I used to play video games a ton growing up (most of the ones mentioned in the article). I have tried picking up modern games as an adult, but don't get quite the same thrill/zone as I did as a kid. I haven't felt immersed. I get that feeling now from rock climbing, cycling and skiing. I think it's because after spending all day working on programming, staring at a screen and working through challenges seems too much like work.
I know what you mean. I did more or less retire from video games for a while until a few solid ones brought me back. Honestly, everything Naughty Dog released is incredible. The Unchartered series and The Last of Us are absolute masterpieces in storytelling and immersion. I love my PS3 :)
Indeed. I think this has a lot to do with 'fluff'. More modern games have a lot of fluff to make the difficulty increase less abrupt and, of course, because we demand it.
There are a few games, even relatively new ones, that don't have much 'fluff'. They're often considered very difficult, but because they're so lean and well-designed, they don't generally feel unfair.
These games remind me of what I used to play growing up, and they often offer much more satisfaction in a shorter time-span.
A good, new-ish example of this is Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, which at times feels overwhelmingly difficult, and yet after playing for a while you notice improvement. It rarely feels truly unfair, and I find it more enjoyable than 'fluffier' games.
Other examples would be games like Ikaruga, F-Zero.
I find I like to load up Axelay in an emulator and play a few levels. It has an amazing balance of playability and difficulty once you get how it works and is a very relaxing game to play through.
Strangely, I also love playing a few levels of Elevator Action. Something about jumping around and plugging bad guys from that little side arm is very satisfying.
If you're running a recent version of GitHub Enterprise, the avatar base URL can be configured today. It's possible to run an internal, secure server that responds to Gravatar's URL scheme.
I agree with this. Mobile first doesn't necessarily mean native first. From both design and engineering perspectives, it is much easier to build a website that looks good on both mobile and desktop and then add components to the desktop site than it is to start with a desktop site and pare it down to work well on mobile.
Beautiful service - I've wanted this for a while. My bookmarks all show up, but when I search for anything I get no results. Looks like you guys still have a few kinks to work out...
Any "CSS Best Practices" guide should start with "1. Use a preprocessor."
Also, don't use IDs? Really? The article referenced as a source for this claim ends with "Don’t stop using IDs, just be aware of where they can cause you headaches and know where to sensibly circumvent them. Anyone telling you not to use them at all is not wrong, but they’re definitely not right…"
That's good advice. Understanding how specificity works will make you realize, when designing your Twitter widget, relying on a selector ".tweet a" is unreliable, and use "a.tweet-link" instead.
I just spent my entire day tracking down a missing "var" that caused a bug only in Internet Explorer. I haven't written any assembly code since college, and I hope to reach a day when I never have to write or maintain native Javascript again.
Can anyone explain why 'United States' could possibly be an autocomplete result for 'CA'? I am staring at United States and just can't see a 'C' anywhere... have I totally lost it?
Funny enough, I already proposed the same problem and solution with a blog post and sample code for "Re-thinking the State Dropdown with Autocompletion" back in May. Same issues applied, but there was at least some feedback on reddit and optional changes.
I think the random string is clever. My first instinct would be that you should be able to reach it at http://resume.io/dangrossman, but then if someone is familiar with the service they could circumvent the tracking URLs.
On the other hand, having a human friendly URL might be nice in the long run for easily finding people. Definitely a tradeoff.
