I know this was to prevent the camera from triggering as you carry the phone around in your pocket, but it’s just not very affordant. On a dark background you can barely see the subtle lines around the camera icon that indicate dragability in iOS, and the screen-bounce seems like a clumsy solution to the problem. Since 5.1 came out I’ve seen people on the street try repeatedly tapping the icon before they understood what they had to do—call me crazy, but maybe it’d have been better to go with a double-tap on the icon instead? I’d willingly take the hit of a few photos of the inside of my pocket in exchange for a button-like icon that actually acts like a button.

OK, </grump>. That concludes this week’s episode of end-of-weekend blues manifesting themselves through UX criticism.

I’ve described TED to the uninitiated as “video-twitter for good ideas,” and facile though that is the two formats do share some similarities: short-format, topically-focused, and easily share-able nuggets of information. A hashtag like #TEDxVille can give outsiders a real-time window into what’s happening at a necessarily limited-admission event, and tweets often help distill the already-focused idea of a session into its most pithy expression. A talk about what Somerville can learn from international communities large & small boils down to an anecdote about a Somalian village, where the most under-served or least-represented has first say in the discussion of village issues; the key points of a session about situational awareness can be summed up within a single tweet.

Given how concise TED talks are intended to be, Twitter ends up being a very effective vehicle for communicating those concepts, and the real-time nature of live tweeting can encourage readers to reply to speakers in the moment with comments and questions. However, Twitter is a broadcast tool, and a noisy one at that. The signal-to-noise ratio is never going to be great. Whatever you post will be seen as a tiny part of a long list, crammed together with hundreds of other people’s content. Twitter provides Lists and Hashtags to help you structure this chaos, but lists are only viable when dealing with people you know: Hashtags are the best thing going at a conference like TEDxSomerville, which I attended last week. Being able to quickly “tune in” to a specific topic looks great on paper, but when you’re actually at one of these events, the hashtag runs afoul of the RT. Rather than doing their job to help increase the visibility of funny, interesting or important topic within the chaos of a twitterstream, all RTs do in a conference stream is ensure that you’re going to be reading that particularly quotable sentence from the last talk over and over again for the next two to three hours as the rest of the world shares the thought around.

What I think we need is a way to enhance a stream to filter out RTs from the stream, perhaps by enlarging the RT’d tweet like you would enlarge a word in a tag cloud to show emphasis without repetition. I feel this would be a good compromise between the wide-band sharing mechanic of the RT and the narrow-band purpose of the hashtag at a conference.

Around New Year’s, I talked a bit about writing up interesting cocktail recipes in a blog. If it’s not obvious I’m not exactly the world’s best blogger, so let’s try Snip.It. A bookmarklet-based collection should be maintainable, and if anything warrants a write-up that I can’t find on another blog, Mixed Up articles might just cross over into this space. If you’re one of the people who expressed interest in reading my thoughts on mixed drinks, give it a follow:

“Mixed Up” cocktail recipes collection on Snip.It

function bypass_password_form( $output ) {
  // Check for a hash of the password
  // exactly as in Kieran's example
  if ( $_GET['pwd'] == md5( $post->post_password ) ) {
    return apply_filters(
      'the_content',
      get_page( get_the_ID() )->post_content
    );
  }
  // Or return the output as normal
  return $output;
}
add_filter('the_password_form','bypass_password_form');

They are not well documented, but there is almost always a way to do something in WordPress using filters—it can just take a few weeks of digging to find the right one! If you are managing your own site, modifying the core files may be fine, but I encourage any WordPress contractors or developers to research and share ways they have found to avoid customizing the core. Having this kind of functionality in a plugin or your theme’s functions.php will make for fewer headaches for clients when they need to upgrade ;)

My slides for today’s presentation have been uploaded to Slideshare! I will post a link to the video when it is available.

UPDATE 9/11/11: The video of my post types talk is now online! My sincere thanks to Kurt Eng for all the effort WordCamp Boston put into filming these talks.

I will be speaking at WordCamp Boston this weekend, giving an introduction to Custom Post Types for intermediate theme designers. If you will be coming to WordCamp this year, I hope you will drop by!

I’ve cross-posted my blurb from the official WordCamp blog:

WordPress 3.0 expanded theme and plugin developer’s abilities to create Custom Post Types, representing data more complex than the average blog post. This functionality firmly establishes WordPress as a viable Content Management System, but it can be difficult to know how to use these new post types effectively in your themes.

Using a recent client project as a case study, this talk is a candid introduction to Custom Post Types for the intermediate theme developer. I will examine how creating your own post types can benefit you while developing a site, while also calling out some drawbacks and “gotchas” I found while designing a site heavily dependent on my own post types and taxonomies. If you have been developing your own themes and are beginning to need your content organized more clearly than categories allow, this talk may be for you!

Boston Indies is a local game development group, founded by Scott Macmillan as an offshoot of the larger (and more corporate) Boston PostMortem meetup. I’ve been proud to be associated with the Indies group, and was excited when Darren Torpey asked if I would be available to help them with a site design. Managing editor Jonathan Myers has brought in a lot of good content to the site so my design was pitched to take a backseat to the articles themselves, giving just enough structure and consistency to let the content shine. Check out the new, cleaner look of Boston Indies here.

I have spent way too much time this weekend playing tiny tower. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my holiday—just that, every fleeting moment I could snag between grilling, family events and fireworks, I would dash to my phone to restock my tiny businesses.

As time-wasters go, Tiny Tower has a leg up on the competition. The writing is clever (and delightfully referential), and the pixel art feels fresh in a market over-saturated in nostalgia. The art’s strength is in abstraction of the familiar: an Apple Store, a wood-grilled pizza parlor, and a brewery are all represented, each row no more than about 50 pixels tall. With a nod to its social-game ancestors, Tiny Tower even abstracts Facebook: your ‘bitizens’ will post status updates about their jobs, favorite pop-culture quotes, or speculations on 8-bit existence. Sam Cooper, one of my “Mapple Store” genius bar associates (complete with blue polo—you can customize each character’s outfits) muses, “If we were thinking with portals then we wouldn’t need these elevators!”

Any game that can engross both me and my stalwartly non-gamer girlfriend has to be doing something right, and the pacing of tiny tower is perfectly tuned: floor pricing (=floorNumber^2 * 150, as near as I can determine) starts out low enough to permit rapid development, and scales exponentially as you build out your businesses (and get addicted). Your stores’ income scales, too, providing you maintain a balance between residential and commercial floors—the price of the next expansion tends to be just barely out of reach, and this feels fair. To date it has not taken more than a few hours of inventory management grinding to make it to the next floor, and if you can’t wait, that’s where Nimblebit provide the easy out of in-app purchases to get more towerbux. Reviewers have discussed Tiny Tower’s freemium model already so I won’t repeat their findings here, beyond applauding Nimblebit for creating an entirely optional payment model that still grows ever more enticing as the times and costs involved in the game scale.

Your narrative role within Tiny Tower is confusing, to say the least. The game’s interactions cast the player alternately as zoning board, inventory manager, landlord, human resources director, and… elevator operator? That last one is the most unique among sim-style god-games, and it ends up being the majority of what you do when the game is open: in between building new levels and restocking merchandise, you spend most of out time shuttling bitizens up and down your tower, rewarded for your engagement by the random appearance of time-saving VIP characters that can sell out a specific product or shave three hours off a build time. You don’t have to leave the game open after restocking your inventory, but you’ll want to. You are also periodically asked to play the front desk and identify particular inhabitants of your tower, for a variety of reasons. ID actions occur about every five minutes you have the game foregrounded: perhaps a package has been delivered for bitizen Peggy Moore, or perhaps (and this happened!) the game informs you that only Fred Duncan is a bad enough dude to save the president. These are good mechanics, adding to the games character and allowing you to play at your own pace as you get to know your pixellated minions.

And what of those bitizens? Between the expansions, restocking, and elevator maintenance, this unabashedly simple game does offer flashes of insight into the workings of an economy. Many of my bitizens have creative talent, but ended up stuck in dead-end retail jobs; more than a few of my tower’s inhabitants had to spend some time working at a sub shop before they landed their dream gig at that travel agency. I’ve grown attached to my tiny champions of commerce, reading each sprite’s personal stories between the lines of the games’ wall-posts and popup notifications.

Tiny Tower is a well-made game, and I’m glad to be playing it. I’ve got to run, though—I need to restock the bike shop on 11, and one of my bitizens just warned me there may be some angry birds trapped in the ventilation.

Tiny Tower is available for iPad and iPhone—for free—from the Apple App Store. Good luck maintaining your social life!

If you’re not familiar with the video game Slam Bolt Scrappers, I strongly suggest you go check it out at Fire Hose Games’ site. I have worked with Fire Hose several times in the past, most recently this winter to design and launch their new website, and they are great folks. More importantly, the game is a lot of fun! It’s a mashup of sorts, combining elements of Super Smash Bro’s, Tetris and several other games—that may sound weird, but it works. I’ve yet to win a match, but this weekend at PAX East I will be challenging ‘Fire Chief’ Eitan Glinert to a rematch from last year’s PAX, where I suffered a crushing defeat!

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a PSN exclusive, and will be released digitally on March 13. Catch them this weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, PAX East, in Boston to try the game.

One of the achievements this year was to build a game using aggregated data. After Friday’s video keynote and kickoff meeting, the first idea I pitched was a trading card game where the deck is built from the list of people you follow on twitter. While that game didn’t gain enough traction to win a team, other jammers did grab on to the idea of twitter integration. My friend Ryan came up with a pitch of his own, and a platformer originally pitched as TwitAssassin came to life as @TwitApocalypse!

TwitApocalypse has a pretty silly premise: You are the grim reaper, and you have overslept the end of the world. Upon waking, you must use twitter to find and eliminate the survivors. Based on the idea of culling the people you don’t care about from your twitter list, the goal of the game is to traverse a platformer level and gruesomely destroy your friends. The game tracks who has tweeted most recently, and gives you a ‘Kill List’ of recent tweeters—These are your priority targets, and you get a bonus for taking them out. Killing somebody not on your list results in a penalty.

We had an awesome group of people working on this project: Ryan Kahn, Darius Kazemi and Imran Malek handled the programming; Shervin Ghaemmaghami served as our voice actor and narrative designer; Vytenis Krukonis and I took care of the art; and audio genius Akash Thakkar came on mid-Saturday to help us with sound and music. It was a great group, and I hope to continue working with this team on future projects.

Just as last year gave me an opportunity to stretch my musical skills, this game jam saw me doing my first ever pixel art animations. While previous projects had involved some pixel art, I’d never tackled anything as complex as our grim reaper player character. Despite my lack of experience I am extremely happy with how it turned out, and I will post an animation demo of the character soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of @Death’s poses there to the left.