Cubelogic Improv

Ho appena scoperto (immagino in ritardo) un videogame estremamente divertente: Desktop Tower Defense. Scritto da Paul Breece e David Scott, il gioco ha avuto un successo estremo in poco tempo, al punto che ha spinto i creatori a licenziarsi (è una scelta logica) e a creare una mini azienda (che per ora credo abbia solo due impiegati, ossia loro stessi).

Ci sono altre piccole aziende dedite al “casual gaming”. Ad esempio la Kongregate, che ha molti più giochi come numero, e (mi sembra) sempre gratuiti in versione base. La Kongregate ha un modello di business piuttosto elaborato ma intelligente: vende le versioni “plus” dei suoi giochi, fa pubblicità (a tema, non troppo fastidiosa) sul sito, e infine condivide i profitti con gli sviluppatori dei giochi (!) che lavorano a contratto.

Ho letto che la pubblicità in ambito gaming non rende molto. Ciononostante, la Kongregate ha ottenuto 6 milioni di dollari da investitori (venture capital) in due round nel 2007, come riporta CrunchBase/TechCrunch, sito dedicato alle startup.

Il futuro del capitalismo, l’unico con un volto umano, è proprio questo secondo me. Mini aziende messe in piedi da pazzi, folli, appassionati: the crazy ones. (Se poi magari rimanessero umani, non guasterebbe.)

OS X text system allows it.

1. Open a document in your favorite text editing app (TextEdit, Smultron, even M$ Word).
2. Put the cursor where you want the text square to begin.
3. Shift-Option-click somewhere else, et voilà! Les jeux sont fait.

I think it should work in any editable text areas of any Cocoa app, although it is working even in some non-Cocoa apps like M$ Word.

I should observe more of the stuff uploaded at Deviant Art. There’s such amazing art and such amazing artists. Some examples are spacemecha, ranvier, ooookatioooo and badness-cat… and I have the honor to know the latter in person!

Some of my favorite deviations:
uno
due
tre
quattro
cinque

NuLOOQ has been released! I guess I never spoke here about my latest efforts (damn NDAs)…. but yeah, I am responsible for part of the NuLOOQ software. It’s been quite a while now, so it’s good to see it’s finally out. I am having a great time working on it, actually. It’s a lot of work. Now it’s released, but it’s not ended. I know there are bugs in there (it is a v1.0 after all), we just have to find them. I was (I am) at PMA in Florida where it was launched, it was amazing to see the response we had… well, despite the first hour where nothing was working!

I’ve been working on my NeXT cube in the past week, and finally got a working installation on “large” disks (4 GB). I also tested all my 4 MB SIMMs (I found 6 faulty SIMMs, and 5 of them were made with Mitsubishi chips). Well, during the process I played around with NEXTSTEP 3.3 and noticed that it’s not so much slower than my Mac G3 500 Mhz / 640 MB RAM. It’s actually pretty close. But the cube has a 68040 25 (twentyfive) Mhz, and 16 MB RAM. How’s that possible? Maybe, maybe Mac OS X is a little bloated? Uhm. I do have a lot of cool things on the Mac, though. QuickTime, iTunes, OpenGL, pretty icons and shadows, and much more, but do I really needall of them? (By the way, NextTime did exist.) Don’t get me wrong, I love Mac OS X and its pretty icons and transparencies, but when I look at NEXTSTEP and I notice I have almost everything I need, I just think, why can’t I have everything I need AND a really snappy computer? I do have a hardware that is at least 10 times more powerful.

At least I wish I had a chance to streamline my installation; maybe all I need is a better installer. OS X system installer sucks. I’d prefer that over a hundred new features that I won’t use. Why keep adding stuff? Can’t we just improve what we have? Fix bugs, improve performance, that sort of thing?

An analogy comes to my mind. Marble Madness. A wonderful, genius arcade game designed and developed in 1984 by 17 years old Mark Cerny at Atari. (Interesting to know it was developed in C, not in assembly, which is quite unusual for the time.) Marble Madness is conceptually simple, beautiful to watch and play, and has a unique atmosphere, and that’s it. There’s not much more than that. No fancy intro, no fancy hi-score table, even the score and messages on screen are in a simplistic font on a solid background. Yet they do work. We don’t really need more, we just need the Marble Madness.

Now, how come there’s no such a game today? If you want my opinion, I sort of feel like all the additional crap they put in games today is affecting really cool ideas. (After all, if you need 157 developers/artists/managers to develop a game, it’s just normal that something gets lost in the process.)

Yesterday I started a new job, which requires to work on a Windows 2000 workstation. The corporate environment is set up to use Outlook as email application. I confess I never had the “luck”-ahem misfortune to actually use that bloated monster. Anyway, I don’t want to digress on why Outlook is a bloated monster, I just want to point out a design error in a very useful function for an email application: the “Find” function. Finding stuff happens at least on two levels in an email client: at the application level, to search through all your emails (or all the emails inside a folder), and at the message level, to search inside the current message. From a user point of view the concept behind the operation is the same, and the logic is almost the same. Yet the following happens in Microsoft Outlook:

• the application level “find” is located under the “Tools” menu (!?), and has a CTRL-E shortcut; moreover, there’s an “Advanced find” feature with a CTRL-SHFT-F shortcut. (By the way, why using two different letters for the same shortcuts? My head gets easily confused!)
• the message level “find” is located under the “Edit” menu and has a F4 (?!? another one?!?) shortcut. There’s no advanced find.

So, for one single concept (”finding stuff”), there are three different, distinct, non-substitutive approaches. Nicely done.

On the Mac, things are a little better. Finding stuff on the Mac is - at least - a coherent experience throughout all applications: the system provides a default search panel, usually located inside the Edit menu, with a default keyboard shortcut. That is, the find function is recognized as a common applications feature by the system native frameworks. However, even Apple’s design is flawed. The default find panel (the one you find in TextEdit for instance), has a dual function: Finding stuff, and (!) Replacing stuff. Why? To save some coding. Yet this is illogical: although the latter subsumes the former, it is not intuitive to click on “Find” to perform a “Replace” operation. I know that to actually replace something you’ve got to find it first (and so there IS a logic in clicking on “Find”), but wasn’t the Mac supposed to be for everyone? It seems like Apple just wanted to reuse the same software component (and same UI) to do two things at once. This is cool, but it makes me angry because it would have been incredibly easy to achieve the same level of code reuse, and make two separate Find / Replace panels. Or even simpler, add an explicit “Replace” menu option that actually calls the same exact panel of the “Find” option.

CSS can be pretty amazing. I just found this game entirely realized with CSS. And the entire site contains many “cutting edge CSS experiments”.

SimpleTimer is finally completed. The current nightly build is going to be pretty much the final build for v1.0. Before officially releasing it, though, I wanted to finish the redesign of the web-site, because it seems like a logical thing to do. The new design is more minimalistic yet efficient IMO. My graphic skills suck but OmniGraffle is my friend.

E.g. During the web-coding redesign efforts of today, I had the need for a nice download icon. Iconfactories, Icongardens, xiconsforyou, …. after 30 min of looking around, I realized, why paying? So I started OG and 15 minutes later I had my icon. OG is art.