So our dear friend and former colleague Mike Rubenstein just alerted me to the fact that in the new (awesome) Batman video game (Batman: Arkham Asylum) the website that is mentioned for the Asylum is modeled after Boston and Harvard’s very own Mclean Hospital website, which we did back in 2005.

See for yourself:

That’s just too awesome not to share!

There’s simply too much stuff in the world.

Basically, that’s what I’ve surmised. Even before The Internet became the most convenient and preferred method of information delivery I remember realizing, as a young boy, the amount of information that existed in the world. And I was scared then.

Now with every passing second the tubes that connect The Internet grow ever longer. You can pretty much get some kind of information about anything you can imagine. This is obvious. And with this incredible access comes an easy way to seek out anything that is of interest to you. Where before you had to go to the music store to find out which cool new band had debuted (or read the liner notes of your favorite album to get all the bands that were thanked), now you just search. And search. Newest games? Check. Obscure limited edition books? Check. Sneakers? Check.

The Internet has basically made me a Jack of All Interests. I like a bunch of things and can try and keep track of them but because I can so easily find out about new things I rarely dive really deep into any single one of them.

And with all the interests I have comes the problem of tracking all this stuff. What an ordeal. There are lots of webapps that help you keep track of your life, but then you have to keep track of those!

But now I feel like I’m complaining, and this is sounding like some spoiled 1st world problem post so I’ll stop.

I came across a really interesting article on Ministry of Type (via kottke.org) about the UI that was developed for the Xerox Star computer way back in 1981.

In it, Aegir (what a rad name) discusses the minute details that designers of the interface needed to account for when creating the graphics. Because of the limitations of the black & white display device used in the Star, the icons they created needed to account for the dithered hash pattern they used to create a gray colored background. He goes on to detail why it’s not only good but essentially necessary for all designers to know the limitations of the device/situation they are designing for. And I 100% concur.

He also discusses how with some updated graphics, the desktop UI model pioneered by the Star would essentially be the same as any of our modern operating systems UIs. And that got me thinking about timeless design, or the situation where you find a great solution to design problem. Is this it? Is the desktop model the best we can do? 1981. That’s nearly 30 years ago! And as much as people have complained about the desktop metaphor as a user interface a part of me knows those designers at Xerox PARC came up with a rather elegant solution to the problem of interfacing with and manipulating virtual files.

So, to my point for this post: is there such a thing as getting it right the first time? In our consumer culture it seems to me that we are constantly going back to the drawing board, revising, iterating, re-developing things we use all the time to make them more efficient, sexier, better. But if you look around you can also see examples of models that haven’t really changed since their inception – only been revised. The desktop UI. The car. The mouse. The camera. There are numerous examples.

I think though, it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we keep at it, despite how many times we might arrive at the same conclusion. Because sometimes a new idea does come up, and in that instance, we have innovation.

For too long Youtube has been a bastion for crappy quality and 4:3 screen ratio videos; I’m glad they’re finally giving us a better experience (though tricking your browser to trick Youtube to display the widescreen, “HD” video is somewhat klunky).

But man, watching stuff in widescreen AND higher quality is just so nice. Glad to see the other video sites are forcing Youtube’s hand.

EDIT!
So it looks like Youtube implemented this across the board, so everyone know has access to widescreen vids and you no longer need to do the hack I described above. But apparently you can force a higher res version of the video you’re watching (if available) by adding “&fmt=22” (sans quotes) at the end of your movie url.

One thing I realized quickly when I got to TBG is that most people here are really into their music (I’d venture to say that over 60% are “active” musicians in some capacity). I think one of the first things I did when setting up my computer was to add the iScrobbler plugin for iTunes so that all my tracks would update my last.fm account. We even have a Barbarian Group last.fm group!

My musical tastes aren’t extremely erratic, but I really like the notion of having a glimpse into what I’ve been listening to since I started tracking my music. Last.fm gives you some cool ways to see what you’ve played, but nothing as visually striking as LastGraph does.

And you can generate gorgeous PDF graphs like so:

You can snoop/visualize any Last.fm user’s listening habits by plugging in their username and giving LastGraph a few moments to gather the data. Look’s like Rick listened to a lot more music in September then I did!

A friend just IM’d me a link to a new type of cross-browser text replacement technique called typeface.js which allows for any HTML text element to be rendered in the font of your choice. Now the most common of these live-text to rendered replacement techniques is the awesome sIFR, but typeface.js is notable cause it’s only javascript.

At first I was about to write it off since the examples section of the project site shows images, but when I took some time (oh what has the internet done to our patience) to read through the background (and view source), I realized this is a pretty great and new approach to achieving this effect.

The javascript reads from the glyph information of any font you specify, which you need to add to your server after being converted using their conversion process(conversion), and then renders out the font using your browser’s vector drawing capabilities! Pretty rad indeed. Definitely something to keep your front-end eyes on.

Google has just announced their entry into the web browser arena (and has created a handy comic about what went into making it): Google Chrome.

While my first inclination was to moan and fret about the start of BW3 (not the chicken wing joint, but the third browser war), reading through some of the features and reasoning behind the endeavor changed my mind…and I’m curious how these innovations (a new Javascript engine? a Javascript Virtual Machine? Tabs on the OUTSIDE?) are gonna change things.

So I guess an owner of Tiger Woods Golf by Electronic Arts wanted to show a bug that was in the released version of the game by uploading to YouTube….EA got wind of this and posted a response to it, getting Mr. Woods himself to participate.

Pretty great that EA took the time to do this kind of thing.