bornon5

Hi, developer here! I’ve taught myself to code over the past 16 months, and last year I released my first app, a simple tip calculator. I’m excited to release this somewhat more substantial app.

I was inspired to make Continuo as a replacement for a pen-and-paper calendar I’ve kept since 2012. It’s based around the idea of recording the activities you do each day, without getting bogged down in specific numbers.

Feedback is welcome. Thanks for looking!

I've used this for years to count measures when playing with an orchestra. I have to continually support my instrument with one hand, so I use the other hand to count.

Similar thing happened to me - a client didn't like a shade of blue I was using, even though it was the exact shade she had told me to use. She then sent me a PowerPoint file with just a blue box in it and told me to use that blue instead. Of course it was the exact same blue as before. I re-sent her the file, and she immediately transmitted her enthusiastic approval.

SEEKING WORK - New York City - remote or local - projects of any length

I'm an illustrator and game designer, always looking for new games or apps to help create.

Games: I did all the art and UI for Optia (http://bederstudios.com/optia), an award-winning iOS puzzle game. I've also done game art and design for Microsoft Game Studios, Atari, MIT Game Lab, and others.

Illustration: I've done drawings and paintings for national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and the LA Times. My work has been repeatedly recognized by the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration, and has been featured on prominent industry sites including Illustration Age, Illustration Friday, and Behance.

I'm fluent in many graphics programs (PS, AI, InDesign, 3ds max) and can learn new ones quickly. I'm very familiar with version control and project management software. Some experience modifying code in Lua and Objective-C.

My portfolio site is http://naftalibeder.com.

Feel free to contact me at naftalibeder@gmail.com. Thanks!

I'm impressed with your take on the level list. It's so nice to see something more than a grid of colored, numbered boxes. It may be a simple puzzle game, but approaches like that make it feel like an adventure.

The game is beautiful, too. Wonderful job!

I think this is related to Borromean ring system - three inseparable rings, yet no two are directly linked to each other. Cut any one ring, and the other two fall apart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borromean_rings

A lot of those backgrounds look procedurally generated or tiled in some way. They're still wonderfully crafted - just not necessarily hand-modeled or hand-painted down to the pixel.

I see a lot of disparagement, especially on HN, of the Gates Foundation's methods. I don't find myself questioning Bill Gates when he talks about how unimaginably difficult it is to improve systems like education or cope with malaria.

On a fundamental level - individual scandals and cynicism about Gates' motives aside - what is the foundation doing wrong?

When I was in school, one of my illustration professors said to us, "None of you will ever be as creative as Moebius."

To hear this was not a letdown. Moebius was incredibly prolific and unbelievably talented, and his work represents the upper bound of what is creatively possible.

If his argument is valid, there's no logical reason to stop where he does. You see a continuous progression of weeks instead of discrete months; fine. But what about days? What's so special about the end of one day and the beginning of the next? Nothing - it's just an artifact of paper calendars, daily planners, and so on.

What a calendar should be, if we're going to truly abolish the tragedy of skeuomorphism, is a smoothly flowing timeline, with you at the front, diminishing logarithmically into the future. This way, you can clearly see your appointments. Should make the author happy.

The point is, sometimes we need to artificially break things up into manageable pieces. We think in milestones - the beginning of a season, midnight as a landmark showing how late you're staying up. Some skeuomorphic designs are only "incidentally" skeuomorphic, in that they solve a problem the right way, and just happen to resemble how people used to solve that problem.

I'm not convinced that rounded corners are anything more than a trend right now.

Aesthetically, many beautiful objects have sharp corners - tables, windows, and computer screens, not to mention the universal reading tablet, a.k.a. the piece of paper. Our eyes haven't had a problem staying focused inside these rectangles.

The big draw for rounded corners is comfort. But we've been using sharp rectangular folders, binders, magazines, etc. for decades without complaint.

Apple used the rounded corner to great effect, and for now it seems like the only possible design choice. But some point, someone is going to produce an elegant matboard-thin computer tablet with "sharp" corners that don't cut your fingers, and suddenly the rounded corner will seem like a childish relic of the naughts.

When I was an intern at Microsoft, they let us walk around the Future Home.

One of the features was a countertop screen that displayed information like the time and date. I asked the tour guide about how the countertop screen worked, since it didn't look or feel like an LCD - the images were much too dim and the surface felt like acrylic. She laughed and said that they hadn't known what to do, so the night before it was supposed to be finished, someone ran out to the department store and bought some translucent plastic, and then installed a video projector underneath the counter, pointing up. Sure enough, the cabinet was glued shut, so as not to ruin the illusion.

Everything else felt similar. Standard (and awesome) futuristic concepts, but executed cheaply, and not really usable beyond the staged usage scenario. It was like showing off a flying car that can only fly a foot off the ground and by the way you're not allowed to look underneath.

If you want to draw cool cartoon characters that aren't just precise copies of an online tutorial, pick up a pencil and draw a person from life. It'll suck, but do it in earnest a few dozen times, and pretty soon you'll have an idea of how to distort reality into cartoons.

These tutorials are the end result of a lot of invisible rule-breaking (a nose looks like x, a hand looks like y, etc.). You can't break these rules intelligently unless you know what they are. And since everyone has access to reality and a pencil, there's nothing preventing anyone from discovering the rules.

The Street View UI in the Google Earth app lets you walk around using first-person shooter WASD controls.

The surrounding textures are pasted onto simple 3D rectangles approximating buildings and houses. As you move, they transition into each other, giving you the least distorted view possible. With a fast connection, it feels pretty realistic, like you're walking around the neighborhood.

Almost like how mipmaps, if done well in 3D games, aren't really noticeable.

You might have meant this by "intensity", but you're going to want to vary lightness, not saturation. They should be distinguishable in grayscale.

Yes, if most young designers demanded respectable wages, it would help established designers. But to claim that that's the only motive for this kind of plea isn't fair to the people succeeding in the industry.

I recently graduated from art school. Nearly ever one of my illustration professors (all established illustrators) harped on this issue, encouraging us to demand industry-standard wages, and to turn down jobs that paid dirt.

It wasn't hard to see that they love the profession, and want to see it supported in perpetuity. By making sure that the next generation of designers continues to convince the world that illustration is an art form worth paying for, they're supporting an endeavor they love.

Call it passing the torch. That it helps them continue to earn a living is fully beside the point.

Using complementary colors to make your subjects "pop" is just standard color theory.

When coloring anything, you pretty much have to choose some variation of red/green, orange/blue, or violet/yellow. Anything else blurs into one of these three.

We'd all do better to criticize specific color choices, rather than stigmatizing one of the three possible general palettes. Otherwise it's like criticizing violins or oil paint for being overused.

Even in Photoshop, if you draw a very quick curve, you can see individual vertices along it. But Photoshop seems to quickly interpolate curves instead of straight lines, so you get a rough approximation of the curve you're drawing between the vertices. It's pretty good for hiding how it works.

Very nice app, by the way.

At art school, we were taught that in movies and paintings, a person's gaze tends to enter in the upper right, and loop around in a C shape, exiting the frame on the lower right. Therefore, it's the job of the artist to compose the image to sweep the viewer back up on the right side, to repeat the cycle.

We didn't do eye tracking studies to confirm this, but in analyzing intuitively "good" images vs. "bad" ones, the good ones invariably catered to this kind of eye movement.

Websites control the eye so differently (and more rigidly) than how representational images do, that I wouldn't expect the two to generate similar viewer interactions.