Nuggetty Goodness

A Sad Announcement from Tiny Speck

This is a horrible day. This is a horrible thing to have to say: Glitch is closing. The live game/world will be closed on December 9th at 8pm Pacific time (see when this is in your time zone). The website and forums will remain available until the end of the year, so players can still communicate and find each other. Glitch HQ, the Glitch API and third party applications which rely on the Glitch API will become unavailable at the same time as the website closure.

Automatic refunds for recent purchases will begin immediately. Refunds for older transactions will need to be done manually and will be processed as quickly as possible, from most recent to oldest. For details on your payments, to request a refund, or to see the status of your refund, please visit the refund information page.

Unfortunately, Glitch has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself and based on a long period of experimentation and our best estimates, it seems unlikely that it ever would. And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up. Glitch was very ambitious and pushed the limits of what could be done in a browser-based game ... and then those limits pushed back.

For many of us at Tiny Speck, the creation of something like Glitch was a long-held dream. There's no better word than "heartbreaking" to describe what it feels like to have to do this. And we know that for many of you who poured your creativity, energy and imagination into Glitch and the community, it will be heartbreaking as well. We are sorry to have let you down.

We are grateful to have had the opportunity to play with you. The game was absolutely preposterous. And yet, we kind of liked it.

I had an amazing amount of fun in Glitch - far, far more than I thought I could have in an MMO without killing.

Everything about Glitch was charming, and almost all of it went beyond charming to brilliant. The only problem is, I couldn't understand how the Glitch model could make them money, and apparently, it couldn't.

I was one of the initial subscribers, and when the game launched, TinySpeck did the amazing thing of allowing initial subscribers to cancel and be refunded - because, they said, they had the money they needed to launch. I was amazed by the generosity they showed there, and even more impressed by how they're handling the refunds now.

Glitch was a brilliant, crazy, beautiful, polished but unsustainable experiment, and the world will be the poorer for its loss. :(

You know those Dove Chocolate commercials? The ones in which the girl takes a bite so small it probably requires her six bites total to eat one tiny square?  She always eats in slow motion.  What are the people in the chocolate business trying to tell us?  Eating in slow-mo somehow means you’re savoring this cocoa luxury more than you would if you ate it in real time?  Um, I disagree.  I savor my chocolate with the zeal of a lion taking down a zebra.  I think that means my love is true love.  It also means I could never be in a chocolate commercial.

XD I'm pretty neutral about chocolate (which is a bit odd considering all the chocolate things I've made / am making / am planning to make), but that description is just wonderfully hilarious.

While every engineer may find Search easy and efficient, that is not the experience of most people under many conditions, including those encountered by the users of the systems Craig has referenced—Contacts, iOS, and Lion. Learning to type into a box is easy. Memorizing the names of perhaps several hundred apps so you know what to type into the box, not so easy. Unless you are an engineer.

 Graphic designers, left unchecked and unschooled, are likely to aim for maximum visual simplicity at the expense of both learnability and usability. Such interfaces require users to discover new capabilities by clicking around and seeing what happens. Users don't do that. 

So much good stuff in here! The second quote about graphic designers, in particular, sounds like what I spent the first 3+ years when I started working in the digital space arguing against, usually on the losing side.

It's even punny! 'Fou Lard' which apparently means 'silk scarf' in French. O.O It looks like it should be an epic rep item from some piggy faction somewhere. Or cheffy faction.

T_T I want eet.

Great talk on Microsoft's 'Metro' styling (though they aren't allowed to call it that anymore).

Particularly interesting is the part about how 'digital natives' - folks who've grown up with the Internet and digital being everywhere don't need skeumorphs. E.g. a 10 year old *now* doesn't need or even understand a phone app with an oldschool 'dial' for numbers. If you give it to a great-granny though, it suddenly works.

Responsive design is more work. And more expensive. Maybe you don't need it as much as you think you do.

I've run into the idea that since responsive design is a more efficient mobile solution than creating unique mobile sites or alternate page templates, it is therefore going to be cheaper and simpler than what everyone is expecting. Not true. The fact of the matter is that doing responsive design requires work that just wouldn't be done at all if mobile wasn't a consideration. Now, I'm not advocating that we ignore mobile. But in some cases, I'd argue that mobile is probably higher on the priority list than a serious cost/benefit analysis would merit.

Our audience is primarily comprised of people working in the advertising, marketing and design industry. They're people who influence or make decisions about design and development projects. With our audience in mind, if you were to ask me if mobile should be a higher priority I'd say absolutely. I'd think of all of our hip and stylish visitors and how many of them probably already have an iPhone 5. But you know what? In the last month, just under 10% of our website's visitors accessed it with a mobile device. That includes phones and tablets. If I extend my look to the last six months, the mobile population is exactly the same. The last year? It drops to 8%. So, mobile traffic is growing, but not as rapidly as I would have assumed based upon what I think I know about our audience. With those numbers, should mobile be prioritized as much as it has been (we're about to launch a site redesign that makes heavy use of responsive design techniques — more on that later)? With over 90% of our visitors still coming in through a "desktop" computer? Probably not. But for us, there's an additional consideration of needing to demonstrate our capabilities in this area, which pushes the benefits over the cost. For many other businesses, though, that additional benefit doesn't exist.

Very few of our clients have a "money is no object" attitude when it comes to budgeting for a web project. In fact, for many of them, our costs are a bit of a stretch. But they believe in the value of what we offer and trust us to lead them to the best outcomes. It would be wrong for me to push responsive design on all of them, indiscriminate of what they know about their audience, their actual visitor data, and their actual budget. If their money could be better spent in some other way, then it should be.

Superbly practical and down-to-earth article about responsive design.

Too many creative leads (and writers) jump onto the idea of responsive design like it's the next wonderfully shiny new toy that will display their leetness, without regard for whether or not it's actually suited to what they're producing. It's refreshing to see something so logical and well-thought out about the subject.