Drive: are we human or ... ?
An impressive piece of visual communication about what motivates our behaviour and the importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is based on a speech of David Pink’s, so it is spelled in highly “economic-ist” terms, but it is easy to see the deep meaning of those words.
The best interactive books for iPad
I have been working lately on a project for an interactive book for the iPad (more on this in the coming months, I hope). Now, the definition of interactive book is still quite fuzzy, so that products that you find labelled as such may not always correspond to your expectations for the word “interactive” (this is an euphemism to avoid saying explicitly that many of them are pretty delusive and quite possibly not worth the money they cost). Anyway, a few of such interactive books are, IMO, really impressive, both for their general quality and for the work that went into defining what “interaction” could mean in something that is not exactly a book, nor a game, nor an animated comics.
Fast grid effects for Cocos2D on the iPhone
Cocos2D is a widely used framework for building games for iOS, as it provides a consistent, game oriented, higher-level interface to the OpenGL-ES iOS underpinnings. Cocos2D sports many basic features that are a real life-saver when it comes to squeezing the last FPS from your device or optimizing memory usage, while also offering advanced features that would cost you some effort to implement on your own.
A Interaction Design/Usability List
Some resources on the topic:
Smoothing CCGridActions in Cocos2D for iPhone
CCGridActions are a great feature of cocos2d. They provide nice 2D and “3D” effects that you can use to make your app or game appearance more appealing. I have already written about them, mostly about the high cost the exact in terms of CPU time (and FPS), what makes them barely usable in a real, sufficiently complex scenario. In a recent post of mine, I described a solution to this issue, which though not a full replacement for “real” grid actions, makes them usable, fast, and not at all demanding in terms of processing power.