RobotSkirts

I never really used Google Reader’s ‘like’ feature. I mean it just seemed like a black hole to me: click the button and who sees it? It’s not like Digg where the votes are the focus and easily visible to the content creator. If I like something enough, I’ll add it to my shared items.

There are some cases where it does turn up useful. Pictured above is a screencap from Netflix’s New choices to watch instantly RSS feed—you can find all Netflix feeds here. Netflix added about 160 films to Instant last night so by the time I saw the feed this morning it had been augmented by everyone’s ‘likes’ (yes, I already knew Goonies was good). This is handy since the feed doesn’t show you your predicted rating. I usually end up thinking, “Is that a movie I heard about… was it good?” which leads to me clicking through and finding out, no, no it’s not. Now at least I can see what other people dig.

My love of Tumblr was pretty obvious in my previous post where I built a theme to do exactly one thing. One of my favorite aspects of the service is how quickly you can launch a new blog, attach a domain, and add contributors.

The Tumblr community has noticed this and has launched many many very niche themed sites… which I absolutely love. One of the first I remembered was FUCK YEAH SHARKS. There are quite a few “Fuck Yeah” sites like this on Tumblr, so I launched Fucking Curated a while ago to post a new niche Tumblr site every day. Recent favorite examples of this type of site are: three frames and Hot Chicks Picking Up Dog Poop.

I’ve started a few more sites that are usually an IM or lunch table joke that I turn into a blog in ~5 minutes. Tattoos that make your belly button a butthole was thrown together as filler for Fucking Curated. I setup Twisdom for Lon after he sent me one too many examples of Twitter asshattery. Headline WIN! was launched on a day with some particularly hilarious blog headlines. Look at this fucking hacker was started right before Defcon and is a spoof of the classic Look at this fucking hipster.

While most of these are throw away sites, I’m certainly glad that Tumblr provides free tools for taking a joke too far.

I know it may not look like much, but I just put the finishing touches on a new Tumblr theme for “single serving sites” called One Shot. About two years ago I came across the site amiawesome.com and immediately knew what to do with a domain I had been holding onto for a while: eliotsucks.com. Am I Awesome? was hosted on Tumblr so I decided to do the same thing. I just cut and pasted the static page source into the “custom html” section of Tumblr and used their simple domain mapping. Eliot Sucks had the word “FALSE” in big black letters. (more…)

First person shooter video games often have the option to “invert Z axis” as part of the controller scheme. Normally when you press down, the character’s gun points down. When inverted, the camera will look up when you press down. Inverted Z movement was actually the traditional behavior in games. Players using joysticks with flight simulators would naturally pull back on the stick to bring the nose of the plane up. It was when gamepads became more abundant that regular Z movement became standard. The stick/pad is much shorter and you just point where you want to shoot. That doesn’t mean inverted Z is “wrong” in newer games. The game is showing you the perspective of the player. If you think of the view being generated by a camera on a tripod you would push down on the tripod’s handle to make the camera look up. I used to play with Z inverted, but I’ve learned to play normally with recent console generations.

Right now I’m typing this on a MacBook. I use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll. As I sweep down, the text on the page goes up. Sweep up, and the page text moves down. When I switch to the iPhone or the ADP1, my fingers and the text move in the same direction. On these devices, the direct interaction with the text “makes sense”, but going back to standard scrolling on a computer just seems odd.

I wonder if we’ll start inverting Z again.

Jason’s new human powered search engine, Mahalo, is live. Last week the engineers were trying to figure out a weird load spike around 3PM every day. At least today they know what it is: people clamoring to access the site. I’ve been in LA recently to hang out with CK since he’s been working on this project since leaving Netscape. (If you want an appropriate ringtone for Jason or CK I suggest this one that I grabbed from Pimp My Ride.)

There’s no shortage of press coverage:
Webware
Wired
TechCrunch
Battelle
Search Engine Land
WSJ
Fox
Winer
D5 AllThingsD
ZDNet
CK
Jason

Bill Higgin’s “the Uncanny Valley of user interface design” discusses why Windows apps should look like Windows and web apps should look like the web. Unfortunately he shuffles the fact that the web app Zimbra intends to replace Outlook into a footnote. He is right that it makes an odd looking web app and I do find our company’s SAP jarring because it’s web based and used to look like a crappy Windows app. I think it’s interesting that the new Netscape browser’s Netstripe theme pulls it in line with current web apps even though it is a web browser. It gives a much stronger mental connection with the content than Firefox’s random bits of color. As a long time Linux user I grew used to inconsistent interface. It didn’t matter to me what it looked like as long as it worked.

Another aspect of the robotic ‘uncanny valley‘ that we’ve already run into is the chrome not matching the intelligence; manufacturers of real looking human skin for robots have found a lack of acceptance because the robots appear to be mentally challenged humans (sorry, I couldn’t find reference for this). In software, this is Microsoft Bob.

I found this little treat while looking at CK’s Spider-man 3 experience. Conrad pointed out posts on both Buzzmachine and Ryan Block’s blog featuring other funny ad juxtapositions.

Dad got out the cutting torch yesterday to modify some grader blades. I had always assumed it was just heat melting metal, but he told me about the process and it’s actually a chemical reaction. (more…)

Annalee recently posted relating Twitter to an article on how “life pace” increases exponentially with population growth. Most articles on Twitter fail because they attempt to cram it into a known space. Twitter became a roaring success because of its amorphous nature. Even Evan didn’t know what it was in the beginning with most of his posts sounding like “we built this thing, we don’t know what to do with it”.

The big punch was SXSW where it became the Dodgeball replacement (not that DB was being used outside of the bay). Twitter kept its ground through its ease of use; you could post via web, IM, or TXT. It didn’t define itself as a service solely for broadcasting location either. As people left SXSW, they switched to using Twitter for microblogging. Some people embraced Twitter because it lacked the permanence of actual blogging. Annalee’s article is crippled by its geographical awareness. Twitter doesn’t care whether you’re in a city or rural, whether you have internet access or cellphone access, or even if you’re posting your current task or your location. As the world flattens, relating online movements to physical world problems is just going to become even more ridiculous. I don’t think Twitter is taking us to some singularity pace that will eventually cause our demise (i.e. burnout). It’s created a new disposable outlet of expression that will hopefully reduce the number of “I got up and had a piece of toast” entries on regular blogs while increasing the number of people talking in our industry.

Just an example of some of the rampant ugly design out there. I’ve marked the actual content in red. How could anyone think a paragraph in the shape of a backwards L is readable.