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, [...]
¶
Posted 02 July 2010
§
Work
‡
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 [...]
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 [...]
¶
Posted 22 April 2010
§
iPhone
‡
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 [...]
¶
Posted 16 March 2010
§
iPhone
‡
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
This is a lightly tweaked version of the report I submitted to the University after returning from Magnolia’s first-ever conference, in Basel, Switzerland. I realize I need to write up a more general-interest trip report, but have been dreadfully short on time since our return. I have, however, recounted our adventures often enough now that [...]
¶
Posted 24 September 2009
§
Travel
‡
Over the past several years at the University, we’ve had to hire for a variety of programming and programming-related positions. One of the interviewing practices we’ve adopted is to give candidates a programming assignment which they can complete at home, at their own pace using any resources they can muster. Because these conditions approximate the [...]
¶
Posted 23 July 2009
§
Work
‡
Recent Reviews