• James Shore on games to explore software architecture skills. Lovely stuff, I was looking for exactly these a few weeks back.
  • Links discovered between mental illness and creativity. My Goldacre-sense is tingling, but what the hey...
  • A behind-the-scenes look at the Michel Thomas iPhone app BERG has created. Interesting to see the number of discarded ideas and the negotiation between technical constraints and beauty. Plus I'm really hoping that their term "tuning" is a Dark City reference.
  • Lots of buzz around mobile payments right now: PayPal. If I were an operator, I'd be frantically reconfiguring myself to 99% engine mass, in an attempt to avoid the rest of the world doing to payments what they did to location services (i.e. wait for it for bloody years then get fed up and go do it better and cheaper themselves).
  • Wired on iPad: much more shit if you care about how it's made, I find, but here's a nice design critique.
  • Smokescreen: really cool I guess, but I can't help feeling it's a talking dog in most cases... i.e. unless you have a pile of existing Flash content kicking around, or folks skilled in Flash who can't migrate webwards.
  • Nice piece on non-obvious gestures in the iPad: "...gesture-based user interfaces often don’t have visible elements that represent verbs. The gesture is the verb. This works if the gesture is intuitive, but breaks down if there is no «natural» gesture for a verb.". Not sure I like the use of this to justify modes, mind...
  • Danny Sullivan presents a case study of the mainstream media taking a story and running with it without credit. Be interesting if this kind of "borrowing" could be quantified, perhaps with the same level of scientific rigour frequently applied to software or music piracy. I mean, the damages we calculate as done by such evil ought to be financially offset against these benefits, no?
  • The Guardian Build Radiator. I'm very interested in these things right now, as tools for unifying teams around a consistent view of a business. Mr Bigland at FP has been working on such a beast for us, I'd love to see it include e.g. the sales pipeline as much as project progress...
  • Along related lines, Informal Conversations in Multi-Geographic Teams: "...we had always assumed that you can pick up a phone, use IM, or send off an email to the remote person. Yet it turns out that the mere presence of the remote person via the robotic avatar has profound psychological effects on how people initiate communications within teams."
  • Alan Cooper tries to find common ground: "The biggest problem in software today is that programmers and designers simply don’t work well together". He's rightish, but I can't help feeling that writing a book which claims programmers intrinsically care more about making the construction process easy than meeting user goals, didn't help here...
  • Scrum patterns, a really lovely checklist of stuff that matters.
  • I, Pencil, as related to me by Mr Castle: "I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove... not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. "
  • If someone mentions Android, make sure you go totally nuts. That is all.