bouncingsoul

There are lots of Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution clones in Flash, and while this one seems especially well made I still feel the whole thing is silly when you're just using your keyboard.

The physicality of playing is what makes these games fun and memorable: it's tapping your feet forward and left on a DDR pad or hitting sticks on actual drum pads or raising your guitar controller at a crazy solo.

Whenever I play these Flash versions (or even the Tap Tap iPhone game) I just think Hmm, I'm tapping my fingers in a pattern that matches these okay songs the developers found for free on the internet. And I can't move because my keyboard has to sit on my desk. This really isn't that fun.

I'm tempted to say the pattern matching mechanic is just an excuse to achieve the essence of the game, which is making people move. But that's probably not right because I recall PaRappa the Rapper on the Playstation was just pushing buttons and it did well.

So I don't know what it is that pushes a game beyond rote pattern matching into something fun, but to me these Flash clones don't have it.

Unless that offline technology is based on the HTML 5 client-side storage recommendation and isn't named Gears. In that case it should be ripped out and replaced with Gears.

It's a feature in the next version of Safari as well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wyctim/2568406483/

It's sorta funny because in the past people complained about sites hiding browser chrome and rejoiced when browsers let you disable that Javascript feature; now it's reversed and we're excited to be able to view sites without browser chrome.

With dialog boxes on OS X you tap Return to use the highlighted option and Esc to select Cancel. (Notice how the keys' left-right position on the keyboard matches the dialog?)

For the common "Don't Save | Cancel | Save..." dialog you can type Command-D to choose Don't Save.

To get to the menu bar type Ctrl-F2.

I think OS X definitely directs you toward using the mouse, but I've found that keyboard shortcuts do exist for most everything.

SIR – Lexington seems to have confused interior design with interior decoration. The interior-design profession is regulated because the designers provide services that carry substantial risk of harm if performed by unqualified people. They design spaces in a manner that can, among other things, reduce the likelihood of the spread of germs and disease in hospitals; increase productivity in commercial offices; and encourage learning in schools. Most important, they understand buildings from the users' perspective.

Interior designers are required to know about building codes, mechanical and electrical systems, fire suppression methods and sustainability measures. The “state-mandated test” that Lexington referred to was developed by our organisation and examines a designer's competence in these areas: it does not cover “fabulous taste”.

Jeffrey Kenney, Executive director, National Council for Interior Design Qualification, Washington, DC

All OSes let you have multiple windows visible. Stating that OS X's use of 3D is good and Vista's is bad is not a convincing argument. Comparing Clippy to Spotlight is unfair.

Really poor article.

But I understand now how makecheck could get annoyed: though pixels can be resized after page load, ems and percents take the browser's font size setting into account and are scaled appropriately the first time.

Edit (since my original brusqueness earned a downvote):

The flaw is that IE6 cannot resize text sized in pixels. IE7 fixed this with its new zoom feature, but left the old, broken resize method untouched. Every other modern browser can resize pixel-sized text.

I personally prefer sizing text in pixels because browsers handle ems and percents differently. Usually it works out fine, but it's really annoying to futz with fractions of an em because one browser rounded it up while others rounded it down.

Pixels also make the translation from mockups to code a tad easier.

I don't understand why this is okay. I imagine he means it was hard to perceive the difference between correctly scaled circles, but that means the data is close, not that you should misrepresent it.

I can see he's written a book about this, so I should assume he has good reasons, but the ones he gave don't seem it.

The problem is that simply scaling the radius exaggerates the difference between numbers because:

    * 26 is 30% more than 20, but
    * a circle with radius 26 is 69% larger 
      than a circle with radius 20.

He said he preferred the look.

Though I’d appreciate a note about what browser bug a particular workaround is for.

† The italics rule I'd guess is to avoid the IE6 float bug, but there better workarounds than axing italics. The suggestion for capitalization is wrong because text-transform:capitalize is very basic and simply capitalizes every word, which is incorrect for titling.

The amateur user thing just doesn't seem consistent throughout. And the way he talks about his limitations as a user ("I’m not a software engineer; if I can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it.") just strikes me as reciting a persona.

Two other obvservations:

* His experience with OS X must have been a long time ago because there's no mention of Exposé, Spaces, or Spotlight – which are all comparable features to the Ubuntu ones that impressed him. And if he was truly an OS X user all these years he'd know about them because they were the main features touted on the upgrade boxes. (Unless he's never upgraded from OS X 10.1.)

* From my memory and quick research Ubuntu doesn't come with KDE – you have to install it. I'm guessing the journalist read about the Linux war between Gnome and KDE and decided the throw it into his story even though it didn't actually happen to him. (Though it's possible Virginia Tech gave him a customized Ubuntu install to play with.)

2. I too don't understand why they play the same one or two ads for the entire movie. It honestly gets annoying, which seems like something you don't want your advertising to do. At this point I just mute them.

Seriously, your question is bad because it ignores the inherent trade-offs in the decision. An on-screen keyboard isn't easier or faster to type on, but it allows for a larger screen and probably cheaper manufacturing costs.

You have to mention the trade-offs if you want useful information from your question. More like: Would you rather have a powerful engine that gets mediocre gas milage, or a mediocre engine that gets great gas milage?

Otherwise you'll just get everyone saying they want the powerful engine.

There is a variant of our [primary audience's] native tongue. Its user base is growing. Soon you might be forced to learn this strange culture/young people's bastardization of our language to function in society!

It's an interesting topic, for sure, but the consequences are always so overblown.

I wonder if this is a common story in other languages.

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: "As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?" In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn't know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/New-Poll-Gauges-Americans-Ge...

Of course there is some difference in face-to-face debate. Probably blatant, irrelevant personal attacks decrease, for example. But that is more because they are instant debate killers since the other person will likely just walk away. The more integrated meanness – hostility, caustic zingers, and the overall drive to embarrass your opponent – is definitely still present.

I think the issue isn't the separation between the two people debating: it's that other people are standing around watching. The publicness of comments is what leads to nasty behavior. Comment threads end up not being two people's search for truth, but their attempts to impress and gain audience support. It becomes a performance.

And I don't think people necessarily intend to do it – it's something you sorta fall into. You may realize you're sacrificing any chance to sway your opponents by being mean or embarrassing them, but the thought of a hundred other people admiring your ass-handing abilities or laughing at your stinging zinger can make the sacrifice seem worthwhile.

To help me be a better commenter I don't ask, "What would I say if this was face to face?" I ask, "What would I say if no one else could see this but the person I'm arguing with?"

I wrote it for a specific instance so it isn't super robust, but it could at least get you started.

Edit: Actually, it sounds like you're talking about using this for navigation and not a form. In that case you should be using an unordered list as your starting point, not a select.

You can turn ULs into dropdowns with just css and there are plenty of examples around. Here's one I found after a quick Google: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/final_drop.html

You can say what he said about anything because there is always something more important than something else. It's a cheap way to dismiss someone without actually addressing their points.

However, I don't understand why they force the user to distinguish between depositing checks and cash. The scanner can tell the difference just fine I'm sure.

Actually, it'd be cool to not have to push a deposit button at all – just start sliding checks in and it'd know I was depositing and switch to that mode.

A desire to shape our environment to be aesthetically pleasing is not a human defect that needs to be transcended: it's a natural desire that fulfilled improves our lives. (Example: it's been shown that higher ceilings increase creative problem solving: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/519146)

You speak as if you've taken the better side in the case of form vs. function. But just like we're wary of people obsessed with form over function I think we should be wary of praising function and degrading the importance form.

2. You don't recognize triangles.

3. Instead of having two modes, could you just have freehand mode with shape buttons in the toolbar? I say this because the shape recognition didn't work that well and I ended up needing to customize the shapes anyway.

4. You should mark where the last click was. I moved my mouse after clicking and had no idea where the text would show up.

I doubt Arrington has taken Journalism 101.