Your interface is a serious stinker. Great idea moving off of iTunes. Gives you a chance to showcase that stinker of an interface *and* force me to listen to the same commercial over and over and over again. Are your advertisers totally hooking you up for that? Because after hearing the same jingles over and over again, I can promise I won’t buy anything being advertised.
That is all. Xoxo, Erik
Sphere: Related ContentNo awesome news at this point. While I continue to appreciate the user interface overall, and the beautiful industrial design, I am no longer in love with this product. You can start with my honeymoon review (#1), and my 3 month slump review (#2) here before reading this (my 3rd) review.
So, in conclusion (for now) I won’t recommend this device to friends. It works well enough getting me from A to B and I don’t intend to replace it anytime soon, but I’ll definitely borrow a friend’s Garmin or other device for a week next time I am in the market.
I’m getting a lot of referral traffic from GPSTrackLog, which has compiled a list of reviews for the TomTom 920T (and every other GPS device on the market), so definitely check them out for potentially more balanced reviews 
There has been a design related tempest in a pisspot on gaming websites recently, making fun of (and in some idiotic cases being outraged by) Capcom’s Okami Wii Cover artwork oopsie. This post by GayGamer sums it up:
Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this when it happened. Recently, it was “discovered” that the Okami Wii cover art contains an… abnormality. Amaterasu is barking a translucent IGN watermark. Yep, that’s right, they stole their own artwork off IGN’s web page. I guess the cover art staff could not be bothered to actually use press packs from the original release of the game. (Read More)
As a designer, I am vicariously amused and mortified for Capcom’s agency or design staff. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been rushed to deadline and just grabbed a photo off the web as a placeholder– always with the intention of replacing it with licensed, royalty free, or otherwise appropriate and usable images in before the thing goes out the door to a client. In my case, it usually doesn’t matter much since the contexts are design specs, and either not a final product, or final but web-ui based so any photographic stuff or text will almost always be populated on the fly.
But, you never know what will happen to a document once it’s electronic and not solely in your control. Our team recently put together a tasty little deck that was only intended to help communicate what we were working on one-on-one, with other folks internally. So tasty, in fact, that it was passed up the chain until it became The Presentation used at a Very Public Event. There was a fun, last minute scramble to scrub our once-internal deck of unlicensed art and inside jokes.
In conclusion: Always throw FPO on everything, as a not so subtle reminder to yourself that your work isn’t finished. Make sure you have an alert editor on hand to double check everything before you ship it out the door. And finally, to everyone else: Lighten the hell up.
Sphere: Related ContentAfter over 4 months of mum, I can finally talk about what I’m working on: the Yahoo! OS (open strategy). To be even more specific, managing the design team for the end-user experience of the Yahoo! Application Platform (and more than a little hands-on interaction design, given the scope and speed at which we’re working!)
I’m a bit brain fried right now after spending 2 weeks in a cave with our amazing design team* to produce the presentation shown by Ari Balogh (Yahoo!’s new CTO) at today’s Web 2.0 keynote, so I’ll just link over to Cody Simms’ short and sweet post about the project.
*Particular shout outs to Hans Kim, Mary Choi, Nicole Gregory, Jonas Hinn, and our fearless and truly visionary leader Micah Laaker. (and wade. and chris. and ash. and Denis Roy, our PR guy. And tons of other folks.) I couldn’t be prouder to be at Yahoo! working with such talented people.
Updates:
Jono is excited by the prospect of not answering the question “So, what ya workin’ on?” with the answer “I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you.”
Max is similarly excited, and found the keynote video:
Sphere: Related ContentI wondered what the hell this was… I was hitting the 101/280 North/South split at 730 and it was clear 280 South was stopped cold. Effing freaky.
Sphere: Related ContentLast night a 27-year-old man was shot and killed while driving on the 280. This is the second freeway killing in less than a week. 37-year-old Luis Solari of Richmond was driving his Honda car at around 6 p.m. going southbound between the Alemany and Monterey boulevards exits when the shooting occurred. So far no arrests have been made, but according to the Gate:
San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens said the suspect vehicle was a small red four-door car of unknown make. He said initial reports that the suspect’s car was gold or tan were incorrect.
Two children were also in the car Solari was driving, a seven- and eight-year-old. None of the kids were injured. Investigators are still trying to figure out what sparked the rush hour attack.
Has anyone ever bought something from Frontgate before? (”Outfitting America’s Finest Homes”). I haven’t, and some of their stuff looks cute and innovative. I get the feeling it’s cute and innovative in the same way as Sharper Image: Looks awesome in the catalog, turns out to be made of hollow metallic finished ABS plastic and breaks after five uses.
I bought a new VW Bug this weekend (photos to come) … in the mean time, I’m posting a fun DIY hack for my GPS.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Beetle’s windscreen is too far away for the GPS, and the dashboard is just a bit too curved and a bit too matte for the suction cup to stick. I attached a 3/4" dowel to a bell jar plastic lid with epoxy, wrapped the dowel with a couple of rubberbands to prevent spinning, and the suction cup stays attached to the lid nicely.
I can touch the GPS with my index finger while my hands are on the wheel.
My favorite game on the PS3 is Drake’s Fortune: Uncharted. The sound design, graphic design, insanely real animation, and story are really out of this world.
You play Nate Drake, a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. You’re a treasure hunter in search of El Dorado. Lots of fun guns to play with, a partner who actually helps kills people for you, fun puzzles to solve, and a beautiful environment in which to play. Seemingly relatively straight forward, and earth bound… until where I am stuck right now.
For more or less no reason, there’s these effing manimal beasty things with point teeth and 3 toes and bald heads who are infesting (of course) a dark tunnel system in which you’re trapped. You have to solve a mystery while klaxon horns sound and these damn manimal thingies come out of nowhere to rip out your throat.
It’s totally stressing me out. I’m not *scared* of these things, in the sense that I have nightmares about them, but they’re freaky. You can hear them snarl around the corners of your dark tunnel. They run a lot faster than humans. They hunt in packs. If one latches on, you have to shake your controller to get them off of you. THey’re powerful too: you can only sustain two direct slashes before they kill you. Every time they come out, my heart races and my palms get sweaty.
I can only take a few minutes of it at a time because it makes me a bundle of nerves. Not relaxing, not particularly fun at the moment, but its the best damn game I’ve ever played. So much so that while I continue to try to solve this one, I’ve sent 2 other games back to GameFly for their inferior… everything. The animations suck, or the fighting engines are ass backwards, or the sound design or story is stupid. (heavenly sword & frozen planet… awful)
Anyhoo I’m about 3/4 done with this game and another one (Folklore… also awesome, talk about it another time), and am mostly really pleased I decided to buy my PS3.
Sphere: Related ContentI’m looking into buying a new car, and they have an online credit check. I clicked on the privacy policy and read this:
Disclosure of Private Information
We may disclose all of the information we collect, as described above, to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf or to other financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements. We may make such disclosures about you as a consumer, customer, or former customer.We may share Private Information that consists of transaction information with our affiliates. Our affiliates include other automobile dealerships and financial companies.
We may also disclose Private Information about you as a consumer, customer, or former customer, to non-affiliated third parties as permitted by law.
Is that normal language for a credit check? If I include all my information, including social security number, can they legally share that info? I get that that info gets shared around with other finance companies, but with marketing companies? Marketing companies with my social security number?
*Weirded out*
Sphere: Related Content
Subscribe to chromatic.net
