Midway is already working on a new Blitz title, and according to them they're happy to not have the NFL license because the league asked them to tone down the hard hitting and trash talk and now they have no such restrictions.
I'd argue that most UI Designers do things right, the problem is that there really aren't very many of us. Too often the visual designers, product managers or the engineers get assigned to do it instead of a UI designer. Then, typically, management hires a usability consultant during beta to test is out and tell them what's wrong. Ironically, these usability experts cost the same as UI designers do.
...and Jakob Nielsen is not an interface designer. He's an analyst and a pundit extrodinaire but he's not a designer.
Any rule of UI design should be broken if there's a solution that benefits the user more than the one that follows the traditional guidelines. Now the reason that we have all these HCI folks busily compiling lists of the 'right' way to do things is that they didn't actually teach them how to design anything in their masters' program.
The sad fact of our industry is that the people who reach 'guru' status tend to spend more time bolstering their book [and overpriced PDF report] sales and retainers for giving speeches than they do trying to advance the state of the art. I can't blame them, book tours are probably easier than real work anyway.
But I like craigslist better than I like Google. And the quality of that data in my hands is dependent upon the internet community at large AKA those people who write gay erotic fan fiction about Star Trek characters.
Besides, Google's pagerank has been owned by 'optimizers' for years. I don't trust them any more than any other commercial enterprise.
And FOAF is the closest the 'blogosphere' has come yet to physically jerking each other off.
Semantic web stuff if cool and all but I honestly don't believe that it will ever really take off in any meaningful way. For one, it takes a paradigm that people know and understand and adds a lot of complexity to it, both on the user end and the engineering end.
Plus a lot of the rah-rah booster club that's grown up around it sound a whole lot like the Royal Society folks in Quicksilver who keep trying to catalog everything in the world into a 'natural' organization.
What it basically comes down to for me is that it seems like a great framework for single-topic information organization but at a point we need to keep our focus on the actual content of what we're producing more than the packaging. For this to be ready for prine time the value proposition needs to move from a 30-minute explanation involving diagrams and made-up words ending in '-sphere' to something even less than an "elevator pitch" like 2 sentences.
That's funny because Madden, Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk are some of the best-made, most consistently quality titles being released right now. And it doesn't take them 5 years to release a game that can be beaten in 6 hours.
The entire concept of the 'real' gamer and the "gamer lifestyle" is what leads to pandering garbage like the Spike awards. The more of a market segment you try to make yourself the more attractive you become to advertisers and therefor the more crappy television gets made for you. Since 18-30 year old males are watching less television than ever before advertisers are desperate to try to market to them. Did you notice that most of the sponsors were not game companies?
Most people who buy and play games do so as a side hobby and they have no interest in being 'real' gamers. They just play games that they enjoy and live the rest of their lives. The actual gamer population crosses all demographic lines and is more diverse than you can imagine. Just because that guy at EB talking about Madden accidentally elbowed you and made you drop the copy of Harvest Moon you were looking at doesn't give you any special rights as a "gamer" as opposed to a frat boy.
Re:Proprietary format ? You mean like the Nintendo
on
PSP Opened up and Exposed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nintendo has had patents on their cartridge form factor since the NES days, in addition to the connector arrangement, etc. That's how they were successfully able to sue Tengen for making NES-compatible games without paying license fees. Every single format we have today is proprietary, including DVD, Compact Flash, CD, everything. The only difference is who's getting your license fees.
I wish everyone would stop beating around the bush and just say "I'm not going to buy it because I can't pirate games". Given the fact that high-capacity Memory Stick Duo media is already starting to appear and will be gentler on the battery when playing video than using the UMD drive the only reason to want writable media is game piracy.
I used to work with a guy who regularly used the letter u in place of 'you' in emails and even documents he prought to meetings. This guy is a 40-year-old college graduate with 2 kids.
That wasn't really what I meant. In fact, 'applying' for jobs directly to companies with published listings netted me exactly two intervews over the course of two years. In a lot of cases now you don't have the luxury of knowing in advance who is seeing your resume. When you post it on craigslist, hotjobs, dice, etc. it's a whole different game.
At least in the Bay Area it seems like a lot of places are hiring now. Everyone I know that's actually good at their job is employed and most of their companies are hiring. It's hard to get a job but except for a couple years in the late '90s it's always been hard. The industry is competitive and you need some way to stand out. I spent a long time trying to package myself as a jack of all trades as far as design goes and got very little interest. If you think the programming market is flooded with unqualified people you have no idea, in 2002 I spoke with a recruiter who was getting 1200+ resumes for every design position she posted. It was only when I focused my resume and portfolio on exactly what I wanted to do that I got the job I wanted.
The times of being able to post "OH HAY GUYS I CODE AND STUFF" on craigslist and having recruiters trying to beat your door down so you could make 90k to write text parsing code were a fluke.
Re:Article Text
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Typical, 900,0000 songs, thousands in computer hardware and speakers with 2" drivers.
Wow, you're waaaaaay off there man. Metroid Prime is an American game, Burinout 3 is British and since the first 2 Shenmue games are among the biggest flops in videogame history [at least in budget/sales terms] there's about a 0.1% change of there being a Shenmue III.
Microsoft has been exceedingly good at hooking the PA guys up with exclusive peeks at their games and presumably free copies of them. I'm not going to go so far as to say that they're buying editorial content from PA but their opinion on Microsoft and the XBox has improved a whooooole lot over the last year or so.
I'd say the one thing Microsoft has really nailed in marketing the XBox is whipping their online fans into a frenzy. They have an amazing PR agency that can somehow turn Fable in to the EB's best selling game... ever*cough* infirstdayafterreleasefromthemanufacturer *cough*
Hey, thet's cool that you responded. The problem at Evite specifically was that DoubleClick's sales people incredibly overpromised the capabilities that you guys were working on. Plus it seemed like they were trying for global user targeting instead of a more local solution. At the time going for the holy grail instead of the easy win seemed like a good idea but ad targeting, at least to a reasonable level always stuck me as something you could pull off with a decent set of heuristics and some editorial classification of the ads themselves.
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, before the CMGI buyout they were using DC for their banner advertising. AltaVista represented 40% of DC's business and we had difficulty getting ahold of them when we had a question or wanted to talk something over.
A while later I worked at Evite and those idiots couldn't do ad targeting correctly given a zip code, audience gender breakdown, activity type and gender split. They were serving Pampers ads on bachelor party invites.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 1
1-button mousing is perfectly fine for many tasks. On the other hand, in content creation applications like Photoshop, InDesign, etc. the contextual menus are incredibly big time-savers. Also, being able to use the side buttons on my mouse for undo/redo in design applications is worth its weight in gold.
The entire concept that there is a "right" number of mouse buttons is ridiculous. Different tasks require different interfaces. There's a right way and a wrong way to do contextual menus just like every other part of the UI. If you can save your user time by including a limited set of actions contextually appropriate to the click location they cause no harm. Of course there are bad contextual menus as well but that's up to the individual application team;s discretion.
While I seriously respect Raskin's contributions to the world of HCI and agree with his general philosophy, his current commentary is woefully out of date. Nowadays he's the equivalent of one of those natural philosophers in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle who is trying to come up with a universal solution for everything. And even if THE is the greatest text editor of all time, the content created by even common users is far beyond ASCII in its complexity.
This strikes me as eerily similar to Daniel Waterhouse trying to write down lists of everything for the Royal Society in Stephenson's Quicksilver.
The whole reason the web is popular is because it's trivially simple to create content for it. Maybe the web would be more useful if it was like a giant encyclopedia but it's just an exercise in futility unless everyone gets on board.
This *is* Wired, people
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Just keep in mind that this is the same magazine that predicted "The Long Boom" in 1998, which was 35+ years of sustained global growth led by the emerging Asian economies.
Of course Wired lost me way back when they ahd a caver that said "Viacom Doesn't Suck".
Enix is well known for whoring out many, many spin-offs, side stories and the like. Right now there are multiple games available where you play as a slime or merchant from Dragon Warrior. Even within established series Square never did a true sequel until the merger with Enix. I guess this is the end result of the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Your view is a bit skewed. In the Mac community Shareware is a crucial part of the platform's software offerings and in may cases shareware solutions frequently surpass commercial offerings in quality and support. Software like DragThing, CSSEdit, DefaultFolder and such are amazing pieces of work and the authors deserve to be compensated for it.
That said, trying to charge for a tool that is mostly for streamlining the process of watching and storing pirated media probably isn't the best idea.
Teach someone Powerpoint and Word and you have an idiot who can't do anything else.
But think of all the marketing teams out there who need new people to wear expensive shoes, not listen to their coworkers, make sweeping, inaccurate generalizations about their customers and complain about having to travel!
Seriously though, in the design industry there's a tremendous number of people who think that knowing software packages is a substitute for knowing the problem solving methods and techniques of being a good designer. Fortunately they don't tend to last very long.
The tabs need an selected state, right now if I click on 'Products" it takes me there but when I go into a subpage there's no indication that I'm still in the Products section.
Also, a lot of pages like Module Owners are still pretty nasty.
Nice work though, it's always nice to see more standards compliant websites that actually look good.
Meh, my favorite is still Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. It's a free download, runs on any platform that runs Java, it has skill-based gameplay and a friendly community. Of course if you're a PHAT LEWT whore who enjoys crapping your pants so that you don't miss a mob it's probably not for you. It's better suited to more casual players.
Slashdot Mirror
Midway is already working on a new Blitz title, and according to them they're happy to not have the NFL license because the league asked them to tone down the hard hitting and trash talk and now they have no such restrictions.
I'd argue that most UI Designers do things right, the problem is that there really aren't very many of us. Too often the visual designers, product managers or the engineers get assigned to do it instead of a UI designer. Then, typically, management hires a usability consultant during beta to test is out and tell them what's wrong. Ironically, these usability experts cost the same as UI designers do.
...and Jakob Nielsen is not an interface designer. He's an analyst and a pundit extrodinaire but he's not a designer.
Any rule of UI design should be broken if there's a solution that benefits the user more than the one that follows the traditional guidelines. Now the reason that we have all these HCI folks busily compiling lists of the 'right' way to do things is that they didn't actually teach them how to design anything in their masters' program.
The sad fact of our industry is that the people who reach 'guru' status tend to spend more time bolstering their book [and overpriced PDF report] sales and retainers for giving speeches than they do trying to advance the state of the art. I can't blame them, book tours are probably easier than real work anyway.
But I like craigslist better than I like Google. And the quality of that data in my hands is dependent upon the internet community at large AKA those people who write gay erotic fan fiction about Star Trek characters.
Besides, Google's pagerank has been owned by 'optimizers' for years. I don't trust them any more than any other commercial enterprise.
And FOAF is the closest the 'blogosphere' has come yet to physically jerking each other off.
Semantic web stuff if cool and all but I honestly don't believe that it will ever really take off in any meaningful way. For one, it takes a paradigm that people know and understand and adds a lot of complexity to it, both on the user end and the engineering end.
Plus a lot of the rah-rah booster club that's grown up around it sound a whole lot like the Royal Society folks in Quicksilver who keep trying to catalog everything in the world into a 'natural' organization.
What it basically comes down to for me is that it seems like a great framework for single-topic information organization but at a point we need to keep our focus on the actual content of what we're producing more than the packaging. For this to be ready for prine time the value proposition needs to move from a 30-minute explanation involving diagrams and made-up words ending in '-sphere' to something even less than an "elevator pitch" like 2 sentences.
That's funny because Madden, Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk are some of the best-made, most consistently quality titles being released right now. And it doesn't take them 5 years to release a game that can be beaten in 6 hours.
The entire concept of the 'real' gamer and the "gamer lifestyle" is what leads to pandering garbage like the Spike awards. The more of a market segment you try to make yourself the more attractive you become to advertisers and therefor the more crappy television gets made for you. Since 18-30 year old males are watching less television than ever before advertisers are desperate to try to market to them. Did you notice that most of the sponsors were not game companies?
Most people who buy and play games do so as a side hobby and they have no interest in being 'real' gamers. They just play games that they enjoy and live the rest of their lives. The actual gamer population crosses all demographic lines and is more diverse than you can imagine. Just because that guy at EB talking about Madden accidentally elbowed you and made you drop the copy of Harvest Moon you were looking at doesn't give you any special rights as a "gamer" as opposed to a frat boy.
Nintendo has had patents on their cartridge form factor since the NES days, in addition to the connector arrangement, etc. That's how they were successfully able to sue Tengen for making NES-compatible games without paying license fees. Every single format we have today is proprietary, including DVD, Compact Flash, CD, everything. The only difference is who's getting your license fees.
I wish everyone would stop beating around the bush and just say "I'm not going to buy it because I can't pirate games". Given the fact that high-capacity Memory Stick Duo media is already starting to appear and will be gentler on the battery when playing video than using the UMD drive the only reason to want writable media is game piracy.
I used to work with a guy who regularly used the letter u in place of 'you' in emails and even documents he prought to meetings. This guy is a 40-year-old college graduate with 2 kids.
Depressing, really.
That wasn't really what I meant. In fact, 'applying' for jobs directly to companies with published listings netted me exactly two intervews over the course of two years. In a lot of cases now you don't have the luxury of knowing in advance who is seeing your resume. When you post it on craigslist, hotjobs, dice, etc. it's a whole different game.
At least in the Bay Area it seems like a lot of places are hiring now. Everyone I know that's actually good at their job is employed and most of their companies are hiring. It's hard to get a job but except for a couple years in the late '90s it's always been hard. The industry is competitive and you need some way to stand out. I spent a long time trying to package myself as a jack of all trades as far as design goes and got very little interest. If you think the programming market is flooded with unqualified people you have no idea, in 2002 I spoke with a recruiter who was getting 1200+ resumes for every design position she posted. It was only when I focused my resume and portfolio on exactly what I wanted to do that I got the job I wanted.
The times of being able to post "OH HAY GUYS I CODE AND STUFF" on craigslist and having recruiters trying to beat your door down so you could make 90k to write text parsing code were a fluke.
Typical, 900,0000 songs, thousands in computer hardware and speakers with 2" drivers.
Wow, you're waaaaaay off there man. Metroid Prime is an American game, Burinout 3 is British and since the first 2 Shenmue games are among the biggest flops in videogame history [at least in budget/sales terms] there's about a 0.1% change of there being a Shenmue III.
Microsoft has been exceedingly good at hooking the PA guys up with exclusive peeks at their games and presumably free copies of them. I'm not going to go so far as to say that they're buying editorial content from PA but their opinion on Microsoft and the XBox has improved a whooooole lot over the last year or so.
... ever *cough* infirstdayafterreleasefromthemanufacturer *cough*
I'd say the one thing Microsoft has really nailed in marketing the XBox is whipping their online fans into a frenzy. They have an amazing PR agency that can somehow turn Fable in to the EB's best selling game
Hey, thet's cool that you responded. The problem at Evite specifically was that DoubleClick's sales people incredibly overpromised the capabilities that you guys were working on. Plus it seemed like they were trying for global user targeting instead of a more local solution. At the time going for the holy grail instead of the easy win seemed like a good idea but ad targeting, at least to a reasonable level always stuck me as something you could pull off with a decent set of heuristics and some editorial classification of the ads themselves.
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, before the CMGI buyout they were using DC for their banner advertising. AltaVista represented 40% of DC's business and we had difficulty getting ahold of them when we had a question or wanted to talk something over.
A while later I worked at Evite and those idiots couldn't do ad targeting correctly given a zip code, audience gender breakdown, activity type and gender split. They were serving Pampers ads on bachelor party invites.
1-button mousing is perfectly fine for many tasks. On the other hand, in content creation applications like Photoshop, InDesign, etc. the contextual menus are incredibly big time-savers. Also, being able to use the side buttons on my mouse for undo/redo in design applications is worth its weight in gold.
The entire concept that there is a "right" number of mouse buttons is ridiculous. Different tasks require different interfaces. There's a right way and a wrong way to do contextual menus just like every other part of the UI. If you can save your user time by including a limited set of actions contextually appropriate to the click location they cause no harm. Of course there are bad contextual menus as well but that's up to the individual application team;s discretion.
While I seriously respect Raskin's contributions to the world of HCI and agree with his general philosophy, his current commentary is woefully out of date. Nowadays he's the equivalent of one of those natural philosophers in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle who is trying to come up with a universal solution for everything. And even if THE is the greatest text editor of all time, the content created by even common users is far beyond ASCII in its complexity.
Don't forget the incredibly narrow selection of DVDs at greater-than-MSRP prices!
It's amazing how it contrasts with the Playstation store next door to it which actually does a pretty good job.
This strikes me as eerily similar to Daniel Waterhouse trying to write down lists of everything for the Royal Society in Stephenson's Quicksilver.
The whole reason the web is popular is because it's trivially simple to create content for it. Maybe the web would be more useful if it was like a giant encyclopedia but it's just an exercise in futility unless everyone gets on board.
Just keep in mind that this is the same magazine that predicted "The Long Boom" in 1998, which was 35+ years of sustained global growth led by the emerging Asian economies.
Of course Wired lost me way back when they ahd a caver that said "Viacom Doesn't Suck".
Enix is well known for whoring out many, many spin-offs, side stories and the like. Right now there are multiple games available where you play as a slime or merchant from Dragon Warrior. Even within established series Square never did a true sequel until the merger with Enix. I guess this is the end result of the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Your view is a bit skewed. In the Mac community Shareware is a crucial part of the platform's software offerings and in may cases shareware solutions frequently surpass commercial offerings in quality and support. Software like DragThing, CSSEdit, DefaultFolder and such are amazing pieces of work and the authors deserve to be compensated for it.
That said, trying to charge for a tool that is mostly for streamlining the process of watching and storing pirated media probably isn't the best idea.
Seriously though, in the design industry there's a tremendous number of people who think that knowing software packages is a substitute for knowing the problem solving methods and techniques of being a good designer. Fortunately they don't tend to last very long.
The tabs need an selected state, right now if I click on 'Products" it takes me there but when I go into a subpage there's no indication that I'm still in the Products section.
Also, a lot of pages like Module Owners are still pretty nasty.
Nice work though, it's always nice to see more standards compliant websites that actually look good.
Meh, my favorite is still Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. It's a free download, runs on any platform that runs Java, it has skill-based gameplay and a friendly community. Of course if you're a PHAT LEWT whore who enjoys crapping your pants so that you don't miss a mob it's probably not for you. It's better suited to more casual players.