primigenus

A great observation is that having access to the content provided by Wikipedia is a delight in and of itself. That's a fantastic starting point for investigating, then, how you can enhance that experience with great design.

These guys did that with this brief. It's not the right answer, but it does raise some interesting questions. How do you design a more delightful Wikipedia without damaging the content? Because surely you agree that certain elements of Wikipedia - like editing pages, for instance - could use a good bit of delight here and there.

This is the Brand New blog: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users.

But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.

Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?

[1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-th... for a great explanation

Unreadable to humans with sight. Screen readers don't care! :-)

This looks really nice, but what's up with the URL?

https://dub002.mail.live.com/default.aspx?id=64855&owa=1...

Doesn't look like outlook.com to me.

They got in touch with AirBnB; AirBnB sent out a message to nearby hosts asking for emergency assistance, and a friendly host in the area was able to pick them up and give them a place to stay for the rest of the week. It looks like they may have to pay some fees and extra for the difference in value of the location, but overall it's better than sleeping on a bench in a park!

They headed out to see the keynote at 9am and I think they'll deal with the problem afterwards. Priorities, and all that ;-) If I find out what happened and it's relevant I'll report back.

Two of my coworkers are in SF right now for WWDC, having flown there from Europe, and their AirBnB host was just handed an eviction notice for subletting - they have to leave immediately. So this article feels extremely ... timely.

And I'll be in SF in 2 weeks for Google IO, also staying with an AirBnB host. Not the kind of article I want to read before flying out there :-)

I understand what you're saying and we probably could have worded it differently, but ultimately we do need another $100k. In fact, we need $500k or the game won't happen. So we're trying to focus the community on working towards those goals with us. After all, they want to play the real game, not just the prototype.

I prefer being honest about what the demo is: it's a great way to interact with the community and a great way to help spur further pledges. Hopefully playing the demo will convince people to up their pledge.

What did you feel was very, very buggy about the interface? Please let us know so we can work on improvements.

Since it's a prototype we're focusing on fast iterations using webkit specific CSS properties and such without worrying about cross browser support. I think it works okay in Firefox, but we haven't tested it and don't guarantee it for this phase.

It requires Chrome because putting it up in the Chrome Web Store allows users to download and install it, which removes concerns about latency (since the assets total 7MB, we don't want the game art loading in fragments). It also allows us to point to a single place where people can get the game. And Google is in charge of hosting and bandwidth, something else we don't want to be worrying about right now.

If your concerns lie with Chrome being a Google product, I believe you can install it in Chromium as well, though I haven't tried it myself.

Hey, Rahul here, one of the guys from Q42 who built the prototype.

We approached the "Two Guys from Andromeda" just over a week ago with the idea of helping show them that HTML5 is a viable adventure gaming platform. They were so surprised that they brought us on with them to help prototype an early game demo during the Kickstarter period.

We had a lot of fun prototyping this, and it's just the beginning. Each time the Kickstarter pledges reach another $100k, we'll release another iteration based around fan feedback. This could mean better art, sound and narration, expanded gameplay, death sequences, etc - we're really looking to just interact with the fan community on this.

As far as we're concerned, getting to do this (working with our childhood heroes while using our favorite development platform) is a net win for hackers and geeks, so I thought it would be a relevant post here. Have fun!

Haha, sorry about that. q42.com is very experimental, perhaps too much so. It works really well in Chrome/Safari, okay in Firefox, and not at all in the lower-end stuff.

You can use the keyboard to go back and forth between steps.

We don't offer a HTML5 game engine yet, but we'll build one if we need to. Right now we're using a light-weight version of what we made for sarien.net.

We approached the "Two Guys from Andromeda" just over a week ago with the idea of helping show them that HTML5 is a viable adventure gaming platform. They were so surprised that they brought us on with them to help prototype an early game demo during the Kickstarter period.

The submission links to an update on their Kickstarter page where they first explain what it is before linking to it. If you want to go straight to the demo, this is the link you want:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lomnnfeooofoenddph...

We had a lot of fun prototyping this, and it's just the beginning. Each time the Kickstarter pledges reach another $100k, we'll release another iteration based around fan feedback. This could mean better art, sound and narration, expanded gameplay, death sequences, etc - we're really looking to just interact with the fan community on this.

As far as we're concerned, getting to do this (working with our childhood heroes while using our favorite development platform) is a net win for hackers and geeks, so I thought it would be a relevant post here. Have fun!

It's not super obvious from the page but the thing that sets this project apart from all the other is that they're going to build a HTML5 demo game during the Kickstarter period based on fan feedback. This is a great way to show that these two guys who haven't been in the gaming scene since the 90s are able to work with modern technology to build a solid multiplatform release that makes use of today's gaming paradigms (like touch support).

I know I'm excited and I invested up a tier on principle because this is what I want to see more of rather than just someone coming out and saying "here's a HD remake of a game I made in 1987" - nostalgia-driven I'm sure, but the reason we love these guys is because they're supposed to be able to create something new, not recreate things they made when they were young.

The guys at Effect Games were actually making a pretty kickass javascript game engine in basic non-HTML5 HTML, using all kinds of Flash hacks to get sound and other advanced stuff working... until libraries like impact.js came out and browsers made a jump forward to support canvas and HTML5 better.

So they shut it down and started a game development company: http://www.goldcartridge.com/

I wonder what they're up to?

Some more thoughts on where this could go in the future:

This whole thing is great for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Right now, using a Chromebook is an experience that comes with a lot of sacrifice. You can't really do much with a lot of the files that you're used to using on Windows. You're locked to a browser UI that limits your flexibility.

But with the upcoming new Aura UI and Google Drive, suddenly you've now got an experience very similar to Windows. You have a desktop that you can put apps on, and you can open arbitrary files using any app that supports it and is available in the store. Now the distance between Windows and Chrome OS is suddenly very small relative to how large it was last year.

This makes me very excited to find out what Google plans to talk about at Google I/O. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced a new Chromebook model built around the coming together of the new UI and Drive.

Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will gloss over (because Google glossed over it):

"Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future."

Specifically the app integration ecosystem they're creating with the Chrome Web Store is extremely interesting. There's documentation for developers here:

https://developers.google.com/drive/

Basically, you register your app against certain mime types, and then when users install your app into Chrome, they can now open those file types directly from Drive using your app, seamlessly.

It's Windows' "open with" dialogue, except on the Web. That's a big deal, because while everyone expected Drive to offer features that compete with Dropbox, this feature competes with operating systems. I think it's a brilliant move that shows Google thinking ahead and beyond what Dropbox is doing.

No, I was arguing in favour of them. I'm one myself. :-)

I read this, thought "gee, this guy gets it", then clicked on your profile and saw "developer/designer hybrid unicorn".

From my experience, it's mainly such hybrids that have this perspective on designing for the web. It makes it hard to work with people who don't see it the same way - either designers like Dustin or developers who don't fully appreciate the value of design.

Two questions my dad would have if I showed this to him:

- How do I pronounce this?

- What does "poly-browser extension" mean?

It doesn't matter that it's cross-browser or even that it's an extension. Those are descriptions of the technical architecture. What matters is how it makes my life better: it improves Gmail by getting rid of ads, etc.

Perhaps my dad isn't your target audience. But it might be worth testing an alternate design that includes more accessible copy.

"the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML."

Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website? Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there, and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?

Thanks for mentioning Cleaner Hacker News! It's available on Github: https://github.com/primigenus/cleaner-hacker-news - pull requests and forks welcome if you have any concerns or improvements.

That's a good point that's worth addressing. What do you suggest? Left-aligning the content to the window border or something else? Pull requests to the repo on github welcome!

Front-end engineers make things beautiful? I thought that's what designers do.

This is a terrible video because the guy keeps pointing things out to his dad. If you want to get some objective data about how people respond to this, you let them figure it out by themselves and you let them start from scratch: turn on the computer and go from there.

So until someone does that on a reasonable scale (say, 5 people), there's nothing to see here.

Thanks! I added this to the README.

That's a different read of "cleaner" than I had intended, but you're free to fork :-)

Good point. I just added a link to the screenshot near the top of the README.

I should probably fix this, but right now I'm not too concerned since it's not like hundreds of people are using the style. Thanks for the tip though.