Choosy

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?
imageIt’s so great when a developer creates a piece of software that matches precisely a feature that I’ve been wanting for years. This is the case with George Brocklehurst’s compactly executed and altogether wonderful utility Choosy, for Mac OS X. Once installed, it effectively intercepts your clicks on Web links from non-browser applications — Mail, Word, iChat, whatever — and displays a menu of available browsers that you can ‘send’ the link to.

Incredibly handy for people who use multiple browsers regularly — people like me and you, too, I’m guessing.

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Twistory

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Cute, simple tagline: “Twitter + history. And that’s really it.” In reality, just slightly more robust than that: this new service grabs your tweets and formats them as a subscribe-able calendar file that plays nice with iCal, Google calendar, etc. It’s clever, but if there’s a business model in there, I can’t see it. Via John Niedermeyer.

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NYT: Saving the Story (the Film Version)

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Fearing that the traditional mode of narrative storytelling is increasingly at risk from disruptive new technologies, the Media Lab at M.I.T. is looking at the problem more closely. This article includes quotes from Bob Farrelly (of the Farrelly brothers):

“‘If you go off the beaten path, say, give them something bittersweet, they’re going to tell you they’re disappointed,’ Mr. Farrelly said. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts, where he is working on the script for a Three Stooges picture, and said he missed complex stories like that of ‘The Graduate.’“ Hilarious bit of irony there.

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Game On

Back in 2007, during the initial burst of enthusiasm for the Wii, I bought one, thinking that perhaps there was the soul of a gamer lying dormant inside me. After playing with it for several months, though, I essentially got bored, and haven’t much touched it recently. Today it sits in my living room, hooked up but usually forgotten.

In spite of this inability to muster a sustained interest in video games, I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that world. As a point of reference for interaction design — for design of every kind — I’m convinced that games represent an important new paradigm that people, like me, pay insufficient attention to at our own peril.

Forget design, even. As a subset of our culture, video games are clearly headed to center of the conversation, where it’s not inconceivable that one day they might shoulder aside old media mainstays like television and newspapers, or even eclipse plain-vanilla Interweb browsing. The inherent power of the concept of play shouldn’t be underestimated.

There’s no shortage of intelligent thinking about this field being written in all corners of the Web. For someone like me though, who remains essentially disconnected from gaming, validation still bubbles up through the mainstream media. And lately, I’ve been noticing increasingly thoughtful writing about video games in some of my favorite publications.

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Pentagram: “Quantum of Solace” Book

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

In a tradition of endless repackagings of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and novels, it’s probably fair to say that this is the most aesthetically sophisticated. Certainly the fancy-pantsiest:

“Hyland created a cloth-covered hardback with cover imagery restricted to a silver foil-blocked image of Bond’s infamous Walther PPK… A subtle diamond pattern is debossed on to the boards, which combined with deep burgundy endpapers evokes the discerning elegance of Bond’s world. An embossed manila bellyband with typewritten cover information on the label evokes the official documents of the period.”

Appears to be available only in the U.K.; American customers must abide with this plebeian, retro-minded edition.

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Yet Another Lousy Adobe Installer

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“All in all, it is, once again, a pitifully bad installation experience. Adobe’s engineers have not learned any lessons from the experience with previous versions. And I suspect that the experience with incremental updaters for CS4 is going to be just as bad as it was with previous versions… Just what will it take for them to address this?”

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