Simple story about How Reddit Saved an Orphanage in Kenya. I am proud to be part of this, giving $50 I didn’t have. The results and seeing the pictures of the results made it all worth it though.
While the initial goal was $2,000, TheLake posted an update: “Over $9,000 and I’m in a state of shock.” The next update showed Reddit users contributing a total of $11,000. Donations continued to pour in through the organization’s website, Longonot Education Initiative, was upgraded to a Pro account for two years from its host, Weebly. The company also donated $10,000.
$65,000 in two days. Amazing.
Kudos to go forgetfoo for the link of the New Prometheus Trailer. I so want it to be as awesome as it looks like it will be.
I know the damn kids out there won’t care, but the fact that Rogue Synapse Released ‘The Last Starfighter’ PC Game For Free Download made my day. I still love the movie even though the special effects haven’t held up at all over the years. I still wish I could join the Starfighters…
The plot of The Last Starfighter revolved around a space-set first-person shooter arcade game used to recruit warriors from all over the galaxy for a real interstellar war. The graphics for Rogue Synapse’s Starfighter back in 2006 are based on those of the film’s and the game’s creators have even gone to great lengths to replicate the feel of an authentic 1980s arcade game, right down to the fonts. An 8-bit version of the film’s main title theme composed by Craig Safan and actual Starfighter game audio from the film enhance this amazing retro experience.
You can download the game for free here.
Google Earth 6.2 is out of the gate for Windows and Mac.
Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.
Some other nice stuff in there too, new search interface, Google Plus integration, and so on.
Don’t Link This asks: Describe your sex live with a movie title and the comments are awesome.
Home Alone.
If you want something on Google Plus a bit more easy to remember than a random string of numbers, check out Google Plus Nick which lets you, for example, point http://gplus.to/alanbailward to [https://plus.google.com/u/0/118382057892892439930/posts](https://plus.google.com/u/0/118382057892892439930/posts]. Handy.
Clear for iPhone looks pretty nice, and is a good example of different and cool UI design in the iPhone space. They’ll have to have sync and other options (repeating tasks, etc) to move me over from Appigo’s Todo though. Really looking forward to checking it out!
Quick video from G+ with a look at the new Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw. Not a huge amount of new details, as expected Camera Raw follows the new setup that Lightroom 4 showed up with, and the only real details about Photoshop itself is that it’s going to default to a darker theme.
Wow is right: Yosemite Time Lapse. If you don’t have a huge monitor to see this on you’re missing out.
Mark Shuttleworth says Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu..
Say hello to the Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. Here’s what we hope you’ll see in 12.04 when you invoke the HUD from any standard Ubuntu app that supports the global menu…
Basically this looks like a combination of the current Unity “dash” menu and the quicksilver/launchbar/alfred program launcher/utility that Mac users will be familiar with. It allows you to not only launch and search for apps from the dash HUD, but also run menu commands.
There are other teams interested in a similar problem space. Perhaps the best-known new alternative to the traditional menu is Microsoft’s Ribbon. Introduced first as part of a series of changes called Fluent UX in Office, the ribbon is now making its way to a wider set of Windows components and applications. It looks like this: […] You can read about the ribbon from a supporter (like any UX change, it has its supporters and detractors ) and if you’ve used it yourself, you will have your own opinion about it. The ribbon is highly visual, making options and commands very visible. It is however also a hog of space (I’m told it can be minimised). Our goal in much of the Unity design has been to return screen real estate to the content with which the user is working; the HUD meets that goal by appearing only when invoked.
I’m not sure I agree with Mark about the MS ribbon interface, the fact he doesn’t know if it can or can’t be minimized is either commendable (going forward and ignoring the competition) or silly (having no clue what’s going on in the same problem space), but the goals are commendable. I see a few issues that will have to be addressed though:
- Discover-ability of commands (with no menu, how do you know what’s available, and what if you don’t know what you’re searching for)
- Mixing of different menus and app functionality in the same menu. In the video around 1:33 you see there are two identical “Compose a Message” entries that come up. Maybe a bug? Maybe two email programs, maybe the same named menu option from two different apps (your IM and your Email maybe?).
- Depending if the HUD is app-centric (only shows commands from the current app) or global (shows commands for all apps and all the system) I see it potentially getting very cluttered.
- Will there be menus and the hud? IE: if I just want to mouse over and use the old ways? They say they are deprecating menus slowly, but this still doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a good idea.
- I like using the keyboard to do everything as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to be forced to do it. An example is in the video of using InkScape. It seems like it’d be very bad UI to have to go from using the mouse (clicking around and creating graphics) to going to use the keyboard to apply an inner glow or a filter, and then back to the mouse. Seems to me it’d be way easier to use the current way of using the mouse for everything.
- Right now the Dash is slooooooooooooooooooooow. I hit <super> and on a core i7 machine with 6G of RAM it takes about 2 seconds to show cold and 1 second to show “hot”. On my 4 year old dual core mac hitting option-space shows my launcher of choice alfred almost instantly. They have to overcome this speed issue to make this usable for power users.
Those all said it is early days and I anticipate that most of these issues are anticipated and dealt with, and the “every app works like VIM” that they mention would be quite frankly, heavenly for about 80% of the time :)
Vivify looks pretty awesome. Check out the link on reddit for more awesomeness and info.
I finally watched the final episode of season two of BBC’s Sherlock (an awesomely excellent show which everyone must watch) and was reminded by my friend @GlasgowGurl75 to find and grab the texting alert sound from it. Took a bit of looking (ok, one google search) and I found the Text Alert Ringtone
Below is a link to the folder containing the iPhone Ringtone file (TheWoman.m4r) that if you have IOS 5 you will be able to set as an alert message for whomever you think worthy. I’ve also included an MP3 version for other phones. (TheWoman.mp3) Just right click or control-click the file of your choice and download it!
WordPress.com added a set of features that are very tumblr-like, including liking and reblogging, as well as an integrated RSS reader. Looks like they have seen the benefits of having all your products users in one place a-la facebook. Looks good, and the mobile version does as well.
Nvidia Optimus GPU Switching For Linux has been released.
Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it’s not needed and then switching it on again when it’s needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.
Nvidia Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows 7, but it’s also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project.
Great article on Visual Studio 2010 from Ars, relating it to a text adventure game.
Play starts with the spell game. The game has three difficulty modes. In the two easiest modes Visual Studio questers must cast spells to appease a malevolent gatekeeper known only as "the compiler," combining the text adventuring of Zork with the wizardy and magic of Loom. If the player's spell contains even a single faulty incantation, the compiler will respond with a torrent of abuse and spells of its own; the player must piece together clues contained within compiler's response to determine how they went wrong.
Interesting timing that MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds and the Founder Arrested the day after the internet protested about governments getting too much power to do things like, say, take down websites in other countries.
Just sayin'.
Birds, Ducks and Robots is a look at basically how there is no "perfect" twitter client for iOS. I loved Tweetie and the official twitter app it turned into until the current version. Even ignoring the new layout ("connect", "discover", etc), it's slower and feels more memory and CPU hungry.
After Tweetie was acquired by Twitter Inc. and rebranded as Twitter for iPhone I slowly stopped enjoying the app. First it was small things like removing power user things such as TextExpander touch support. Next it was putting more focus on things relevant to Twitter's bottom line more than my use of the service: trending topics and top tweets. Next, the infamous #dickbar.
I've personally switched over to Tweetbot but it's missing some of the niceness that the official twitter app has, but does give me the light and fast feel that I expect.