You have eaten another glowing dot!

Ever wonder what Pac Man would have been like before graphics? Somethinglike this I suspect:

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

> look
You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you.

> eat
You have eaten the glowing dot!

> look
You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction.

> forward
You have moved.

> eat
You have eaten another glowing dot!

Technorati Tags: Gaming, humour, retro

Untitled Document, honestly.

Untitled Document is the perhaps intentional title of the home page of new Birmingham art gallery Woom, and it's a real blast from the past. No really, I remember making a site like this for artist Skip Rat, sometime back in 1995/6. All very creative guys, but really, this is 2007. No page titles, no text, no rss. On a positive note, the artists in the first show look great, and the site links out to them (including this lovely horizontal-scroller from Matt Burden).

Technorati Tags: Art, Birmingham UK, Exhibitions, Web

Awe. Some.

I just fell in love with Flickr all over again. By how much would they have to raise the price in order to make me leave?

Picnik’s awesome photo editing tools are now only a click away. If you’ve ever wanted to deal with the dreaded red eye or crop a photo just so, click on the new “edit photo” icon located above one of your photos and get started.

Technorati Tags: Flickr

This made my day

Thanks to Fake Steve Jobs.

Technorati Tags: Business, humour, Web

De-obfuscation

High Definition Blog: Avid Announces Major Shift in 2008:

“We are always evaluating the most effective ways to build closer relationships with our customers and keep pace with the ever-changing media market. Over the past few months, we’ve been collecting data from all of our constituents, and the findings have been clear – we need to connect with users in new ways,” said Graham Sharp, vice president and general manager of Avid’s Video division.

For which read: "Our customers don't understand what we're doing, and they're moving to Final Cut Pro".

Technorati Tags: Apple, Film, Mac OS X, Software, Television, video

IM on iPod touch

And on the iPhone too obviously. I finally got around to checking out meebo yesterday, and boy am I glad I did. Finally I have a single web-based interface that lets me log in on MSN, Yahoo, AIM/iChat and Google Talk all at once. It gets through the university firewall (it's just port 80 http), has a decent AJAX interface, and a lovelier mobile Safari optimised version. With the iPhone/iPod predictive text I can manage a decent chat speed too. Lovely, lovely, lovely. If only it handled Skype messaging too. Ah well, let's wait for the SDK and the real Skype client.

Technorati Tags: Apple, gadgets, iPhone, iPod touch, Software, Web

The Scourge of Arial

This is old news, but it's worth revisiting. The Scourge of Arial:

Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable. It has what you might call a "low-end stigma." The few cases that I have heard of where a designer has intentionally used Arial were because the client insisted on it.

Why am I quoting this now? That'll be because a recently rebranded local institution's marketing department has just specified Arial for all its output, on PC at least. Go figure.

Technorati Tags: Birmingham UK, branding, Design