May 2012
9 posts
The Switzerland of the South
The Boston Public Library just released this collection of travel posters from the 1920s-1940s, including a couple from Australia. Absolutely gorgeous.
Who's Gonna Pay For That?
As some have already noted, the damage done to Midtown Manhattan in The Avengers could easily top $160 billion, all told.
That’s a lot of money. By comparison, as the link notes, the total impact of the September 11th attacks was about $83 billion and Hurricane Katrina cost about $90 billion. This is about as much as the two of those put together.
So… who’s gonna pay for all that?
I love...
I Hate Unmetered Content
A couple of days ago, I noticed that Foxtel launched a ‘Catch Up TV’ service. It’s a new service that allows you to download content directly to your Foxtel IQ box.
You’re probably thinking, “didn’t Foxtel already have this?” Well, not exactly; before the introduction of Catch Up TV, their Foxtel Download service allowed you to download to your computer,...
“My goal is for you to hear a bit what’s going on inside me. I want you to...”
– Nathan Kontny
Sticking with Tumblr
One of the things I thought about when re-designing my blog was whether I should (or shouldn’t) stick with Tumblr.
There’s a couple of good reasons to stay:
I’m kind of a schizophrenic writer. Sometimes I’ll post longer, multi-quote, embedded-video-and-image pieces on Microsoft. Sometimes I’ll write two words about a Samsung TV remote. I’m not sure where any...
Now on all the screens
Now I’ve got some spare time up my sleeve, I decided that the first thing I wanted to change-up was my own personal blog. It’s been on a free Tumblr template for a really long time, and it was long overdue for an update.
Here was my design brief:
Most blogs I read have lots of unnecessary stuff in them; tags, sidebars & social media buttons. Most of them are designed to pull...
Diablo 3 open beta nets 2 million participants |... →
I was one of them. Can’t wait for 15th of May!
Don’t forget though, (and annoyingly) Battle.net access won’t be switched on until 5pm AEST. So don’t buy the game in the morning, go home & expect to be able to play it.
Building a ramp
Smart acquisition — Evernote acquires Penultimate
I’m Ben, the creator of Penultimate, and today I’m proud to announce that Penultimate is becoming part of the Evernote family.
Dumb acquisition — Zynga acquires OMGPOP, makers of Draw Something
A new report shows that in the past month, Draw Something has lost nearly 5M Daily Active Users (DAUs), bringing the total down to 10M from 15M when...
April 2012
2 posts
Wake Up
Is RIM Behind the Embarrassing Wake Up Stunt?
I think this whole fiasco proves a couple of things:
Ripping on Apple is clearly identified these days as Samsung’s marketing angle. If you’re a company, don’t take this tactic. You risk having your marketing budget co-opted by Samsung.
Tech sites need to check stories more thoroughly before printing. I know this story has all the...
1 tag
March 2012
1 post
About this NetSpot/Blackboard thing
I found out this morning that NetSpot, an Australian company I’ve had the good fortune to work with on a few occasions, is being acquired by Blackboard. NetSpot primarily run with Moodle, a competing LMS to Blackboard’s offering (Blackboard Learn).
I don’t think I’m particularly worried about the LMS battleground part of this. One thing is abundantly clear to both sides;...
February 2012
3 posts
tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About... →
tmac721:
I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are...
Microsoft makes legitimate point about Google,...
Microsoft made an internal video last year entitled ‘Gmail Man’. It basically made fun of how Google scans your email for keywords, and delivers targeted advertising against it. WIth Google’s recent privacy changes, they’ve now taken it a little further and put it up on their official YouTube channel.
Fair enough, right?
Well, no. Not really.
Here’s a page on...
January 2012
2 posts
Thorsten Heins, New RIM CEO live blog @ The Verge
11:24 pm “We have fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem that we’re building on.” He restates that RIM is about its network and its strength as a cohesive whole. He won’t split anything up.
11:24 pm “If it makes sense strategically and tactically,” he’s open to licensing BB10.
*11:25 pm But his “focus 1” is to develop...
Monster Cable wants to be Apple, has no idea how...
“We’re competing with ourselves,” Lee (Noel Lee, Monster Cable CEO) says of the Beats products he’s trying to outdo. “We can be the Apple of the headphones space, with or without Beats…”
“…He showed off the company’s offerings, which became available for preorder to distributors on Jan. 9. One $200 pair of in-ear headphones bears the name of the ’70s soul act Earth, Wind &...
December 2011
5 posts
I'd Like To Try a Galaxy Nexus, but I Think it...
…Where it all goes wrong is with the space bar. It sits right above the system’s home key:
I find when I’m really on the move skating, I’m always hitting that home key by mistake rather than the space bar and so exit out of what I’m typing. This never happens with the iPhone or the Droid Charge, because they use “hard” menu buttons that you have to physically depress. You can’t...
Aged to Perfection
Love that old 1st-gen iPhone. I read in the Steve Jobs bio that he thought that a stainless steel finish (like the back of the iPod line) aged really well over time. That scratches & dings in the material really added to the device’s character, and that covering them up with ugly cases stopped that from happening.
Can’t help but think that the current line of iPhones has no way...
Android Loses the Magic
Andrew Munn:
“A laggy UI breaks the core affordance language of a touch screen. The device no longer feels natural. It loses the magic. The user is pulled out of their interaction and must implicitly acknowledge they are using an imperfect computer simulation. I often get “lost” in an iPad, but I cringe when a Xoom stutters between home screens. The 200 million users of Android deserve...
Victorian high school deploys Android tablets
Renai LeMay from Delimiter:
“I’m betting that Acer have given this school a massive fat discount to roll out Iconia Tabs instead of iPads. To put it bluntly, I think the choice of an Android tablet instead of an iPad for students at this point is a foolish one. I don’t yet regard Google’s Android platform as being a mature operating system for tablets, with it needing at least another year to...
Kindle Fire Usability Findings
“Using designs intended for a full screen on a 7-inch tablet is like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit. Not going to look good. But that’s what the Fire is trying to do. Accessing full (desktop) sites on the Fire was a prescription for failure in our testing. Users did much better when using mobile sites.
Using sites optimized for 3.5-inch mobile screens on the bigger 7-inch...
November 2011
19 posts
Galaxy Nexus Beeps
“It’s a chewer of battery power par excellence. Again, not a huge shock; this is a big screen phone and I spent a lot of time testing it yesterday, and then letting it sit on the charger once it started plaintively bleeping at me that power was low.”
Why in the name of everything holy would any phone manufacturer make a phone beep when its battery is dying?
Best case scenario: it beeps,...
OpenClass — First Impressions
OpenClass is a Learning Management System built by the Pearson Publishing group. It currently one of the newest offerings in the LMS space, and comes with a number of unique points of interest. Most notably:
Super-tight Google Apps Education integration
It’s free (more on this later)
It has a new, social-focused course structure
Looking at Pearson themselves for a second, you may know...
Stop doing Stupid Shit
At some point, I caved and made the mistake of asking him what the quickest way for me to improve my chess skills was. What followed was some of the most insulting and profound advice I’ve ever received in my life. He pulled me aside and bluntly said “Josh, stop doing stupid shit.”
After that, I gave up chess for some time, as I was busy working on a piano performance degree...
#MLG Providence
I’ve been watching bits & pieces of the tournament this weekend, but when I saw Leenock take down MVP this morning after losing 77 drones? Nerd chills.
By the way, I think it’s great that YouTube is streaming these tournaments now. The quality and reliability of the stream is great. Next step? Both streams at the same time.
iPod Phone
A great article on Patently Apple about the almost-made iPod Phone. Choice quote:
“Jobs called Fadell, Rubinstein, and Schiller to a secret meeting in the design studio conference room, where Ive gave a demonstration of multi-touch. “Wow!” said Fadell. But they were unsure that they would be able to make it work on a mobile phone. So they decided to proceed on two paths: P1...
Call of Duty: Rocks the 80s!
Taken from the front page of callofduty.com:
Exhibit C.
I’m sure I could find many many more examples of this on other games (OH HI EVERY HALO GAME EVER MADE), but for some reason it’s particularly grating with Modern Warfare 3.
Call of Duty: Aerosmith Edition
Exhibit B.
Call of Duty Elite
Call of Duty Elite is the Guitar Hero: Aerosmith moment of the Call of Duty series; that whiff of a once-loved series turning rotten before your very eyes. I hate the way Activision treats (or to use their own term, ‘exploits’) their successful franchises.
Android Not @Home?
Ice Cream Sandwich is nearly upon us, but where’s the coolest part of Google I/O 2011?
Bing Launches In Australia
Microsoft’s localised search engine Bing Australia is no longer in beta mode and has made a deal with Yahoo! to power the search of Yahoo!7′s searches in Australia.
So Bing Australia is powering Yahoo7’s search.
Ninemsn’s Managing Director of Audience, Alex Parsons says:
“Australians deserve more than one search engine”.
…and NineMSN’s search.
Why did Australian TV...
Sony Forgets Great Designs
“It’s as if Sony was using Helvetica before almost everyone else, then switched to Arial when the world followed suit. Years ago, it nailed a good balance of size and resistance [for keyboards], minimizing protrusion from the bed without losing the tactile sensation of travel. Then it forgot.”
A great article on what’s wrong with Sony.
“All of these were...
Why Microsoft Indeed
Microsoft blog ‘Why Microsoft’ taking aim at Google:
“The recent killing of Google Labs is ironic to me. Google releases experimental products and tracks adoption to determine whether to continue providing them. Its products are like spaghetti, Google throws them up against the wall to see if they stick.”
Microsoft is different, because it goes the extra mile with...
Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA on Reddit
Q: Since time slows relative to the speed of light, does this mean that photons are essentially not moving through time at all?
A: yes. Precisely. Which means ——- are you seated? Photons have no ticking time at all, which means, as far as they are concerned, they are absorbed the instant they are emitted, even if the distance traveled is across the universe itself.
Incredible.
WhatsApp
“WhatsApp is now delivering an eye-popping 1 billion messages a day on six different platforms, which it claims puts ahead of any other independent messaging apps.”
I for what it’s worth, I tried Textie, Facebook Messages, HeyTell, Beejive IM & WhatsApp. WhatsApp was the only one that has stuck.
Here’s an interesting use case; my group of friends use it for group...
Yet Another Database I'm In Is Hacked
“Valve’s games-on-demand Steam service has been hacked, the company said Thursday, saying that a database containing private user information has been stolen. That information includes user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information, according to an email sent by Valve managing director Gabe Newell to...
Yahoo!7 launches app to check in to shows
Viewers who download the free Fango app can check-in to a selection of Australia’s favourite TV shows from Channel 7 including Home and Away, Beauty and the Geek, The Amazing Race, Bones, The One and Sunrise. From February 2012 viewers will also be able to check-in to all free-to-air primetime TV programmes as well as major sporting events.
Oh wow! All my favourite shows!
jesus, what a...
“As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our...”
– RIM, in a statement to AllThingsD
All I hear is this:
The Slow Creeping Death of the Browser Plugin...
Strangely enough, both of these announcements came within hours of each other:
Adobe ends Flash development for Android and PlayBook, will focus on HTML5
Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release
Microsoft is obviously dedicated to HTML5 with it’s Windows 8 strategy, so it is in their best interest to slowly wind down Silverlight.
Adobe giving up...
October 2011
3 posts
Pants
MacTalk - Can we talk about pants for a second?
It was kind of a fluffy, silly topic for an article that I wrote during my Sunday morning coffee, but I’m actually quite happy with the way this one turned out. Also it’s the first article I’ve written for MacTalk in ages — it’s good to get back in the saddle.
The Play Well Cup AU 2011: Grand Final: SEGA vs.... →
playwellcup:
We’re coming to the end of the tournament, and we’ve got the Grand Finals tonight!
Steve Jobs 1955-2011
A very black day.
Can I just relate a quick story about this post? I took this screenshot. Then I retook it in Safari, because it seemed appropriate. Then I retook it with a different wallpaper background, because it was too bright, and didn’t reflect the mood. Then I retook it, and pulled the window corner up to get rid of the white space. Then I retook it, hiding the bookmarks bar. Then...
September 2011
2 posts
August 2011
0 posts
The Play Well Cup
I’ve been really pretty busy over the last couple of months, but I just thought I’d pause for a second to put this here as a marker in my life, of sorts.
A few months ago I thought of an idea. It was one of those half-formed things that rolls around in your head, and you go, “man, someone should do that.”
If you’re a nerd like me, you might register a domain,...
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
So I'm Leaving TAFE
It occurred to me sometime at the beginning of April that I’d completely missed the anniversary of when I started in TAFE. It was 5 years ago, on the 23rd of March in 2006.
I don’t want to make a huge fuss about it, but it has come time for me move on from TAFE Queensland. I’ll be working for the Mining Industry Skills Centre, as a learning technologist. I must confess, I...
March 2011
3 posts
“So, just as the gobby John Galliano calamitously destroyed value at Dior, the...”
– Apple’s Jonathan Ive: How did a British polytechnic graduate become its design genius? | Mail Online
On Flash & Bad Behaviour
Flash is certainly still a contentious issue in the web development community. Many people believe that Flash is the past, and is in decline. Others firmly believe Flash is the future of writing applications for multiple screens, be they mobile, tablet, desktop or even TV.
Both sides have smart, reasonable arguments about the technical aspects (or deficiencies) of Flash. However, one thing I...