I’ve commented about this book here before. It’s very useful across multiple disciplines. What drew me to it was video game level-design. There’s a section on how churches and temples often have these increasingly smaller and more intimate chambers as you go deeper into the building. I found it super helpful as a lot of these little details are difficult to intuit. I appreciate that you can open the book to almost any page and gain tremendous insight.
I was introduced to it, if I remember correctly, via a post on The Dark Mod forums (a Thief-like mod engine). The pattern in question was "positive outdoor space", on the importance of creating places between buildings, rather than just plopping discrete monoliths onto an empty plain.
(Funnily enough, the way the original Thief engine worked was beginning with a fully solid universe which the level designers would carve air volumes out of to create the level. This was due to how the engine prioritised sound propagation. So Thief levels had to have positive outdoor spaces!)
Was it Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design for you, too? I loved that book when I thought I was going to become a game designer. When someone like Schell spoke so highly of Alexander it was plain he had to must be something really special.
I guess that explains why I couldn't understand the point of this... For a while I thought it was just a kinda cool but nothing special particle effect, and wondered what it was even doing on the HN front-page.
OP:I dunno what the issue is but I didn't get any sound on Android. Might be a bug in your page. Sorry for the detail-free bug report.
I was just gonna write the same thing. First I opened it in Firefox, which works fine for a couple of seconds, then the audio glitches out. Then I decided to try Chrome, as many of these "toys" are ever only tried in Chrome, but then this happened instead.
> More ugly wire-frame skeleton design compared to it's original counterpart. Where is the call to interact with any of these elements? Where is the hierarchy?
Is it just me that finds the old iOS settings design ugly, and not* the new one? I think the new design is a vast improvement. I guess you could say that heavy-handed gradients and drop shadows exhibit more personality than the flat design, but so do children's toys & interfaces compared to professional tools & interfaces.
I'm not sure what the author means by "call to interact" in this sentence. Are they referring to the right arrows and how they've been muted? Maybe they mean the on/off switch indicators that are put front and center in the old settings screenshot, but are scrolled off-screen in the new settings screenshot(even though they're still present in the new UI).
I also don't understand the "where is the hierarchy?" question. They hierarchies of the old and new settings panes are strikingly similar. Maybe if the author cared enough to show the same things in each of the screenshots it would be more clear. It feels disingenuous to me.
The first time I learned about dynamic loading was while watching an episode of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero - a series where he builds a video game, in C, from scratch.
He compiles the game code as a dll and dynamically loads it at runtime in the Win32 platform layer code. This way he can keep platform code and game code separate and reload the game code at runtime if any changes are made. Being new to this technique, I was impressed to say the least.
I always assumed the same functionality was available in the linux environment, but I hadn't bothered to look it up. Now I know.
I also own a hard copy of this one and know nothing about architecture. I've found the patterns helpful for video game level design. Whether it's the layout of a small town, window placement, or the tiered chambers of a church or temple, this book is extremely insightful for someone who doesn't know where to start when it comes to this stuff.
This is my experience as well so far. It took 15-20 minutes to learn about it, install it, and setup configs. Since then I haven't had to think about it once.
I never understood the appeal until I started watching Handmade Hero(https://handmadehero.org/). I had always wanted to learn about C, but if you don't have an idea of your own, it can be difficult to put what you learn into practice. Casey Muratori did a great job of explaining why he was doing things certain ways and went even deeper to explain the underlying concepts.
I don't see very many live broadcasts on livecoding.tv at the moment, at least none that interest me, but I think I'll be checking back somewhat frequently to see if I find something worthwhile to me.
I'm looking forward to playing around with this. Vim is my editor of choice, and it would be nice to configure/extend it in something other than vimscript. Gives me a good reason to familiarize myself with Python as well.
It's 2014 (almost 2015), you don't need to give your personal number. Google Voice is free and seems to work but can't confirm since the last text posted was at 12:28 pm. Bonus, one can use their PC with a real display and keyboard if use their GV number.
It wouldn't be a texting only to post site then would it? My point is there are free services where one can get a second phone number for uses like this.
I don't know if this went into the decision making process, but with the cursor at an angle the OS can use the x,y coordinates of the cursor to find it's target, instead of having to offset the coordinates to compensate for a straight cursor.
I'm not sure if that's how cursors work.. just a thought.
Macintosh cursors were configurable right back to the beginning; the hot spot could be anywhere in the cursor's 16x16 rectangle. The text insertion point cursor had the hot spot centered and on the baseline, the crosshairs had it in the center, and so on. I have heard that it was the same in Windows, from the beginning. So the location of the arrow cursor's hotspot in the top left is a result of that being the arrow's tip and not a cause of the arrow tip being located there.
