Jure Cuhalev

Getting a chance to work in industry that you’ve heard so much in school is a really great experience. Today I’m hyped up about designing user interfaces and writing specifications for how things should work.

Image by snowcrash via Flickr

Personally, I’m a big fan of paper prototypes. A technique where you create low-fidelity prototypes that allow you to iterate quickly and without need to invest a lot of time in creating ideas. Trying this for a while now, I’ve learned that just paper prototypes are not enough. People just doesn’t take them too seriously.

This time around, I’m experimenting with upgrading my paper prototypes with computerized version. Nothing too high-fidelity, just printed wireframes in nice boxes and with a rough copy in place.

What about tools? I decided to experiment with OmniGraffle Pro (being a Mac Head) and some excellent stencils from Graffletopia.

To make the whole process easier, I followed a great video from Michael Angeles, Creating prototypes with OmniGraffle, it shows you how to use Actions->Jump tool to create interactive PDF’s that you can use to simulate actual user interaction. It also quickly presents good layout technique, how you’re supposed to have a Master layer with overall grid and then just create different canvases for new layers. Best spent 5 minutes of last week, watching that.

Summary: Go watch the video, and give a bit more hi-fi prototypes a chance, after being happy with your paper ones.

Following on, with excellent writing of Jon Courtenay Grimwood author of Arabesk. There’s a brief quote that’s probably going to save you some insanity in future, if you remember to use it:

“About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me - or was I just being a spoilt brat … ?”

“Ah,” Raf smiled. “The what-if factor.”

Zara stared.

“For every action we take,” said Raf, “there’s probably a better one.’

So there you have it. Don’t worry and just try to optimize your further actions

One of the most hyped up releases of this fall, as definitely Spore, a game where you played evolution and evolved the species from a few cells up to the whole galaxy. The exciting thing about it, was also that it wasn’t only a PC release, but that Maxis released also a Mac version.

Image by Zenat El3ain via Flickr

People tried it out, decided that it didn’t live up to the hype, and moved on to the other games. A typical life of a computer game.

Yet in case of spore, something more stayed behing - latest release of Cider technology, a portability engine that allows game developers to port their PC games using Wine-fork technologies to run on OS X. They say it so nicely with their buzzwords:

TransGaming’s Cider™ Portability Engine is a proprietary technology that allows PC games to be enabled on Apple’s Intel Macs without the traditionally expensive and arduous need to redevelop a game from the ground-up. Cider acts as a “wrapper” around the PC game dynamically translating PC API calls to the Mac OS X operating system. As such, games can be enabled with Cider in a matter of days to weeks as opposed to the typical man years that traditional development takes. Source

Image by manfred-hartmann via Flickr

Related articles by Zemanta

• TransGaming to support Sony’s SecuROM DRM for games
• Spore System Requirements Are Decidedly Sane [Hardware]
• City of Heroes MMO is Mac-bound
• Macintosh version of Spore really costs thousands of dollars
• Spore on WINE

After getting hacked, I moved the host and started over. I only transfered my posts to not loose a few years of content. In the process I had to go out and decide which plugins to reinstall.

It turns out it’s about 10 of them:

1. Easy Tube - Plugin to easliy place YouTube objects in Wordpress Content By Paul Bain.
2. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
   
3. Flickr Manager - Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts. By Trent Gardner.
   
4. flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. By Dave Kellam.
   
5. Future Calendar - A simple plugin that utalizes a modified get_calendar function that shows what dates have a future post scheduled in a calendar format, and makes it easy to change the current timestamp. Temperature Functionality and some tweaks by Flavio Jarabeck (www.InternetDrops.com.br) By Aaron Harun.
   
6. Google Analytics for WordPress - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog. By Joost de Valk.
   
7. IntenseDebate - IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. (it used to be DISQUS Comment System but we’ll see which one works better).
   
8. TypePad AntiSpam - TypePad AntiSpam is a free service from Six Apart that helps protect your blog from spam. (I know that previous commenting systems should protect me from spam, but in practice it helps to have a second line of protection)
   
9. Twitter Tools - A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. By Alex King.
   
10. Zemanta - Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.
    
11. (bonus one) - Lijit Search - Search Powered Web Applications for Publishers (I’m not using it at the moment as I have to modify my new theme a bit to add support for Lijit). It’s supposed to hijack my search, but as you can see, that part of their functionality doesn’t work for some reason with this theme.

Lately I’ve been observing interesting phenomena regarding peer pressure. Most of the things that we do, we do because we’re prompted by our peers. That’s perfectly fine, since this is the way by nature’s design.

The issue is that we have to choose carefully which peers we decide to listen and be influenced by. Stereotypical example of this would be bad company that influences you to start drinking, robbing old ladies and overall misbehave. But that’s taking it to negative (?) extreme.

Image by Sailing "Footprints: Real to Reel" (Ronn ashore) via Flickr

Then there is positive influence from your peers. The one that forces you to continue studying, take up new hobbies or just stop eating meat and cooked foods ;). There’s just only one problem with that. As much as your work peers (for example) are enthusiastic about you going vegan or something of that nature, they won’t be able to give you adequate support.

That why it’s important that when you’re choosing up new positive habits to also find a proper support group for it. Preferably within a group of people that already went through similar transformation and can advise and cheer you and will know that you’re going to be break, even before you do.

(Random thought: wouldn’t be a group called carrot chewers anonymous be a great place to talk about going meat free?)