- Lessons from the Johnny Cash Project — When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Doom iPhone Review — fascinating explanation of how the iPhone works for programmers, and how the Doom source code works around some of the less-game-friendly features. (via Tom Carden on Delicious)
- The 8 Pen — new alphanumeric entry system for Android.
- Salesforce Security — lots of information for web developers, most generally applicable. (via Pete Warden)
ENTRIES TAGGED "game"
7 areas beyond gaming where Kinect could play a role
How Kinect could apply to art, education, health and other domains.
Microsoft's Kinect has implications that go beyond gaming. From medicine to learning to participatory art, Alex Howard considers ways Kinect's interface could shift our computing-based interactions.
Windows Mobile apps are more expensive than iPhone apps
The mean app price for the Windows market is nearly two times higher than the App Store.
The Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has about 1,400 apps spread across 16 categories. In this short post I'll provide some basic statistics and compare it with the grandaddy of app stores: the U.S. iTunes store.
Four short links: 2 November 2010
Participation, iPhone Games Programming, Mobile Keypad Magic, and Web App Security
Four short links: 20 October 2010
Bad Game Mechanics, Under NoSQL Covers, the LAN of Things, and the Smithsonian Commons
- Pwned: Gamification and its Discontents (Slideshare) — hear, hear! Video games are not fun because they’re video games, but if and only they are well-designed. Just adding something from games isn’t a guarantee for fun. (via jameshome on Twitter)
- Redis Under the Hood — explanation of the insides and mechanisms of this popular distributed key-value store. (via tlockney on delicious)
- The LAN of Things (Mike Kuniavsky) — Before we can have an Internet of Things, we will need to have a LAN of things.[...] Most of the utility of a LAN came from its local functionality. Thus, before we can build a useful (from a user perspective) Internet of Things, we need to learn to build useful LANs of Things. [...] I think it’s important to start thinking about what the highly localized uses of sparsely distributed technology can be. What can we do when there are only a couple of things with RFIDs in our house? What totally great service can be built on having two light switches that report their telemetry in the house? What totally valuable information can you tell me if I only wear my motion sensor every once in a while? Love it. (via Matt Jones on Delicious)
- Mike Edson’s Talk at Powerhouse Museum — the Director of Web and New Media Technology at the Smithsonian is smart, articulate, and trying to do something cool with the Smithsonian Commons prototype. (via sebchan on Twitter)
Four short links: 12 October 2010
Zen of Open Data, Accurate Judging, Disorienting Game, and Grokking HTTP
- The Zen of Open Data (Chris McDowall) — lovely short piece that encapsulates the whole business.
- The Calculus of Committee Composition (PlosONE) — using accuracy of judges, cost of a wrong decision, and cost of judges to arrive at the correct number of judges for any given situation. (Breaking news: ice skating gets it wrong) This might be useful for crowdsourcing.
- First Person Tetris — clever twist on an old game. (via Nick Bilton)
- htty — terminal for interacting with HTTP servers. This would be great for teaching would-be developers how the web actually works on the inside.
Reality has a gaming layer
Kevin Slavin sees a world where games shape life and life shapes games.
Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code and a speaker at Web 2.0 Expo New York, has worked at the the intersection of games and reality for nearly a decade. In this interview, Slavin explores the impact of mobile apps and the unexpected ways games shape our lives.
Four short links: 6 September 2010
Game Engine, Enterprise Twitteralike, Open Microbiome, and Good Mental Habits
- Akihabara (Github) — open source (GPL2 and MIT dual-licensed) HTML5/Javascript engine for classic arcade games. (via chadfowler on Twitter)
- Eureka Streams — open sourced Java app for enterprise Twitter-like activity: build a profile, join groups, post updates, subscribe to updates from individuals or groups. (via dlpeters on Twitter)
- Open Microbiome — hoping to build open tools, standard samples, data, and metadata for analysis of the microbiome (all the microorganisms that live in, on, and with macroorganisms like us). Early days, but glad to see people are already thinking of building this research open from the ground up. And if you think sequencing the human genome gave us a lot of data we struggle to find patterns in, wait until you start including microorganisms: we have 10x as many bacteria in us as we have cells and the species variety is vast. (via phylogenomics on Twitter)
- Habits of Mathematical Minds — fantastic list of skills and approaches that are hallmarks of many successful minds, not just in mathematics. (via ddmeyer on Twitter)
Four short links: 3 Sep 2010
Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound
- Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) — [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry)
- 2010 Mario AI Championship — three tracks: Gameplay, Learning, and Level Generation. Found via Ben Weber’s account of his Level Generation entry. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels.
- Wave in a Box — Google to flesh out existing open source Wave client and server into full “Wave in a Box” app status.
- 3D Sound in Google Earth (YouTube) — wow. (via Planet In Action)
In defense of games in the workplace
"Gamestorming" author Dave Gray on how games cut through creative chaos.
Dave Gray, co-author of Gamestorming, contends that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable. Gray discusses the collaborative power of games in the following Q&A.
Four short links: 19 July 2010
Open Source Brain Software, Mind Control, Data QA, Android Game Engine
- OpenVibe — open source software for brain-computer interfaces, from Inria.
- Robot Controlled by Mind (video) — uses OpenVibe. I love that this can see blinks and other neural activity, and that it’s hackable.
- Talend Open Profiler — open source tool to QA data.
- AndEngine — open source 2D OpenGL Game Engine for the Android platform.
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