Don Turnbull

Google Desktop for Macintosh.

Goodbye Spotlight?

I’m here at the IA Summit and people are putting up their slides tagged with iasummit07 on slideshare.com.

If you’re using a Macintosh MacBook Pro (and other Apple notebooks I assume), you need to know this tip:

Put two fingers on your trackpad, keep them there and click the trackpad button. This emulates a “right-click” and opens the contextual menu in most applications that have one.

Technorati Tags: mac

Last night I got invited to an event sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin, Center for American History to explore ideas related to the academic study of video game history, development and design. The event was full of video game luminaries including Richard Garriott, Warren Spector, George Sanger and Steve Jackson among many distinguished others.

As you might imagine, getting about 50 freewheeling game designers together can be pretty entertaining but Bill Bottorff (from Austin Business Computers, Inc.) and Don Carleton (from the Center for American History) kept the event going.

One issue discussed was the preservation of video game ephemera and digital assets related to the history of the game industry. Richard Garriott (pictured below) talked about his history in video games and even brought a few items for show and tell.

Among some of the items for show and tell are one of Garriott’s original Apple computers that he used to develop many games (he has a running one in his office to this day) and the roll of paper tape on top of the Apple is a working copy of his first game Dungeons and Dragons I.

George Sanger also spoke, played some recorded music and was very entertaining, if not a bit surreal.

George passed around some his personal keepsakes, including this test cartridge from the Son of M.U.L.E. game. (I fondly remember M.U.L.E. myself, it’s probably one of the best games I ever played.)

It’s hoped that this is the first of many initiatives between UT Austin and the the video game community, look for more information in the future.

David Weinberger is asking an important question tonight (Feb 14th, 2007) at the Berkman Center’s Web of Ideas series:

Can the Internet Save Democracy?

Here’s his blurb:

We’ve been through a few election cycles in which the Internet played an important part. What have we learned? Beyond being a fund-raising tool, has the Internet changed anything important about elections, politics or governance? Will it? Does the connectedness of the Net promise an invigorated democracy? Or more of the same? Or a polarized electorate? David Weinberger of the Berkman Center will present a discussion opener on this topic, to be followed by an invigorating—or polarizing?—discussion.

David says: “ I’ll probably open the discussion trying to stay as far away from facts and reality as I can”, so with that in mind I’ll provide my quip:

The internet IS democracy.

The internet is an open-ended discussion, where anyone (with access) can participate on almost equal footing and the best ideas (usually) win out. (You vote with your clicks?) Sure, it’s not perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill said “the internet is the worst form of government except for all the others”.

Technorati Tags: internet

Gene Smith has some good points and an outline or a tagging paper he’s working on: Taxonomy of tagging systems (Atomiq)

It’s worthwhile to think about how the interfaces, features and even the incentives (“it’s the user stupid”) can influence a tagging system’s design and use.

This Thursday I’ll be at the Creative Technologists Mixer, the very special Holiday Version.

We’ll be at Opal Divine’s on 6th Street from 6:30-8 PM this Thursday, Dec 14th 2006.

From the invitation:

We had such a great time at the last one, we thought we’d do it again.

Come join us for an informal creative technologist mixer. This time we
can look forward to a presentation from a fellow creative technologist
right here in Austin.

We are looking for energetic, passionate people from any discipline
who want to talk about making stuff with the Internet and other
networked technologies.

We welcome designers and developers, students and entrepreneurs,
futurists, pixelists, and pointillists, user researchers, product
designers, Web publishers, podcasters, video bloggers, graphic
designers, people interested in UX, IA, HCI, PHP, and MySQL, and any
other acronyms out there.

Come on out to talk shop or just meet people with similar interests.
Please pass this invitation to others who might be interested.

Direct any questions to creativetechnologists@gmail.com

I’ll see you there.

Technorati Tags: austin, blogging

This is my second post with Ecto, a very popular blogging tool for both Macintosh and Windows systems. So far I like the tool, but one thing is slowing me down. It either takes a very long time to upload photos, or it is trying to upload photos and there’s something wrong with Ecto, WordPress or my setup of either or both. (I don’t know if it truly takes a long time because I did a force quit to get Ecto to stop trying to upload the photos.)

Anyone know what I’m missing here? (And while I appreciate any answer that includes linking in pictures via Flickr instead, that’s not what I’m asking, but thanks.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, ecto, photos

We like Bill Moyers here in Texas. We like him even more at the University of Texas. He’s got a program on PBS where each week he (and his surely wonderful research and production staff) overview topical issues you should know about.

So when Bill does a whole show on an issue that affects us like Net Neutrality we pay attention. We like it even better when there’s a great overview of the issue including the entire show online for you to watch: Moyers on America . The Net @ Risk.

If you’re reading this, Net Neutrality issues should concern you.

No, I’m not sure why I wrote this with the royal “we” perspective.

• Garrett Dimon / Templates & Stencils for Visio & Omnigraffle
• Nick Finck’s – Visio Stencils for IAs
• Visio Stencils
1. Garrett Dimon’s Visio IA Stencil
2. Jesse James Garret’s "visual vocabulary"
3. Henrik Olsen’s prototyping tools
4. Michael Angeles’s wireframe stencil
5. Peter Van Dijck’s Templates
6. Peter Van Dijck’s IA shapes

• Omnigraffle Palettes
1. Michael Angeles’s Wireframe Palette
2. Robert Silverman’s GUI Design Palette
3. Paper Plane’s IA Stencils
4. Jason Sutter’s Wireframe Stencil
• Microsoft Office Templates: Visio
• Visio Cafe
• Visio Download Sites
• Graffletopia – Stencils for OmniGraffle