Between the Spaces

Recently, Blizzard released a website, the Armory, that gives users access to character information ranging from what profession skills they have to what they are currently wearing. This is an ability that Rupture had recently made available through it’s service.

So, what are the differences between these two services?  There are a few that are quite noticable, let’s take a look at the Armory first.  The obvious advantages are that Blizzard is providing the data, so it’s going to be accurate and clean (versus other sources that might not be so trust-worthy).  The  most notable advantage is easily that the data is being pulled directly from their servers, so no add-ons are necessary.  The downside to using the Armory is the lack of information.  Sure, it has overall profession numbers (i.e.: “175 of 250″) but no specifics like what patterns that character has learned.  It also does not show a character’s inventory, which to come players might prove to be a good thing.

Rupture on the other hand, does show things like what patterns a character has learned and what items they have in their bag and bank!  It also allows for user interaction such as uploading images, befriending characters or leaving comments on other character and player profiles.  It’s a lot more like Facebook or (/cringe) MySpace in those ways.  The disadvantages are that you do have to install an executable which has two functions.  The first is to upload gathered data to update the website, the second is actually a really neat chat client.  It uses Jabber multi-user chat so one can use iChat or Meebo to talk with friends on the Rupture network.  This executable also installs an add-on, the one that gathers the data about your characters as you play.  Further, the executable even keeps the add-on up to date, so you never even have to touch it!  So that part can be viewed as both a negative and possitive.

Overall, if Blizzard wants to stay competitive, they will have to implement some sort of user interaction (like being able to have a page for each player where the player can choose whether or not to claim all of their characters on a page.  Meaning, they could claim all of the characters that other players know belong to that player, but if there is one or two that the player plays in secret, they don’t have to claim them on the player page.  Uploading images seems to be a must to be so that proud players can show off their hard work.  Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, if Blizzard were to expand on the amount of data that was shown for each character and gave some sort of chat interface into the game (like guild chat only or the like), then they would be WAY ahead of the game.

Once upon a time, when one called a company’s automated phone service to get to a representative, one might hear “for Spanish, press 2″ spoken in Spanish, presented in a very non-intrusive way. If nothing was pressed, the greeting proceeded.

Recently, I’ve noticed multiple companies following a new trend. Instead of offering Spanish so those who speak it could go through the menu in Spanish (which I think is a great service), now I am told to “press 1 for English.”

Many might think I’m overreacting, but I refuse to press 1 to do business in not only my native tongue, but the native tongue of the country in which that company does it’s business! If I went to Germany, I would most certainly not expect to contact a company only to hear that German speakers had to press a button to proceed in German. That would be stupid! So why must we? Spanish is not equal to English in the United States regarding which is the first language, it is a second language.

I must clarify something. I love the spoken language. In fact, I had considered minoring in linguistics in college at one point. I think they are a beautiful part of our world culture. I would never wish for the absence of Spanish, even in the culture of the United States. All I’m saying is, don’t encourage companies who seem to think it should equal with English here in the US.

To that end, I would encourage you to not “press 1 for English” when prompted. Just hang on, let it repeat it once or twice, then it should continue through the menu. That is unless you enjoy pressing 1, in which case, go for it!

JoyTech, a company in the UK, has released a few retarded interesting suppliments for the Wii. The one I would like to make fun of the most My favorite is the Sports Pack.

With this fun new product, you really can get in the game. For those of you who have played Tennis on the Wii: Have you ever been playing and said to yourself “I sure wish this Wii controller looked more like a over-sized sewing needle right about now.” Na, me neither.

The Wii remotes have small groves along the sides of the controller length-wise, blatantly alluding to the future plans to provide some sort of a rechargeable functionality to the controller. What? Haven’t spent enough time with your Wii to notice this yet?

With a new feature like this on the way, we won’t have to deal with batteries anymore. This is of course the type of feature that the Xbox 360 uses with great success. So, in addition to your $60 controllers (three purchased by you), you now have to spend an undoubted $20+ for each bringing the cost of each controller up from $20 to $30 on past consoles to $80!! Come on, Nintendo. You’re right up there with the rest of them now!! Oh, and how much will a cradle for all four controllers cost? $40? Grrr…

Either way, it would be a great feature to have. I hate to admit it, but as much as it would pain me, I would most likely get it. Darn me!

My sister sent this to me. I found it to be quite interesting. So far, it has been viewed 3110590 times at the time of this writing. Also, it has 4/5 stars from 523 ratings. Not bad. This is incredibly short but worth watching.

Rapture

Now, watch it once more. To me, the ability to play it a second time was comforting to the degree of realizing that it is not too late after all. This took away some of the depression (the same depression that the Left Behind series inspired) and provided an immense amount of hope and encouragement to do something about it!

If you don’t know what this is all about, you may want to check this out.

Have you ever noticed that where life and death are concerned, a thing might give life whereas something else might bring death. You don’t often see a thing “giving death” or “bringing life,” save for a doctor bringing life into the world.

Sorry? Oh, you were looking for a point to my rambling? I don’t mean to let you down, but you won’t find one here today.

I have been using this wonderful service called Meebo for about 6 months or so now. It basically is a web version of Trillian with no IRC feature. Once can connect to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and now Google’s chat service - Google Talk.

Alike many other services on the web, Meebo’s front page have an enslaught of different languages to choose from in case the visitor does not speak English as their primary language. Awesome - catering to the world. Works for me.

A closer look (why I looked closer, I could not tell you - it’s actually a rather busy day today - maybe I’m just in analytical mode) proved to be well worth my time. One of the languages presented in the list was simply labled “l337“. Oh yes… it’s exactly what you think.

My interface now shows things such as “5CЯ33ll ll4[V]3” instead of “screen name” and “#31l*” instead of “help“. Props, kudos, whatever you want to call it, to Meebo for being so creative in their efforts to stay profession-looking but still have a personality which is completely essential in the business of web applications these days. I applaud you sirs.

Have you ever had a feeling like your cell phone is vibrating in your pocket but you know darned well that it’s across the room? Or maybe you start thinking about a console or PC game which you recently played and notice your hands tensing up in the same way they did when you had to perform a drastic move in the game, again with obviously no controller in your hand. It is a rather interesting phenomenon.

When it comes to computers, we normally use a mouse and keyboard to let it know what we want from it. The above described stimulations from our mind are from precicely the same concept! In order to move our bodies, we must tell different parts of our bodies what to do. Sounds obvious, right?

As a culture, we have decided that the method for interfacing with devices in our lives will be through the movement of our bodies. Pushing a button is caused by us telling our finger to apply pressure to a surface; moving a mouse is caused by us talling our arm and wrist to move around while our fingers grip the mouse. It may sound obvious to you, but we do have many methods by which we could interface with devices. Our culture has simply not pursued those methods aggressively enough to make them work. Why? Because the method we have chosen works just fine. Thus is the nature of money. We won’t invest in something which provide immediate results up and over what we currently have. Research and Development is a touch subject and rarely gets the attention deserved in most cases.

A few of the other methods we could use (no matter how far-fetched they might sound):

Voice Control
This is obviously stating a command while a computer receives, interprets and acts upon it. There are as many uses for this input method as there are for the normal keypad entry method.

Mind Control
This is, by far, the most far-fetched of the methods presented, but my goal of this article is to present possible interfacing methods despite the time period in which they might exist, not to convice you that they are possible.

This really isn’t that different from what we are currently doing. The obvious problems are that we don’t have the technology to allow this type of interfacing nor are we aware of any negative side-effects. Some fear that since the only thing our minds

Visual Control
A little confusing, but pretty flipping ingenious! An example of this is a small application called Dasher which is used to enter text more effiently than a stylus (in some people’s opinions) on hand held devices. Check it out. The awesome part of this is that when the eye-tracking part of this software is implemented, one’s eye can move to the next desired letter in the array of possible letter and that letter will become larger and eventually (within less than a second) will be selected as the next character entered.

No Input
“What, huh?! Okay, I was following you up to that point.” Right, me too. ;p Kevin Warwick, the professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England. I’ve followed some of his work for a while now and I must say that it looks pretty interesting. As much as I cringe as the thought of having any sort of implant, he had one which triggered doors and lights as he came near. That is pretty danged neat!! Also, a television that comes on when you sit on a couch. There are probably more ways to implement this method than any of the others!

Once the world is able to move past the stigma that is the mouse and keyboard that we use now, we will be able to move into some pretty interesting interfacing methods, even more that we have not heard or thought of yet!

I have been coding in HTML since I was 16 or so and have been intrigued by the way that humans interact with graphical user interfaces (GUI) for as long as I can remember. Human’s rely on experiences with which they feel comfortable in order to logically navigate through new, unfamiliar territory.This science can really by applied to most anything: building layouts, car dashboards, department stores, magazines. As long as people have lived a normal social life here on planet Earth, they most likely have encountered something which introduced them to the basic idea of a table of contents or central point of navigation. This just seems natural to most people.

More recently, the Web 2.0 movement has begun to develop the Internet into a node-based navigation system instead. With the introduction of tags, users can simply state what they are looking for (i.e.: “cooking” or “pets”) much like a search engine except instead of being directed to a website which may or may not have what the user is looking for, the user is (in most cases) presented with a list of items that meet their needs which other users have added to their own respective accounts. The idea of a social network being the content provision instead of a Russian-roulette style search means that users will be able to get to what they are looking for a lot faster since other users are extremely unlikely to add junk to their own accounts from which the results will be drawn.

A few sites which use tags are del.icio.us, a social bookmarking system, 43 Things, a collective list of goals which users have added and Digg, a technology news website. All three of these websites utilize tags to organize their content in one way or another. A user can search for whatever they are searching for by searching for one or more tags (i.e.: “dog” or “politics”). The website searches through it’s database of items (links, files, articles, etc) that other users have listed and tagged with the same tag and returns the results to the user. It’s logical, clear and obvious how to look for something. Most human’s can understand how to do this.

This only covers navigation around the Web. What about navigation around a web site? Links have always been the obvious method by which a user moves from one place on a website to another, but how and where links are presented have changed dramatically over the past five to ten years. Primary navigation menus have moved from a pure vertical form into other forms such as a horizontal bar across the top of a page or a navigation bar whose methods only become obvious when you begin to interact with it (such as Chipotle’s website).

Once again, a human needs some concept of the navigation or layout of a web site’s interface to be fashioned, or at least similar in some way, to something else in life of which they have internalized the process of. For instance, if someone has been locked away in a basement for all of their life and have had no other literature except for 3-fold pamphlets, they would know how to get around a 3-fold pamphlet pretty well! That’s the navigation system which they are used to. They might expect a front page with a title and possibly a general description as to what is inside as well as a back page containing contact information and maybe a map, if that is applicable. They would then expect to open the pamphlet to find their first taste of real information regarding the subject. One more unfolding reveals everything else. They know to expect anything from a really disappointing layout or possibly to be blown away by a wonderous view of a mountain or maybe even just a lot of data that might keep them occupied for a few more minutes. The general idea is that they know their way around such a piece of literature.

Think about hopping into a jet. Yep, a jet. Go ahead and take ‘er up. What’s that? You don’t know how to fly one?! That’s just because you have not yet used the system of navigation which that jet uses. I would be willing to bet that if you had flown another plane before, at least some of the controls would look familiar to you. That’s the power of familiarity!

Now, I understand that there is a vast difference between flying a jet and opening a 3-fold pamphlet, but the idea is the same. That person who has been in the basement all of their lives will most likely know what to do with a book within a few minutes of pondering, don’t you think?

Thus we return to navigating around a web site using a GUI. As a web designer, it is my job to ensure that nearly anyone who visits a web site I’ve created would be able to identify what the different parts do. I could go on for pages about examples, but try it out. Look around the web for a control for your experiment. Find a page that you’ve never been to before and try to see if you can identify what all the various components do without clicking on anything. If you’ve been using the Internet for long, you most likely will be able to label everything pretty accurately. Then place yourself in the mindset of a mid-15th centrury nobleman. Books and possibly scrolls are all you’ve ever seen regarding any sort of information delivery system. Chances are, that Web site does not look so obvious to you anymore. There is no “click,” no “scrolling.” Starting to get the idea?

Only recently have I really begin to mature in my understanding about how incredibly large the difficulties regarding this topic are. It’s most certainly a philisophical point of debate and consideration. I’m just curious to see how the Web 2.0 movement continues to evolve the Internet.

There is something wrong when we as consumers pay around $7 to $8 for a movie ticket, $5 to $10 for concessions, after which we are subjected to 15 to 20 minutes of commercials (the average amount for an hour long television show in the US). We’ve paid how much money to be shown an hour or two of video only to be advertised to more?!

I understand that a theater makes almost no money from the ticket sales themselves and rely mostly on the concession sales to stay afloat. I can live with that. Okay, sell me consessions that would normally cost a quarter of what you’re selling them to me for if I were to purchase them myself. For the sake of the arguement, say we’re all going to accept that. Now, they’re not making much off of any individual. That does suck. Why are they not making much? Is it because they’re not receiving much revenue from each customer? Not at all! We know that an individual pays between $10 to $18 for the ticket and concessions. That’s by no means cheap! So where’s the leak?

There has to be something wrong in the movie theater industry when a movie-goer is paying that much money and the theator industry is still not making a large enough profit to keep commercials out of the theater. The problem seems to be obvious: give more from the ticket sales to the theater. The whole thing is not quite right. But what can we do? I personally only go see the movies I wish to promote regarding box-office numbers anymore. I hate paying to see commercials with a passion. My wife and I even have a DVR so we can fast-forward through commercials. Are there enough of us out there to make a difference if we spoke out through our actions? Please, make your opinion known!