It seems that the UI shown in games and movies is meant more to quickly show the viewer what the screen is trying to say more than it is supposed to be usable to the person. That's why you always see such big fonts and simplified diagrams. It would seem to me that this is generally inefficient because it means you must constantly be switching between views if you want to see more than a giant number a progress bar.
Furthermore, there's a certain one-upsmanship in Hollywood in trying to show how advanced a society is by how many increasingly complicated gestures one has to perform to use the interface. Something tells me that a Minority Report style interface is more tiring and over the long run than a keyboard. Heck, there were people complaining that the Wii has similar issues with extended play of all these waggle games.
Agreed 100%. This is just for inspiration and ideas. I think that the one thing that video game and movie UI gets right every time is the use of color. Blue/green for comfort, yellow for attention, and red for danger.
ARGs and similar types of viral marketing can be a novel way to engage customers into your brand, but at the same time you run the risk of it leaving a worse impression of your brand if at the end they feel it was a waste of time and nothing more than a roundabout way to say "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine".
People immediately cried foul citing contractual agreements with retailers not to break the street date and thus saying that Valve cannot release no earlier than midnight on original launch date, and once users had data about the fill rate of the progress bars, it was calculated that at best a 6am Tuesday release would be shorted by a few hours. It felt like an unwinnable situation to those in the know.
While Valve is a company known for experimenting on its customer base, and everyone that complained still bought the game anyway, it does seem a bit cruel to lead your fanbase on a wild goose chase that ended in essentially a ransom to release the game. In the end it boiled down to "Pay us $X or else you'll have to wait to play the game you've already paid for, oh, and you'll still have to wait 90% of the time anyway."
I remember when the first couple games were 'complete' and I said to my friend '2 games are done and they've only shaved over 1.5 hours. Seriously? Why bother?'
I didn't have the Steam version pre-ordered (I ordered the PS3 one, which had a code for the Steam one in it for free) so I didn't have any stake in the matter, but if I had, and I had bought the Potato Pack, I'd have been a little upset at them.
But then, I remember thinking that about almost every ARG I've ever seen. When you try to mix reality with a game, you almost always end up with a very thin game with very thin rewards. You rarely get more out of it than just enjoying the ARG itself, even though they present it as a chance to get something better.
In short, I think the expectations were set wrong. Had they presented it merely as an ARG with no 'reward' at the end, I'd be less disappointed with it.
In this world of airplanes and shipping services, there's no non-medical non-legal reason why you're stuck in any particular expensive city. Choosing to live in a big expensive city is an expense choice that you make, just like buying a premium brand.
I see a lot of those capacitive styluses, and the thing that bothers me is that they look too wide at the bottom, as if they're designed to mimic the area of a fingerprint. If I wanted to do more intricate and accurate work, I'd like to have the finer point that a traditional stylus provides.
It's fascinating to think that in 1869 there were Transatlantic telegraph links. One could have sat this entrance exam in London while it was being sat in MA simultaneously, with Questions/Answers transmitted digitally.
First contact was made in 1858, but the cable failed in mere days. The first reliable link happened in 1866. It ran about half "telegraph speed", which was pretty darn slow. I'd hate to connect to that bbs.
Slow, but amazing at the same time. I love thinking about things like this.
I remember someone calling my old BBS, back in the early 90s, with a TDD to see what would happen. That explained why I had been seeing 300bps callers when I was used to seeing 1200bps-2400bps.
I recall one holiday starting the download of a picture of a bear. I then went and had Thanksgiving dinner with my family for about two hours. I arrived home just in time for the picture to finish downloading. :P
What was the bandwidth of that telegraph link? And what were the clerical procedures for passing message text from a sending client to the telegraph operator at the sending end, and from the the telegraph operator to the recipient at the receiving end? Just how simultaneous was communication after the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid? Much faster than any ship, surely, but fast enough (and inexpensive enough for most people?) for cheating on a Harvard entrance examination?
I think the "evil" that is alleged is that Sony is the type of company that is ruthless enough to do things like installing a rootkit on your machine to ensure that its copyrights are not infringed.
If the Lamb in this scenario is a litigious bully who stretches the law to breaking point and abuses privileges that aren't available to you or I, then yes.
No, we're the lambs. One of the wolves is a giant multinational company, the other owns tanks and can control Internet peering.
On behalf of the rest of you lambs, I'd like to thank people who commit crimes to make points about freedom online for picking this fight. I'm sure we'll do just fine in it.
No. You're right. What you should definitely try to do is use coercion against people who can outspend you $1,000,000,000 to $1, or against people who employ hundreds of people authorized to discharge firearms.
Yelp has an API that returns business data in a given geographic area. You could probably get a list of zipcodes from wikipedia and then just loop through that.
Furthermore, there's a certain one-upsmanship in Hollywood in trying to show how advanced a society is by how many increasingly complicated gestures one has to perform to use the interface. Something tells me that a Minority Report style interface is more tiring and over the long run than a keyboard. Heck, there were people complaining that the Wii has similar issues with extended play of all these waggle games.