Handling server errors gracefully and displaying a friendly message to users is often overlooked. Google doesn’t, and displays a more or less understandable message to its users. Including funny artwork of a broken robot.
RockMelt beta
Received my invite and happily started playing with it. Although it’s a really fast browser (not that big of a surprise considering it’s based on Chromium) it’s not for me. Social media can be distracting enough in isolated applications, combining it all in the same thing I work in is not helpful for me. But, I can definitely understand that it caters to a lot of people.
And it’s really cool that Marc Andreessen is behind it :)
Time vs Plants vs Zombies
Ok, I know, it’s a lame excuse for the small delay in my postings. But honestly, I am truly addicted to Plants vs Zombies. That game is said to be more addictive than cocaine. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it sure is a big time-waster. So, I’m warning you: don’t play it ;)
The Beatles and Milo
In my last post I reminisced about ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘, a game from the early nineties. Since then I lot has changed. Indeed. the graphics got a lot better, but a lot of people are saying that mainly because of the incredible focus shift to graphics the fun and gameplay qualities of recent games have been lacking behind. Well, I would like to share two great game-related videos with you that show off just how ingenious and big games have become.
Monkey Island time
Way back in 1990 Lucasfilm Games released an incredible game called ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘. This very video game is often hailed as the first family-accessible adventure game. I remember being frustrated by being unable to understand this game when I was about 8 years old, as my English reading skills were very limited.
Beta preview: Spectives.com
This week ilse media launched its latest start-up concept: Spectives.com. Spectives.com was founded by Rutger van Waveren and soon thereafter bought by my alma mater in the internet world (I worked at ilse media back in 2003). ilse media, once famous as the company behind the first Dutch search engine ilse.nl, is one of the biggest internet companies in The Netherlands. Of course Google won the search engine wars, but ilse media is still a big player in the market with websites like nu.nl and startpagina.nl. Since then ilse media has launched a lot of different concepts but none of them have grown to be as successful as the fore-mentioned sites. Let’s hope that Spectives.com can change this.
FixOutlook mosaic avatar finder (part 2)
Yesterday I wrote about the avatar finder I was building. I posted a comment to the blog of the Email Standards Project asking for avatars. digirati replied and send me their avatar, but unfortunately they weren’t able to locate themselves in the mosaic. So now I had the source image of an avatar which was quite likely to be included (as digirati was one of the first 1,000 people to tweet their support) but still no (edited?) tile. Luckily, digirati’s avatar had quite a lot of pixels of the same color (R = 34, G = 34, B = 34), so I decided to pixel scan all tiles I had separated from the mosaic earlier and save them to a database.
FixOutlook mosaic avatar finder
As I wrote earlier, the fantastic FixOutlook.org initiative created an enormous mosaic of all supporter’s avatars. Because it’s quite a lot of work to find your own avatar between 18,040 avatars I decided to give it a try using PHP and GD.
Just another avatar in the wall
The last few months The E-mail Standards Projects has been actively campaigning against Microsoft’s decision to use the Word render engine in its new Outlook version. This impacts E-mark and other companies involved in e-mail marketing due to the fact that this disables the ability to send rich designed mailings because of very limited HTML support. To make a fist against MS Office The E-mail Standards Projects launched the FixOutlook.org initiative. By tweeting your support your Twitter avatar is added to the Wall of Fame at FixOutlook. After gathering the support of 25.000 fellow protesters The E-mail Standards Projects created a enormous mosaic of all the supporter’s avatars and sent it off to Microsoft HQ.