Matt Gemmell talks about open-source platforms, third-party developers, and how third-party developers are make money from mobile ecosystems. "Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong."
A good write-up by David Cole that sums up the live-wireframing process we here at Visual Lizard have been using with our design partners. "You're designing the real product, not an abstracted representation."
Over 3000 players called into one system to fight. Over 717 billion ISK worth of ships destroyed, which translates into almost $25,000 USD. There's also some Youtube videos of the escalating chaos, as many players call in alliances and go all in.
Music service Rdio is offering 6 months of lmited free music, with a credit-card-less sign-up. If you've been on the fence about streaming music, this is the perfect opportunity to give it a try.
First beta of Sublime Text 3 now available to download. Currently for registered users only. Price will be $70, with on option to upgrade from Sublime Text 2 for $30.
Microsoft relases the 2013 version of its office suite as a subscription service. A hundred bucks a year gets you five installs on Macs or PCs of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access.
Its a full-screen visualization of short videos posted through Vine. Could be an interesting presentation of constrained creativity, but with the recent (but not necessaily surprising) influx of NSFW material, are you brave enough to try it?
The video format successor of the H.264 codec opens the door to 4K over broadband networks, and hwlps make HD video available on bandwidth-constrained mobile networks.
Soverain Software claimed two or three patents that supposedly covered "shopping carts" commonly used in all online stores. Newegg disagreed, and possibly saved online retail as we know it.
"But if we’re going to do that intelligently, we need to calm the **** down. We need to stop asking, 'Is flat design better?' and we need to stop egotistically navel-gazing."
Electrontic Arts an alpha version of Origin, its online distribution platform, for the Apple operating system. Though it is missing key features, such as the game store, it does come with a free copy of Bookworms from PopCap Games.
Twitter unveils a new app to allow users to share short six-second looping videos through Twitter. Will the constrained creativity blossom as well as it did with the 140 character limit?
Well it would appear that never is not as long as it used to be. Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello have updated the site with a teaser saying 2013. All reports are that the duo plans to tour and then finish off at Coachella. Road trip anyone?
Microsoft will be making the Surface Pro, running the full version of Windows 8, on Febuary 9th in the US and in Canada. Prices start at $899 without a cover for the 64GB model.
Apparently, if you go through the proper channels to report these sorts of issues, its better policy to punish you than to actually correct the issue... or at least that seems to be the lesson Montreal’s Dawson College want's to teach you.
We were actually just talking about how we are going to move from basing everything on 1px. Good, quick read over at A List Apart on the hardware pixel, the one all of us have been using which refers to the smallest visible dot on your screen versus the reference pixel, which is defined as an optical reference pixel that can be used by software regardless of screen resolution.
If everyone gets on board with this it should be great. If it goes the way browsers went back in 1999, it will be a nightmare.
Laura June writes a great article on the life and death of the American arcade. Must reading for anyone who fondly remembers spending dozens of childhood hours and quarters.
Design friends if you have not seen Typecast.com yet, click on over. They have a great set of tools for playing around with web-based type using fonts from Typekite, fonts, and more. Caveat: needs Safari or Chrome in order to work.
Ever wonder how companies like Google, Twitter, Dropbox, etc. make money? Want to know if Evernot or Mozilla are profitable? View this interactive infographic.
Until the trend towards data caps on mobile and broadband internet access fully dies out, cogent explanations of why this is a terrible idea will never get old. This is one of the best explanations of the problem I've seen to date.
Drexel University in Philadelphia has a kiosk that, upon scanning a student's ID card, allows them to borrow one of the dozen 15-inch MacBook Pros for five hours for free (every additional hour costs them $5).