Design Decisions, part 1

Okay, so I decided to redo my little section of the web. (Click here for a look at the old and new designs side-by-side.) I wanted to take advantage of some of the things that Movable Type allows you to do, such as comments, and sorting entries into categories. But I made the foolish mistake of also deciding to change the visual design of these pages, too. As Mark Bernstein writes in his article, “10 Tips on writing the living web”, ” Don’t rush to replace a good design: you will grow bored with it long before your readers do.”

Can…of…worms.

Continue reading “Design Decisions, part 1”

Force fields!

An article in The Register describes a new invention for protecting tanks and other armoured vehicles. It uses electrically charged plating to vaporise anti-tank missiles before they can penetrate the rest of the armour.

“It sounds bizarre, but the paper reports that in a recent demonstration an armoured personnel carrier protected by the system withstood repeated attacks by rocket grenades that would normally have destroyed it many times over.”

As I read the article, Star Trek sprung to mind. Not the new-fangled force fields, but the special kind of hull plating they seem to have in Enterprise. When they seem about to enter battle, Captain Archer often requests that they “polarise the hull plating”.

And with scientists already having teleported beams of light, can warp drive really be that far behind?

Trade-in at GAME

I was very pleasantly surprised the other day when I used my copy of the PS2 game Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance as a trade-in at GAME. They sell this game on their pre-owned shelves for £29.99, and I’d thought that to make their margins, they wouldn’t give me much more than £10-12 for it. In fact, I got £17. This was nice, because I was buying a pre-owned copy of Gran Turismo 3 at £14.99, which meant that this month’s Edge magazine weighed in at a mere £2. Bonus.

Usability in print media

In the article Why Usability Matters, Monica Moses looks at how usability (and info architecture) principles can be applied to print journalism.

“Text is the hardest format we give readers. It is potentially the most precise — and perhaps even the most satisfying. But reading text is essentially unnatural. Nobody is born knowing how. Even when we get good at it, reading text requires letter-by-letter, word-by-word translation by the brain. It’s work.”

It’s all pretty obvious stuff, like splitting up text into easily scannable lists, but I couldn’t help but wonder where this might lead if taken to extremes…. The latest Stephen King 600-pager reduced to a 4-page summary of bullet points and plot graphs? 😉