I always wondered to myself why I preferred to play a game on the DS over the iPhone. More specifically, I wondered: why buttons? It came to me the other day, and it really boils down to an essential difference between the two systems. The iPhone is meant to be something your interact with, and the DS (and buttons) are something you interact through. While I have often heard the iPhone described as “a piece of (me)”, it still operates under the assumption that the user is touching the items on the screen, much as they would touch items in the real world. Buttons however, slowly become a part of oneself, much as you would get used to driving a car or riding a bike. So yes, while you are still touching something other than yourself in order to operate the game, it feels more like you are using a different (“phantom”) part of your body in order to do it. Two very different paradigms, with implications for how immersion could be created through them. Perhaps even more interesting to me is simply the fact that I have spent so much time with a controller in my hand that it feels more ‘natural’ to tap buttons than use my fingers to interact on a surface.

Recently I was chatting with Patrick Proctor, a coworker with whom I share a hexagon (Which is something like a very large & orange cubical we have at Mediasauce). He suggested that we come up with some legends about our old senior developer, one Matthew Rogers, so that any replacement we found would feel inadequate at best. We quickly came up with some good stories to bring him some extra fame, and also realized that the rest of the team is also quite extraordinary. Here are their stories:

Matthew Rogers
Once, Matthew volunteered to aide us in some small task we were having trouble with. When he sat down to code the solution, he discovered he had completed the task 2 hours previous.

On another occasion, some rivals attempted to thwart Matthew’s legendary performance by sticking his hand in a Blendtec blender. When his hand was removed, not only was it perfectly manicured, but it also was holding a flash drive that contained a fully completed website.

Tyler Weiss
Tyler once spent 3 months hunting a wild Expression Engine site. He oftentimes would call in ‘sick’, but we know he was just on the hunt again. Once he found the site, he fell upon it from above, snapped its neck, and cooked into a 3-course website, and sold the leftovers to buy us all candy. Not only was his client happy, he started the national pastime of deer-snapping.

Patrick Proctor
Patrick, in a Pepsi-fueled late night of creativity, devised an algorithm that using galactic constants to create any website simply by recording a client’s brainwaves. Unfortunately, the white boards were too small to hold the complex math. All that remains of his breakthrough are scattered parts and pieces on post-it notes throughout the office. Popular belief says that, should they ever be brought together in one place, the world will end.

David Bickel
David once won a Goldeneye tournament in his college days. Afterwards, he revealed that the path he took through gameworld laid down the theoretical foundation for the now-famous javascript library, jQuery. He is now currently devising a similar path in Halo: Reach for a new library he has codenamed “phpQuery”.

Eric Johnson
Every morning when he awakes, he codes his own clothing.

Tyler Polling
Tyler once subdued the notorious Brutal Attacker, and forced him to pay reparation for his crimes using his iPhone, Square dongle, and a copy of Chris Hanson’s face.

About the author
Travis Faas is a man among legends. He counts himself lucky to chronicle the amazing achievements that his compatriots make in the world of web development and beyond.

My glasses are askew, slanted. Moreso than usual, now that the pad fell off one side, but they were always a bit off. It comes from wearing this pair for about a decade. They lose a bit of themselves. Its strange how I have become accustomed to seeing the world through this skewed vision. The light still bends, but I see a bit more accurately out of my right lens compared to the left one.

When I first got glasses, I hated them. It mean that I was weak, unable to operate without outside help. I slowly got used to them, and went though a phase where I would get pissed if someone gave my glasses a knock. I would rough up anybody who messed with my glasses, to let them know how it felt. I guess that was the moment where I really began to assimilate my glasses.

Nowadays, I don’t even realize that my glasses are on. It has reached a point where I sometimes see their outline even when I have removed them to shower or sleep. There is really only two points when I realize I even wear glasses: when I cannot find them in the morning, and when I realize that my glasses are askew.

I wonder what people think of me, with my askew glasses. Do they doubt my ability to perceive the world? I assume I have long since adapted much like those who wear upside-down glasses http://www.instructables.com/id/Upside-down-glasses/ . Perhaps they think me unkempt. Perhaps they see the world askew as well, and find my glasses a refreshing assurance that things have not yet changed to be straight.

I also wonder what these bent glasses have done to myself? Do I write more slanty code? I know for certain that I lean more heavily on my skewed side. Perhaps I subconsciously lean to that side as well. There are a myriad of other things that these glasses, slightly off, may do to me.

For 2011, I am buying a new pair of glasses. Not only will they be scratch-free and with an updated prescription. They will be straight. With time, I will re-adjust to a non-skewed life. And it will seem like nothing will have changed at all.

Recently I have been working on a lot of legacy files inside of CS5. Meaning that, I open up cs4 files and save them as cs5. This has caused many headaches in the form of a most aggravating bug that I have termed the ‘bitmap duplication bug’. This is not a bug that is restricted to just cs4 – cs5 flash file conversion, but seems to be most prevalent when converting those files. The cause is a corruption of the new XML library that CS5 uses to store the library (yes, even if you are not using their new library format, it actually still saves in an XML format, but zips it up into a ‘fla’). For me, it results in Flash Professional bugging out and duplicating a lot of items in my library, mostly bitmaps, but oftentimes it will create 1-3 new ‘root’ movieclips that results in the destruction of any items on my main timeline.

More precisely, when you are looking for potential solutions to the problem (of which I can only find one, described later), look for “Flash library corruption”. There are a few ways to corrupt a FLA file. First, have a blank frame on the first frame of a movie clip. This seems to be very common, and hopefully is resolved in CS6 or future updates to CS5. Second, have missing or broken bitmap files in the library. This seems to happen most often when working with legacy files like mine. Third, and this is only speculation, have an underpowered machine. My two computers I have recently worked on have not been the most powerful by any means. It could just be that Adobe, being themselves, presumed most people who would upgrade to CS5 would have state-of-the-art machines, and those without enough power just can’t compute the requirements to save well enough. Ok, that last one is just wishful thinking, but I’ll state that no one else in the company (who work with better machines) seem to have the same problems as I do.

What is the only solution I have come up with? Well, it is simply to be organized. Take meticulous care of your library, organize the items into their respective folders inside the library, and make sure that all the external assets you are using do not move around once imported. Of course, this does not help with legacy files, but moving forward it should keep some headaches away and make your work look all the better due to the almost OCD-level of organization you will begin to follow.

A few days ago I was able to to attend a presentation by Jason Fried (something about building a world-class business). For the most part, his speech boiled down to the key items outlined inside of the book ReWork (although the majority of the time was Q&A). Perhaps my favorite piece of advice he offered was this:

Useful > innovative: Oftentimes we just want to make something cool. But, if no one wants to use it, its pretty much worthless. Building something that people actually will want to use will naturally lead to users (so long as they can learn about your product). The solution doesn’t have to be amazing. It just has to work as intended to solve a problem for that user.

It was interesting to see Jason in person, as before he was the man behind the screen; he was the guy that wrote inspiring messages that just may have been a robot. In person he was very down-to-earth and laid back. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, go for it. You won’t regret it.