Original Pac-Man Design Sketches Surface Online
Phil Nelson The original notebook of Pac-Mac creator Toru Iwatani. From this seed a mighty oak was born.
A Collection of Bowling Alley Scoreboards
I can smell the shoe-refresher and Miller Lite from here. Smells like home.
via Andy Baio, and I noticed that the site uses la petite url for short urls. Sold!
“Step into the sensory box”
The worst or best possible place to take drugs in the world, depending on the drug. Looks like something out of Carl Sagan’s dreams.
“Steam Is a Port”
John Bell on Steam’s Mac version, and cross-platform UIs in general. As I did in my post on Steam, he sees it as an example in favor of Apple’s stance on third-party SDKs in the App Store:
Apple has their head on straight with regards to ports. They want apps to be designed with iPads and iPhones in mind. If that means half the apps, that’s fine. PC computing never had trouble with sheer numbers of apps, it had trouble with quality. Apple is willing to give up some of the former for a lot of the latter.
via Lukas Mathis
Wikipedia’s New Look
I don’t see a big visual improvement, but the overall simplification of the UI and reworking the previously atrocious underlying HTML code is a step forward.
Not sure why they went with an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE instead of, say, HTML5, which is practically tailor-made for a website like Wikipedia. I’m assuming that the new layout has been in the works for so long that HTML5 didn’t seem like a viable option at the outset.
Lukas Mathis on iPhone OS 4.0
Likes folders, doesn’t see the point of task switcher, worried about file management. Lukas has quickly become a dude whose output I read every single word of.
Distraction-Oriented Design
One of the problems with pageview billing is that it incentivizes publishers to distract you while reading.
Every time they distract you and get you to click on something else, they make money.
But if you’re simply reading their content, they make less.
Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts
Click it, read it, learn it, love it. These are all essential tips.
The Layer Tennis 2010 Season Kicks Off
The nerdiest of sports begin anew, starting with this afternoon’s match of Kohi Vinh .vs. Nicholas Felton.
Jesper On Staying “Above Execution”
… this pattern is evidently sane, well-tested and produces good results: talk to people. Figure out what they want. Don’t rely on them telling you what they want, and don’t rely on you knowing what they want. Figure out a way to separate what they want from how they want it, which problem they want solved from how they want it solved, and work towards delivering that in the most appropriate way possible. Do rely on them and yourself telling you what they like.
In response to this Joshua Prince-Ramus 2009 TED Talk.
How Useful Is YouTube’s 5-Star Rating System?
5-star ratings utterly dominate the distribution of overall votes. 1 star votes are in “second place”, but as the graph shows it isn’t even close.
Star ratings really don’t work well on the internet. YouTube would be much better off with a simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, and doing their algorithmic magic on those.
The short answer to the question in the title of this post: not very.
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
A historical guide to the book jacket designs of Penguin’s Sci-Fi line.