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April 2007
Monthly Archive
Fri 6 Apr 2007
Protected: Paradigm Shift (Really Serious)
Category: Design , Home , Internet , Personal , ProductivityFri 6 Apr 2007
It’s 10:50 now. I woke up at 7 and got online at 8. Since 8′o clock I have been reading, browsing for various content/sites related to ID/UX/IxD/UI. It’s sure a long reading time. What’s more peculiar but not so uncommon in my life is using Firefox, Greasemonkey and couple of life-saving or life-enriching extensions to assist my reading. You can imagine there are many tabs opened all the time.
Actually, some tabs in my Firefox never go away. Thanks to new feature of Firefox 2.* I can have certain tabs restored everytime I open it up. The problem? Well, the problem lies in the fact that when I have as many as more than 20+ tabs, I can’t see them. It’s the same issue as was with Internet Explorer’s countless windows. Tabs were there so you don’t have to do Alt+Tab on your keyboard to see icons/windows names and switch back and forth. In Firefox 2.* you have to click the top <> links to see what’s more on right or left side.
Anyways, if it sounds familiar to you, there’s a workaround which I just got to know and is just as fine for me.
1. Open a new firefox tab.
2. Type “about:config” into the address bar
3. Type “tab” into the filter field.
4. Change the settings of both “browsers.tab.tabClipWidth” and “browsers.tab.tabMinWidth” to 5 or any other you may deem suited.
5. Restart Firefox.
Thanks to Get Humanized
Fri 6 Apr 2007
Game designer Jane McGonigal has a vision for a new generation of network games that will pull players away from their lonely consoles, and get them out in the world, interacting with each other and changing their own lives, and society, for the better.
“When we play games, we experience relaxation, concentration, cohesion, elation, adventurous thinking, constant challenge, focus, and relief. We want more of these things in everyday life,” she said at O’Reilly’s ETech conference on emerging technology. “When we play games, we feel awed, sneaky and backwards. We should feel like this in real life, too.”
The “ubiquitous games,” or “alternate reality games,” are part of an overall change in how technology is being evaluated. In the next five years, the criteria used for evaluating personal technology will shift from things like cost and features. Instead, people will evaluate technology based on whether it improves their quality of life and happiness, she said.
McGonigal is a research affiliate and resident game developer at the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, Calif., which researches emerging trends and discontinuities that will transform global marketplaces, focusing on consumers, technology, health and healthcare, the workplace, and global business trends.
