Dashes win out. I have no doubt that search engines understand both, however the small test case clearly shows that keywords are more easily identified using a dash as the delimiter rather than an underscore. But was this test case actually even necessary. Just do a search for any keyword and examine the results for the dashes to underscores ratio.
It’s a mess right now. There’s no clear path, a myriad of integration tools and a lot of hype. But what is clear, is that there is a pain, a need in the market, and a goldrush in the works. It also means a paradigm shift for technologies, and tests for the agility and business fore-thought capabilities of social media players. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The longer version of 3M’s name is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, which pretty much spells out that they weren’t always in the adhesive tape business. Twitter casts a different light when viewed as a means to update other social media content.
There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter, and a lot of criticism of it’s lack of a profit model. But one thing Twitter has going for it is agility. It listens to its users, listens to the market and doesn’t have preconceived ideas of what it should be set in stone.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams gives a great TED talk on exactly this, and should be inspiration to all in terms of thinking creatively and openly at the start of a new phase on social media on the web.
After a few revisions, Tactica has launched the updated Rabbit Fall game - a chance to explore the town of Rabbit Fall while at the same time embarking on a quest to save the town. Dynamic cut scenes in Unity have given us the opportunity to add some great video content without negatively impacting download time.
Just days away now, Tactica is about to launch a first person game exploring the town of Rabbit Fall. Set as a straight-forward rpg, the story is driven by a series of cut scenes. While more common to see movieTextures within Unity used on models, applying dynamically loaded WWW driven textures into a GUITexture provides an efficient way to increase the content of an online game, without adding download time.
The exciting part of pulling videos from a server, is that the game itself can be used to hide the preloading process. As the user walks through and explores the environment, possible upcoming videos are preloaded. What this means is no interruptive download pauses.
I remember an author stating years ago, that a good writer doesn’t allow the reader to realize they’re reading, and as soon as you shatter that immersion within the text, you’ve failed as an author. In the context of a video game, immersion is extremely important, and in the same way text in a book can be transformed into a feeling of being there and experiencing the novel, a video game, if done well, can utilise the user’s imagination to fill in the gaps. What this means, in my opinion, is that mood and context is more important than graphic quality. Think back to years ago, your heart racing as you entered a room full of Doom goat-monsters. Looking at it today, you wonder how this was anything other than humorous. But what really happened, was that the game effectively immersed you in that reality, and suspended your disbelief, and for a period of time you felt concern about the consequences of a charging wave of goat-headed creatures.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Mac zealot. No fanboy. iPhoto is one of the worst applications I have ever seen. And iMovie is worse. I use both platforms freely, and like aspects of both.
But I had a conversation with a twist with a coworker at Tactica today - a PC. The question I asked was this:
“If you were at a friend’s house, and knew nothing of their computer habits, and for some critical reason, needed to log into your online banking account, and your friend had two computers on their desk, a Mac, and a PC…which one would you use to log into your account?”
He has my respect for answering honestly.
I know, this doesn’t prove anything, other than maybe it’s more difficult for users to screw themselves on a Mac.
Stuart Cohen writes that the Open Source Model is Broken, and I think a bigger point perhaps needs to be highlighted. Open source software can be great, it can have a wonderful function and it can make life better. But not everything needs to be or should be open source. I read a Wikipedia article that listed “not open source” as a con for a particular piece of software. This type of bias, aside from being a reason to further dislike Wikipedia, is also a symptom of the bigger OS issue. OS Zealots want to force the concept on everyone, feel that any software that doesn’t release its source is an abomination.
When times are good, it’s easy for business models to prosper. If tougher times are actually ahead, I think we will see movement in the open source arena, and os may not find itself flourishing as it has recently. Or perhaps time will prove me wrong.
Sometimes I like terse code. if( state ){} is clear. However this syntax can cause a lot of grief in loose typed languages, and while you can avoid some cases by typing vars, you can still get yourself into trouble (as a note: I find strict mode a pain in ActionScript). if( GetState() ){} may mess you up if the function returns a string, where if( GetState() == false ){} will do the type conversion for you and function properly.
Part of a really exciting project I’ve been working on at Tactica with TAG Communications, is an interactive map for the Canadian television series Rabbit Fall. For us, developing the Flash content has been a pleasure working with talented designers and 3D artists. We’re also very excited about some upcoming features of the site we’ve been working on.
Created for Frontiers North, this was contract project done for Anvil Digital. Some great work done by one of their 3D artists give this project a good visual impact, even if the download is a bit heavy. I’m happy with the Flash/Actionscript work I did within the constraints of the project. View the live virtual polar bear buggy.
