1. Miyazaki says, "Our job as animators is not only to draw scenes. We must find the minimum necessary and important lines for the specific movement in a given action. The techniques of animation drawing are not the same as those of painting a still picture. Animation is a consequence of the audience's perception of movement created by sequential drawings. For this reason, each drawing in the sequence -- especially the lines -- should not be drawn too detailed; rather, they should be drawn less [detailed] and create an instant pause in the sequential movement.” (source)

    Sounds a lot like UI design to me.

  2. Walked along a nice bit of beach-ish area near my flat. Realised that whilst I’m fairly experienced at creating UIs where the creation of sound is the end result (musical instruments), I’ve never really given much thought to the use of sound in other UIs.

    The house lights across the bay twinkle a lot — perhaps because of the heat. It’s cold outside here, but inside all the buildings is really toasty, thanks to ubiquitous geothermal power.

  3. Pushed some styling improvements to individual note pages as a result of some brainstorming earlier today. Splitting the content into Primary, Contextual, Metadata and Network will give me a solid foundation on which to add more information (e.g. mentions).

    One thing I haven’t added is an “actions” section, mainly because of double-click-to-edit. That only applies to the main content, though, and I have some other actions like syndicate to facebook, so I should make a section for those.

  4. I propose this law of system personality:

    Put a system in a box and it becomes a thing. Give a thing a name and it becomes a product. Give a product a brand/atmosphere and it gains a personality.

  5. Aral Balkan: Funny to think my first blog ever was plain static HTML, then a custom full-Flash site, then b2/Wordpress, and now plain static HTML again.

    aral I find I go in similar “abstraction loops” for many things. Start off basic → try out an abstraction → try out a higher abstraction → and another → get tired of abstractions, return to the original/something similar. The process always informs me in useful ways, however horrible the intermediate results are ;)

  6. Laura Kalbag: Avatars. Do they add anything to comments, or are they a waste of space?

    laurakalbag they add significant value to conversations, as they provide a recognisable visual indication of who is speaking and where each comment starts/ends. I am inclined against comments, but would recommend having avatars if you do :)