subvisual

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has high standards. He talks about how he prefers to embed video in his web pages, and how he ends up doing it. He refuses to use Flash, and seeks a neat embed only solution that doesn’t autoload, but loads a poster image. Here he talks about the best solution he could find using the <video> tag in HTML5 and some JavaScript, because of what he sees as a shortcoming of the defined standard.

“…across from the Giants’ baseball stadium, the forces of modern games are colliding…” Joseph Menn for the FT is certainly not my favourite tech journalist.

What I don’t understand about this article is it talks about the financial advantage social games have over console games, which may be true in terms of agile responses to gamers’ feedback. But the article is a profile of iPhone game app developer, Ngmoco. And the App Store is notorious in the way it slows down the agile process because of the approval lag.

Social gaming and iPhone apps are turning big business apparently. Now there’s some news. Not sure what this article is telling us other than the FT is looking at this sector and probably like most of its readers, trying to fathom it.

“The business models are changing so rapidly, though, that it is hard to make firm predictions.”

My first thought was, surely the military would not expose itself to the risks of a consumer device? But then I thought it is inevitable that technology as ubiquitous as the iPhone seems to becoming gets put to some usage that many of us would not feel comfortable with. It’s usually the other way round anyway, we get the military gadgets that have been civilianized. But as the article points out – the applications have their place in disaster emergency situations.

Another checklist to run your decisions by. There is probably a lot of sense in this article, but the truth is, when you are in the interview situation, from either side of the table, you know when you have a match. Sure there are basic skills that must be met, but most important is the idea that you can work with this person. If you’re starting from a checklist, you are probably starting from the wrong angle.

I haven’t so far really got into Foursquare. I have checked in a few places, but no-one else I know is playing. (Let me know if you are) This aims to be even more limited in terms of social circles – and I agree with the principle. I think there is something to be said for deeply valuable connections over multiple, transient ones. Unless you’re like me and no one else you know is playing, in which case you have to resort to real conversations, perhaps face to face.

No not user interface menus. Some good business principles here taken from restaurant menus, understanding what you really have of worth to offer your clients and users, and what they are willing to pay for. The basic idea: know your customer.

Paul Kedrosky points to what could be Google’s weakness, whereby it is the victim of its own success and via adword fuelled top search results its search results become useless to the average user. Google eats its own tail. This of course assumes the giant is incapable of accommodating a changing landscape and reacting to this threshhold. Will a new pattern emerge?

This could be useful for my blogging workflow!