Author: Brad Becker
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How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
Just ran into this essay (again) from Douglas Adams (late author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) and had to share it. Great quotes about interactivity: …but the reason we suddenly need such a word [“Interactivity”] is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment:…
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Design Police | Bring bad design to justice.
This is great — Chris Bernard passed this on. It’s a “Visual Enforcement Kit” that you can use to tag bad design–ideally at work with wayward coworkers and not on public signage at stripmalls or something. My favorites are “Legible from space” (although that’s rarely a problem on the web) and “Comic Sans is illegal”.…
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Innovation in the other kind of shopping carts – CNN.com
There’s an interesting development in brick and mortar shopping with this interactive shopping cart console that’s being trialed: Customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a Web site at home and type in their grocery lists; when they get to the store and swipe their card on the MediaCart console,…
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WindowsClient.net
A white paper that I co-wrote just went live on WindowsClient.NET and is the first featured news item (for today). The paper is targeted at developers with WinForms chops who are thinking about making the jump to WPF but want to know when the right time and conditions are. I won’t give away the ending–check…
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Silverlight Apple "Staff Pick"
Pretty cool to see Silverlight as a “Staff Pick” from Apple! Apple – Downloads – Mac OS X – Development Tools Apple.com Silverlight page A tough decision most face is whether to take full advantage of a single platform or to go lowest common denominator and address multiple platforms. One of the nice things about…
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Silverlight and Expression Resources
Here’s a veritable cornucopia of resources online related to Silverlight and Expression. Thanks to the India DPE team for pulling this list together. I’d add one late-breaking item: The Expression Blend 2 September Preview. Cool stuff there! Webcasts https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339986&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339984&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339982&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false Websites Silverlight on Microsoft.com: www.microsoft.com/silverlight Silverlight Community Site: www.silverlight.net Silverlight MSDN Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight…
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Halo 3 on MSN
And while you’re checking out Silverlight, be sure to check out the Halo3 movies on MSN. The site is powered by Silverlight so enjoy the HD videos. And speaking from experience, the game is the best of the trilogy… Halo 3 on MSN
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Liftoff and Linux!
Let’s get right to the point. The rumors are true: Silverlight 1.0 has been released to the web and Microsoft is lending official support to the Linux version (named “Moonlight”) under development at Novell. We’re also releasing Expression Encoder 1.0. Good news all around and lots of fun toys for you all to play with.…
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Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play
This Wired article about Halo3 is actually work-related for most of you. I promise. It’s interesting to see usability testing as the savior for bet-the-business initiatives and to see heat maps and other UX design techniques applied to such a visceral experience. (Plus those of you not in the beta test can learn about the new…
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Signs of Change
Ok–there’s my goofball title for a news item that made the rounds at work today. The New York Times reports on the hows and whys of the process of changing the nation’s highway signage. Interesting article with a focus on design, usability, ergonomics etc. Best place to start for visual people like myself is the…