Lessons from Doom is a great article on some of the game design lessons learned from the classic game Doom.
So because the player moves so quickly in Doom, and because most enemy attacks are dodgeable, the player can avoid a significant amount of damage simply by moving. A skilled player can often deal with large numbers of enemies sustaining hardly a scratch. This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful because you are agile, not because you’re a tank. This frees up Doom’s encounters to feature huge numbers of enemies, to vary scenarios by mixing in different proportions of threats, and to have huge, sprawling, often non-linear spaces that the player can traverse easily. There’s nothing quite like it today.
Been a bit of a lax day, and with Canada Day tomorrow, well, here’s some Flowers opening timelapse for you to enjoy.
Flowers opening timelapse from David de los Santos Gil on Vimeo.
On the 9to5 Mac site they note that there’s a 25% off Nomad Lightning cables sale going on.
If you don’t know what these are, they’re small charging accessories to let you charge your iPhone (or Android) phone from a tiny charging accessory that’ll fit on your keychain, in your wallet, or not, from a carabiner.
Find out more here.
Everything You Need to Know About Google’s I/O Keynote:
More than anything else, today’s keynote demonstrated Google’s ambition to take its mobile OS basically everywhere: to your car, to your body, to your television, to your laptop, even into your workplace. We saw a preview of Android’s L release, with a new design—Google calls it material design—that adds some depth features, support for 64 bit, and an enhanced notifications system that will help people interact with their applications in powerful ways without ever launching the app itself.
Voltset - World’s Smartest Multimeter for Smart Devices is a device my buddy Jim shared out. Their tagline:
VOLTSET connects to smart devices and turns them into SMART MULTIMETERS, allowing you to TINKER, LEARN and COLLABORATE with electronics
Pretty awesome.
Watching Random People Slap Each Other In The Face Is Weirdly Compelling.
It honestly is, I’m not sure why.
Fascinating post called 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 discussing how it was possible to do full motion video on the ancient 4.77mhz 8088 and CGA graphics card.
The news about the Manual Camera Controls in iOS 8 is probably the most exciting thing about the upcoming release. Yea, I know Android users have had this forever, but I don’t really care, I’m excited about it in iOS :P
Lots of news from Adobe today. Updates to their mobile apps, release of their Creative Cloud 2014 software (for those afraid that the rolling update releases will not force them to add in new features, of which Photoshop just got a few), and more. Best news of all is about the Photographer deal from CC:
Last year, Adobe announced a $9.99/month photography plan for the Creative Cloud in response to photographers that didn’t want to use all of the CC apps. When they announced it, it was a temporary thing. So if you got it, you were in. If not, you weren’t. Well, then they brought it back, but again it was still meant to be temporary. I think that made a lot of people uneasy because they thought maybe next year it would go away, and they’d have to revert back to old versions or spend more money to get the full Creative Cloud. So today, they officially announced that the Creative Cloud Photography plan is permanent. It’s not going away so if you want to sign up this week, great. If not, and maybe you decide to next month it’ll still be there.
Great news all around.
The New OK Go Music Video is an Optical Illusion Tour de Force Shot in a Single Take.
Title of the post says it all. Watch and enjoy, then go and buy some music to support these guys.
Designers graphically represent awful client feedback. Remember to share this with your own designer friends, they’ll love some of this advice :)
Found this hilarious re-enactment of the Maleficent pitch meeting on reddit.
Having not seen the movie, I can only assume this is completely accurate.
Slide and Clutch is the latest Kickstarter endeavor from Peak Design, who produced some very cool camera clips previously, and make a compelling argument why their camera straps are different and better than the competition.
While I own a Black Rapid camera sling strap and a eBay $3.50 special hand strap, I contributed right away, and are really looking forward to seeing these guys succeed (again). Please have a look at their Kickstarter page and become a backer so I can have these new products.
The new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy gives a bit more of the reveal for the story. Really excited about this one.
Add GPS to your dumb camera photos using your iOS device. A great writeup of my favorite iOS app for geotagging for my photography.
Tesla: All Our Patent Are Belong To You
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Great news.
Ever wondered what really goes on in your dishwasher? Well, A GoPro Hero’s journey into a dishwasher reveals all!
Saw this on Petapixel this morning: Photog Stopped at Six Flags for Wearing ‘I Shoot RAW’ Shirt. This makes my blood boil. The issue is obviously they think “I shoot RAW” has some connotation with guns, but for some reason they refuse to admit that (which is weird), and the park employees are completely hypocritical. Seriously, screw those guys. I’m so glad I’ve never had any issues with harassment as a photographer from douchebags like this.
Grrrr…..
Just saw the DOOM 4 teaser trailer and I must say, I like it!
I think my favorite part is when you hear the classic shotgun sound. Booya!
13 Signs you are a System Admin.
All true. Been there, done that.
The 22 most important things Apple announced at WWDC 2014 from The Verge is a nice clean overview of what was announced on June 2nd if you’ve been out of the country and not able to keep up with the tech world, like I am.