A walkthrough of the beautiful Popular Science+ iPad app’s design. More so than others that simply reproduce the print product on screen, this keeps what’s familiar about the magazine format, and extends it with in-article scrolling and clever use of media.
Konami’s popular DS game that involves courting a virtual girl in real-time – going on dates, buying her gifts, paying her compliments, that sort of thing – is now on the iPhone in Japan. If you remember, this is the game that one young man actually, legally, married. The killer new feature here is an augmented reality mode that lets you be in a photo with your girlfriend, which should help convince people that yours has something in common with a normal relationship.
Here’s what has changed:
– This blog is now found at www.sangsara.net. It was previously at blog.sangsara.net, a distinction that became wholly unnecessary about five years ago, when I took down the other more static bits of the site. Eventually, all my online activities will be viewable here.
– The Tumblr-powered linkblog, blast!, has been discontinued. The original idea for that was to create a wall between the longer posts I write and the things I find interesting and want to link to. From this point on, those two activities will be merged here on this blog. Outbound link entries will be strictly text, an execution I’ve admired in John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, who was in turn inspired by Jason Kottke.
– I’m leaving behind my favorite yellow (E3C046), seen in every design since 2002.
– I’ll be using one of Blogger’s new features to add ‘Pages’ to this blog, starting with an About Me profile page.
– You’ll find an old-school Blogroll for friends’ sites in the right column. This is an experiment of sorts. Let me know if you’d like to be linked.
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Here’s what hasn’t:
– The RSS feed is still at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sangsara. Most subscribers to this site won’t even notice the changes listed above.
– Positive Machine and Pocket Plastic will continue to be maintained as separate projects. Just in case you didn’t know, the former deals in strange, off-color iPhone app reviewery, while the latter is a place for me to post photos and look at developments in iPhone and toy camera photography.
– The archives are intact. I had wanted to wipe those earlier uncertain steps and start over, but decided against taking the easy way out. I’ve lost a lot of web content over the years and it hasn’t made me a better writer. You can build better things in the present when you have the past at your back.
Transparency! Three-column grids! An absence of lighthouse imagery!
We all know ‘most people’ have no taste, so the Template Designer aims to save them from themselves by having a fixed library of background images from iStockPhoto (you can’t upload your own). I have chosen the least distracting and colorful one, a silhouette of the Parisian skyline, but look forward to experimenting with crazier options now and then. Why not? It used to take a deep dive into the HTML code and some tedious asset uploading to change the look of my site – those who’ve been here before will know that I hardly bothered anymore, and reverted to the most minimal of themes over a year ago – but now it’s all just a matter of clicking around and moving sliders.
Some of these features, like the dynamic width resizing and comprehensive inspectors for changing text/background colors, fonts, etc. replicate the best innovations of blog hosting company Squarespace. That service does a little more but costs money, and incidentally so does Six Apart’s Typepad, which now stands as the only hosted blogging platform remaining whose templates look so hopelessly mired in the early 2000s. Assuming that Blogger doesn’t just push out this one update and leave it untouched for another six years, they’ve got a fair chance of soundly beating the competition. A few weeks ago they added the ability to create standalone Pages, the kind you can use for an About Us page or FAQ. With a few more templates, perhaps some built for microblogging, some for magazine-style sites, they’ll be able to do everything Tumblr can. They’ve got post-by-email functionality that isn’t too far off from what Posterous does, and WordPress.com can’t compete with the freedom Blogger gives you to add third-party scripts, widgets, and ads.
One interesting point: Microsoft IE6 is not supported by the editor or the templates themselves.
Intro video:
Late last year, I wrote about returning from my trip to Japan and sorting through the 2000 photos I’d taken. I finished the job of uploading them to Flickr quite a few weeks back, but neglected to post the links here.
This is the entire set on Flickr, but you will see less as an anonymous member of the public, and a few more if you’re listed as one of my friends.
This is a ‘Best of’ set that I put together, with 150 photos in all (again, depending on your friendship status), which is much easier to get through.
This is a 94-photo subset of the main album focused on Tsukiji, the largest fish market in the world.
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sangsara.net 