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October 2007

The Archives

• 10.28.07
  TV Faux-drama Infraction: Bionic Woman Uncategorized | (1)

  In the pilot of Bionic Woman, where she discovers deals with the fact that most of her body has been replaced with robotics/nano-tech (ooh, spoiler! like that was really unexpected?), the show commits a grievous offense upon the audience. You can't just use a song like Sia's Breathe Me, one which played along one of the most emotional moments in TV history a mere 20 minutes into your series where the audience feels little to no connection to your main character. Slow the hell down, and give us the chance to actually care about it. Oh, and let's not even get ...

  Tagged: TV
  
• 10.24.07
  My Second Home (for now) Uncategorized | (1)

  Through an entirely unexpected series of events, I'm working and living in Denver for at least the next two months. I guess "living" isn't entirely accurate since I'm lodged in a hotel throughout the week, and back in Toronto on the weekends. It feels like living, anyway. Denver's an interesting city. It's much smaller in population density than Toronto, has much more sophisticated urban planning, and looks and feels generally like a "cleaner" city. That has its ups and downs, for sure. Maybe it's due to its multiculturalism, but Toronto has this really vibrant, diverse feeling. As you walk through different ...

  Tagged: Denver, Toronto
  
• 10.24.07
  Dopplr - Geo-Visual Affordances Writing | (0)

  Dopplr, a new Web 2.0 geo-based social service for travelers that I know very little about (since it's still in private beta), is using some cool tricks to create what they term "visual affordances" for their users. When users set their location on the site, the colour of the site's logo, their user profile as visible to other users, as well as the site's favicon, changes to a unique colour code that represents their current location. They explain on the site's blog that this is achieved by taking an MD5 digest of the city's name, and then converting it to ...

  Tagged: User Experience
  
• 10.18.07
  Primary & Secondary Form Actions Uncategorized | (0)

  I know there's some usability gurus reading, so I think I'll start including more posts in this domain. Luke Wroblewski published an interesting study on primary and secondary actions in Web forms on his blog, leading up to the release of his book, Web Form Design Best Practices. They made use of some great eye tracking tests to determine which designs worked best for the users. He also just put out a nice and clear presentation entitled Designing for Web 2.0.

  Tagged: Usability
  
• 10.16.07
  User-Centered Blogs Uncategorized | (0)

  A lot of the reading time I've had over the last few days has been spent parsing this list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs. If you're involved in software development, user-centered design, human-computer interaction, or usability/accessibility testing, this is a great list of resources for you to check out. Speaking of UCD, I'm sick of this blog's design, as much as I like Brian Gardner's Silhouette theme. It only takes one visit to another blog with the same template to get that completely unoriginal feeling. I've been keeping an eye on the user behaviour (via Mint and Google Analytics, and ...

  Tagged: UCD, User Experience
  
• 10.16.07
  Students Today Video | (0)

  Having graduated from university almost a year ago, I'm no longer a student, but still remember very vividly how school changed in the almost five years I spent in my program. Here's an interesting video by Michael Wesch (made famous by his "What is Web 2.0?" video) on 'A Vision of Students Today'. Although I went through a technology-heavy program, many teachers and professors still used some truly ancient teaching styles that didn't engage the class whatsoever. I'd say that 95% of the facts presented in this video were true to my experience with university, particularly in regards to unused (and ...

  Tagged: Education, Web
  
• 10.11.07
  Portal and Innovation in Gaming Uncategorized | (2)

  Last night I picked up and played through the new game Portal all in one sitting. Granted, it's a short game that's based on a really radical gameplay concept, but it's easily one of the most compelling gaming experiences I've had to date. I've barely done any gaming all year, but this is something that I just had to give a whirl. I'll let the game's trailer give you a taste at what it's all about. Amazing, isn't it? This game was created by a couple aspiring game designers from the gaming school Digipen, that garnered the attention of big-time game ...

  Tagged: Gaming
  
• 10.03.07
  Cliffside Photography | (0)

  From a walk a couple days ago along the beach in Pickering.
• 10.01.07
  Art Hangover Uncategorized | (0)

  While I didn't take a whole lot of shots on Saturday night at Nuit Blanche with my SLR, this one is certainly one of my faves from Kristen Roos' The Ghost Station project at the now abandoned Lower Bay Subway station in Yorkville. The irony of this shot is that this is an actively used subway car, yet it looks aged and abandoned. I spent the entire night, iPhone in hand (which I plan to properly, and exhaustively review at some point still), sending text and photo updates over Toronto Hydro's WiFi network live to blogTO, and it's been getting a ...

  Tagged: Art, Nuit Blanche, Toronto
  

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