Seth Priebatsch, the CEO of SCVNGR, a company developing an interesting eponymous location-based gaming platform, gave a talk at TED recently. He covered some interesting ground, including a few game design patterns with in-game and real-world examples. If you’re as interested in this stuff as I am, it’s worth 12 minutes of your time:
Is it [...]
Back in March, I posted my Thoughts on Titanium, which we were using at the time to develop Texas State’s iPhone application. Since that time, we’ve become increasingly frustrated with the system, and have finally decided to leave it behind and rewrite the application in a combination of native Objective C code and HTML/CSS/Javascript.
This isn’t [...]
At the University where I work, there’s always a ton of Professional Development activity going on around campus, most of which is centered on training sessions for which people can register. That has always been an arduous, labor-intensive process, with real live humans handling every aspect of managing those registrations — reporting on class sizes, [...]
I wrote a piece about a year ago called Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics which summed up some of my ideas for bringing some of the compelling character of video games to the office. Since then, some much smarter people have been doing some thinking and experimenting with similar ideas.
Jane McGonigal gave a terrific talk [...]
I’ve had intermittent access to an iPad for about two weeks now through work, and finally feel like I have a grasp on what it is, what it’s good at, and what it lacks.
First off, the iPad doesn’t do everything. It’s not a full-on replacement for a computer. In fact, you can’t even get it [...]
I’ve been having some interesting talks with my friend Ben Mengden lately. He graduated with a Geography degree, has been delving into architecture over the past few years, and is really interested in the developing world and how those disciplines can be applied there. I have a deeply rooted interest in computing, the Internet, and [...]
A couple months back, my team at work started working with Appcelerator’s Titanium, an open-source system for developing iPhone applications that, instead of requiring one to learn Objective C, wrapped up the iPhone APIs so that they could be accessed from familiar web languages.
The version that was current at that time made it very easy [...]
Congratulations to my friend Greg Pierce, who launched Tweeku today, a super-nifty iPhone app he wrote for composing Twitter messages and other short-form texts (including haiku)! I’ve been testing it off and on for a few weeks, and am really impressed with what he’s done with it. Here’s the company line:
Tweeku is a twitter writing [...]
A while back, I wrote a post on Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics, where I speculated on the efficacy of using game systems, like achievements, awarding points, high score lists, etc., to help motivate people in the workplace.
Last week at the DICE Summit, Carnegie-Mellon Assistant Professor of Education and Technology Jesse Schell gave a terrific [...]
And while I’m rambling on about music software, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while:
VoiceBand is software for the iPhone that lets you do multi-track recording using your voice as a controller for various instruments. Very clever indeed.
