design - Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-02-15 through 2011-02-22

February 22, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-02-15 through 2011-02-22:

Why Borders went bankrupt – Interesting discussion on Quora
Basics of effective FPS encounter design (via F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2) – I recently finished playing through the single-player campaign of Monolith's F.E.A.R. 2, a military first-person shooter with supernatural elements. In my mind, the design differences between the original game and its sequel highlight a few essential elements of good encounter design in a first-person shooter. These elements all support one primary tenet: Give the player (and AI) options
Libya Ready to Fall? – Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's regime "showed more signs of crumbling as dozens were reportedly killed in the capital and Gaddafi's son and heir-apparent declared in a televised speech that the North African nation could fall into anarchy if his father was ousted," the Washington Post reports.
iOs Inspires Me | Design showcase of the best looking iPhone/iPad app icons, app interfaces, app websites & resources – Showcase of the best looking iPhone & iPad app icons, app interfaces, app websites & resources
A Couple CGAffineTransform Goodies –

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-02-10 through 2011-02-15

February 15, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-02-10 through 2011-02-15:

Open Sourcing My Genetic Data | The Beautiful, Tormented Machine –
HDR: Pushing photography to the limit — and beyond –
NounProject – The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.
All images are free to share.
WWDC Tips –
How did WordPress win? – Movable Type's licensing fiasco in 2004 angered the community and drove users to WordPress.
Movable Type is not open source. WordPress is.
Movable Type is written in Perl, while WordPress is written in PHP.

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-01-17 through 2011-02-02

January 17, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-17 through 2011-02-02:

Allerta – Allerta is an open source typeface designed for use in signage. Allerta was designed to be easily and quickly read from a distance. Each letter exploits the most unique aspects of that individual letter so that each character can be easily distinguished from any other.
Omnifocus Themes – Make OmniFocus less ugly with themes.
Picture Imperfect – Praise for Hipstamtic
Advanced drawing using AppKit –
MTA.ME – Animated musical MTA map
How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet –
iPad App Marketing Case Study: Flickpad –
Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink — PaulStamatiou.com –
TextMate user – Using the best tool for the best job. TextMate – A great collection of TextMate tips & goodies.
Crash-only software: More than meets the eye [LWN.net] – Many Linux systems actually boot faster when recovering from a crash than from a clean shutdown & startup.
365 Days, $10 Million, 3 Rounds, 2 Companies, All With 5 Magic Slides –
Change Default iCal Event Length | Mac Tricks And Tips – I was looking for a way to change iCal's default event length to 30 minutes when I was scheduling meetings for MacWorld and I found this. It works nicely.
The F Word – You cannot advance the game by simply making it harder. This tactic hasn’t been acceptable since Space Invaders.
Scouting NY –
Dear Me: Get to work | 43 Folders – GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.
For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I'd scan through my context lists and I'd see things like:
Pack box up
Ask Bob about meeting
Review new design book
Send Cherry income information
Scanning down a list of actions in a context list should be like running your hand across a silk sheet. Scanning through these tasks felt less like silk and more like sand paper. Pack what into the box? What did I need to know about the meeting? Review the book for what, specifically?
Mobile & App Store WordPress Themes –
Persisting model state in Obj-C | XPerienced Blog –
Parallels Consumer Tech Blog: Do your classes require Windows? – Fact: 27% of college students use Macs (more than any other computer). Learn how to maximize your capability…

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-01-16

January 16, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-16:

Alex Payne — Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms – People seem to hate AIR. Wherever you see AIR apps, there are support forum threads opened by customers begging for a native alternative, and usually a moderator sheepishly explaining that they just don’t “have the time” to do native apps for each platform. You see the same thing for popular services that only offer in-browser Flash apps.
10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques – Smashing Magazine –
Git – DreamHost – Instructions for setting up Git on DreamHost
what color is YOUR moggie? | MetaFilter –
What have you tried? » Matt Legend Gemmell – If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question “What have you tried?”

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-01-12 through 2011-01-14

January 14, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-12 through 2011-01-14:

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-01-03 through 2011-01-05

January 5, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-03 through 2011-01-05:

Is This the End of the World? [Bad Things] – The new year has arrived and it is awful, what with bird/fish/crab death, floods, freezing temperatures, and zombie ex-Vice Presidents.
Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought) – When using computers, we like to refer to things with names. For example, this website is known as “www.aaronsw.com”. You can type that into your browser and read these words. There are three big properties we might want from such names:
secure: that when you type the name in you actually get my website and not the website of an imposter
decentralized: that no central authority controls all the names
human-readable: that the name is something you can actually remember instead of some long string of randomness
In a classic paper, Zooko argued that you can get at most two of these properties at any one time.
How the Tea Party’s fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine – Read It And Weep – (@Dahlialithwick riffs on the latest round of Constitutional Fetishism)
MacTech Labs: Virtualization Benchmarks | MacTech – #mac users want to run W7 on your Mac? Feast your eyes on this head-to-head benchmark comparison via #mactech
Do CES vendors fear Apple? – Do CES vendors fear Apple? [The Loop Links]
Defining and Managing Contexts in OmniFocus « Simplicity Is Bliss – Not sure how to put contexts to use in your workflow? @Simplicitybliss has some great advice here:
Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU –
How does the Twitter iPhone App implement a custom tab bar? –
RSS War! (As Fought On Twitter, Naturally) –
Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world. –

Posted by Postilicious