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Scaleform is great at enabling web- and interactive advertising-trained graphic designers to make video game UI art. It's not as great at being efficient, or truly integrated into your game.

Gaming "toy user interfaces" like the one pictured lower in the article generally take so much code because, very often, art directed animation which drives those UIs is often actually assembled entirely in script. Comparing it to an early Unix kernel I guess paints a nice visual image, but is probably not a fair comparison.

In game, in-world "toy UI" like that is intended to look like the sort of sci-fi UI you see in movies, but also be interactive. The stuff in movies is made by a motion graphics designer with a copy of Adobe After Effects. Replicating that movie like look, with all the animations and visual effects you see on the big screen, but ALSO making it work as a fully user-aware, state-aware computer interface, isn't cheap, either on an artist man-hours standpoint, or from a lines of code standpoint.

I imagine its expense could be reduced if a lot of the stuff up on screen was boiled down to some kind of binary data - a lot of work is put into optimizing performance of engine-native animation files and effects which are played on the characters and environments of a video game world - but usually UI (including fictional in world "toy UI") isn't considered part of the main tool chain or process, so it ends up either being highly special cased by hand, or very highly interpreted (sometimes running interpreted code through middleware which reinterprets the code again) requiring quite a lot of bloat to look and behave in a way that is presentable and on par with the rest of the game. (Usually at this point in the games industry, people build their UIs in flash, and then run them through middleware like Scaleform, which reinterprets their flash based bitmap and vector artwork as polygonal art, and reinterprets their action script into an engine-savvy language... not efficient for the game, but efficient for a former marketing guy who now wants to do game graphic and UI design, I guess.)

(For what its worth, I agree with Carmack's assessment. Making highly authorable and also highly efficient at runtime, "AAA visual quality" game UI is just a hard problem to solve, and it's a problem which few studios deem worth solving because after so many years of the current system, the benefits of a change have almost become an intangible.)

I hope they followed this up with a QR code which decodes to a treatise on the rise of infographics.

It's totally hindsight driven, but the fact that he started every HN comment with the same "Jonathan here" type canned greeting should have probably raised an eyebrow.

(amending this: after reading up a bit I don't agree with my own original post. It's a very odd thing to do -- I don't ever see anyone on HN post like that -- but he's not a fictional person or anything like that.)

I think most people moved away from it before they knew they had it, when their copy of Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1 opened up in a maximized window.

Apple is heavily promoting use of gestures, multiple desktops, and other OS features to promote fast switching and passing of data between running full screen apps. It's different than the pile-of-windows approach of the last few decades but the intent is still to have a ton of user-opened programs running and interacting. I think casual users genuinely prefer full screen apps, even after 20 years of pro users trying to lecture them and slap their wrists over the potential they're ignoring. Lion seems to be trying to give them their full screen, while also teaching a "safe" feeling way to multitasking and present a bunch of apps.

It'll be interesting to see what happens -- from a marketing and consumer communication/perception standpoint when Windows 8 is out on PCs, and the 360 gets its matching OS update as well. It won't be a perfect arrangement, but it'll be Microsoft's first cross-platform alignment to that degree in ages.

Side question brought on by the headline: Is there such a thing as an "indirect descendant?" Seems like all descendants are direct.

These guys are doing something similar and are demonstrating more dynamic lighting and destruction tech: http://www.atomontage.com

Gold farmers: If you can't beat 'em... tax 'em, apparently.

The Firefox address bar can be set jump straight to the "I'm feeling lucky" result instead of showing search results when it's confide t enough in the search.

That behavior alone, which for some reason nobody else replicates as a feature of their browser, kept me using FF for years longer than I would have otherwise. The FF address bar is still best in class in my opinion.

Haha true. I didn't think of it that way because my mind saw the homepage button and the search as you type button as "the same button" but yeah you're right. At this point (assuming you didn't disable scripts) the Google homepage needs nothing beyond an empty text field. No buttons, nothing. Weird.

Side note: With results-as-you-type now being the default even from the Google front page, isn't "I'm feeling lucky" a totally vestigial button at this point?

As long as it doesn't start resulting in people 'burning down the place' for the 'insurance' money.

How much financially is a customer worth to Google?

I know its a coarse metric, but in the "Twitter should have paid ad-free Pro accounts!" conversations, people always point out that if you look at Twitter's userbase versus its valuation, customers are worth more to Twitter as advertising eyeballs than customers would be willing to pay to become ad-free subscribers.

If that's the case -- if people are actually worth more to the company "for free" -- then the company should take care of those users when they try to leave.

I don't know if that metric actually holds water, even in the Twitter examples where it's frequently used, but the point remains that while customers aren't directly paying money for Google services, they are not without value when it comes to Google functioning. Google isn't offering its services to the public as a public service.

Would a "don't allow others to export my information" feature, maybe with some granularity, help with this? So if your friend dumped their info to leave, or sent it directly to another app or service, you wouldn't be included* since you opted out of allowing others to export you?

* or, with some granularity and tuning controls, maybe for example just your name and it's presence in photo tags from your friends library, and nothing else, would be included.

Why would a clean, user focused "export my info" tool also be exposed to apps? I can't imagine a situation where those two features would be intrinsically tied. This is about an end-user-side button which dumps your friend network 'address book' into a simple machine readable format and downloads it to the users local drive. Implying such a feature would/could, accidentally/maliciously cause a user's contacts to flood out uncontrollably to 3rd party app developers reads like FUD.

In these arguments, its never concrete like that, because what people are fretting over is not actually about a particular metric, about revenue, etc. It's personal, and it's cultural. When someone says "casual games will take over console and pc games!" what they mean is "people's first impression of the word 'gaming' will be rewritten to point to a part of games culture that I don't like or participate in, which is troubling to me personally."

I guess if they're spherical they're consistantly difficult to hit, even if you play spinning animations on them. However, if they're discs, and they rotate on X or Y, their size as a target will fluctuate. I made that mockup with just aesthetics in mind, but changing the shape from spheres would definitely have gameplay implications.

I don't think the gritty/old timey look is bad, but I think you could push it further to sell it as such. I think you could go a long way by adding SOME saturation back into the world, and tinting things a bit sepia for an aged look. I'd still leave the bullseyes full saturation, though, as they really do pop right now. If you want to keep things feeling deliberately old timey and worn, adding a little bit of aged film overlay would go a long way (some decent examples of this type of aging, though fully black and white instead of just partially desaturated, can be seen in the games PB Winterbottom or Limbo).

Out of curiosity, what led to the bullseyes being spherical instead of cylindrical?

-- PB Winterbottom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMZyAsVlMoU#t=1m10s

Limbo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCA79zPaQe0#t=30s

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Edit: I got distracted for a bit but here's a moderately quick mockup of some of those ideas:

http://www.meltwizard.com/stuff/factory.png

You could make people "feel" the gyroscopic movement even more by having the UI's movement be slightly delayed from the player movement, like it's following behind on a rubber band (see: first person games which have helmet art, like Metroid Prime on the gamecube). You wouldn't want to make it too crazy since it has to be usable, but adding a little feeling of sway to the surrounding chrome, tied to gyroscope moves, would probably go a long way towards making it feel less mechanical and more fluid.

Sorry for the armchair art direction by the way. If I am accidentally coming across as an asshole, please know that it is not intentional! I like the concept for the game AND for the visual direction and it made me interested enough to crack open Photoshop and start playing around. I don't know if my ideas are particularly noteworthy or if they actually manage to improve anything, but it's what came to mind when looking at the game. Hopefully no offense is taken!

On his way to get milk, if your son stops along his way, a movie theater won't let him in to see an NC-17 rated film, and they won't let him see an R-rated film alone without your consent. A video game retailer won't sell him an AO-rated game, nor will they sell him an M-rated game without your consent. Online game marketplaces have parental controls and gates which rival those used to block streaming of R+ rated commercial films. Why should the law have to double enforce this already deemed successful institutionalized self-policing?

What does this have to do with legal regulation versus voluntary self-regulation?

With iCloud Apple will potentially make money off the service because some customers will pay cash for extras (more space, more services, etc), but that's it.

Apple is a weird company because for all the eyebrows they raise with talk of closed systems and hubris and whatever else, they primarily make their way in the world by selling goods to consumers for money. The infrastructure enabling that is a crazy thing, but the heart of it is pretty old fashioned.

I love it. The slightly-too-intensely overlapping elements and colors are outrageous in a way that really appeals to me. TechCrunch gets accused of being a brash loud thing, and its fun to see them basically scream that to the mountaintops with the way they present themselves visually.

I also like that it harkens back to the aesthetics of earlier net culture publications (well, to Wired). Seeing text overlaid with bright big blocky backgrounds on top of photos with huge comedy swaths of pixel coloring everywhere brings me back in a very positive way.

It doesn't take a brilliant mind to sell them, though, so in that respect it's a waste.

You need brilliant people if you want to fan the flames of emotional need in your customers, pursue deliberate brand segmentation and diversification and other stuff like that which takes traditional commodity goods and mutates them into the Swiffer Max Wipes Mop Pack EX Refills or whatever but culturally soap on its own sells itself at this point.

Wii's hardware is nearly literally the GameCube's hardware with extra video memory, so odds are high that backwards compatibility would continue.

Twitter has made their nut as the collective tissue of the social web. Sure the tweets are actual content, but they're always about something external -- twitter is most often used for seeing what people have to say and share about something else. If they move into photos that's a move into primary content, it means they're no longer just dealing with hosting the connective tissue - photos, videos, blogs are the meat. I dont have any conclusion to draw from there, because im conflicted. Philosophically that really bugs me, but practically I'll probably use it.

Points are currently prioritized over replies, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that points are private and you're not displaying the contents of a threaded comment in the root article display page. Seems like those two things (points and replies) should be switched, and more attention should be paid to letting the user know a comment has replies.

Good start though, I've been enjoying browsing HN on it since seeing the news go up.

How that article got by without pitching naming the feature "Worms With Friends" is a mystery of the ages.

There's pausing and overlap in the animation

Panic's "Graduate from iTunes" banner ad campaign for Audion is a great example of trying for the pro/hardcore market when Apple has entered your space. Specifically, it's a great example of how it is very very hard to make it work out for you, but still, they tried.