
Hmm, never thought I’d say that!
Check out this video on Channel 9 about Virtual Earth (as seen on Scoble ). I’m really liking the interactivity of the user interface, and the zoom effect they have is really nice. Also, if the “Eagle Eye” view uses imagery as good as they claim it will, that will be pretty neat too, although I have serious reservations about the dragging-a-looking-glass interface model they had in the design mockup – hopefully once they user test it’ll be gone.
It’s interesting, as it shows that the web is now moving into a whole new phase now that we can do interfaces as well in the browser as we can on the desktop (and also in almost any browser – none of this plugin/proprietary rubbish).
From what I see here, it thoroughly trumps google in a couple of areas – I like the full-window map (why does google only put it in a small window? That’s what I want to see, and I’m only on a 12” screen…), and the multiple layering of different search results looked cool, as long as the interface works well with it.
Hopefully this will both...
Read more ➔The Game Continues
So I think we’ve had all the major news from this years E3 – it’s been quite a good one, all things considered. Below is a quick roundup of the highlights:
Playstation 3: I’m not too keen on the design; if I had seen it before the day I would have dismissed it as a bad fake. It does look a bit better in both black and white (it comes in 3 colours, these 2 and silver, pictured above), but it comes across as being excessively bulky, and the curved top means it will have to go on the top of the next-gen console pile (maybe that’s the point?). Also, the controllers look hideous – hopefully they will be ok, and hopefully they will have better analogue sticks then the current, limp dual-shocks.
However, the game demos/pre-rendered footage (depending on your current cynicism level) is pretty darn mind blowing – particularly the MotorStorm clip; the eric/unreal demo (but only the bit when he stops the footage and moves the camera about) and also the “duck” demo (all these clips are worth tracking down). Hopefully these graphics will transfer into some decent games.
Also –...
Read more ➔Star Wars: The End
I moseyed down to Leicester Square (in the heart of London’s fashionable west end) today, and had a look at the “Star Wars Day” event that was going on. Now, I’m not really a serious nerd – I like my computers, games and so on, but I don’t wear “witty” t-shirts and I don’t go to conventions – but I am a pretty big Star Wars fan.
It was a bit weird.
There were people dressed up as various Star Wars characters – wookies, storm troopers, numerous Boba Fetts etc – but they were really really bad. For example, I saw one woman dressed up as – I think – Princess Lea, circa Episode 4 – think white, regal-ish, fitted dress. However, the woman was probably about 40+ and probably a size 40+* as well.
What possesses these people to go and stand around in the rain, in bad costumes, playing with children’s toys, while people look on and stare?
The film looks like it should be good, though.
*A slight exaggeration
Read more ➔