Fugu Talk

HyperBowl is now on the Thousand Apps page. Here’s just a section. Can you locate HyperBowl?

There’s been furor in the past over flag-burning, but to me, the real desecration of the flag occurs when people co-opt it for their own causes. I was recently nauseated by a Facebook campaign against the proposed Muslim worship center in New York, largely by the use of the American Flag as their logo. But I should get over it – the tactic is pretty much a cliche by now.

For example, here is an over-the-top logo for the Huntington Beach Police Officers Association:

A more clever use is on the “about us” page of the Video Game Voters Network:

Nowhere does it explain on that page that the group is founded and run by the ESA, the industry group representing game publishers. That type of omission leads the conspiracy theorist in me (and I didn’t even know I had one) to wonder who was behind the anonymous mass mailings in the IGDA that led to Tim Langdell’s ouster. Anyway, for my civil liberties advocacy, I’ll count on organizations like the ACLU – at least I know who they are.

And liberal groups are not immune, either. MoveOn exercises this tactic (and others normally attributed to Fox News), but with a bit of subtlety here – they have some stars and stripes sneaking in around the borders and background:

It’s an unseemly replacement for discourse. Which flag is bigger, yours or mine?

I have a rule of thirds when it comes to web ads (along with a rule of popups and a rule of flashing banner ads) – I am not inclined to tweet/share/inflict a web page on others if two thirds of the page doesn’t consist of content. Like this Forbes page, which has a story surrounded by blocks of large type blaring at you to sign up for other Forbes products.

You could argue that ads promoting other Forbes products or promotions or tie-ins qualify as Forbes content (at least on my own web site, that’s the story I’m sticking with). But the reason I got peeved is at the bottom of the page, where it’s clear the entire story might have fit on this page if they’d given it, say, maybe 40% of the page.

To be fair, I’ve seen a lot worse. Indeed, I’ve followed twitter links to articles which just had one or a few sentences, surrounded by a sea of ads, requiring you to click on a link to read more of the story. Eventually, they’ll just feed us a word at a time.

For a while, I stopped updating the technicat web site because, well, because I couldn’t. After updating my Mac to Snow Leopard (forced to, because the latest XCode required it), I couldn’t run Apache Forrest anymore because that doesn’t run on Java 6. I was leaning toward Drupal and finally committed to it this weekend. It involved some contortions – ultimately, I have http://technicat.com/ redirecting to http://drupal.technicat.com/ (and the old site is at http://forrest.technicat.com/ )

It’s more of a Drupal-for-Dummies setup, so I can’t add plugins or themes, and I suspect there’s something wrong with the installation or me, since I don’t see some things that I think I should be seeing (like a Contact form and image upload options), but basically, it works, and I found a theme that doesn’t look terrible. Now, I have to start updating the content…

I’ve seen a couple of recent complaints that the black-and-white HyperBowl icon is too bland. I thought the toucharcade forum member was overly dramatic (“get rid of that hideous monstrosity”) and I’m skeptical that it was the only thing preventing his purchase. But I though the HowsMyApp review had a good point that there should be differentiation between the full HyperBowl game and the individual lanes also on the App Store. So I dug this new one out of the archives, which has some color.

The iPad is a nice web-browsing appliance, Flash aside, but I found my HyperBowl site was scrunched in it, quite possibly because I had this in the HTML header as a trick to specially format it for the iPhone:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>

So where I had a CSS for the iPhone and another for everything else, I now have one more CSS for the iPad. The order is important.

<link href="hyper2.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 1024px)"
 href="hyperipad.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
 href="hyperiphone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

If this isn’t the first time you’ve read this blog, then you’re probably noticing the new look. I decided to try out some new WordPress themes for some reason and eventually settled on one that I already had installed, Barthelme. It has an unusually wide format, with the sidebar on the left, so a lot of the images I was too lazy to shrink now show up uncropped. While I was at it, I customized the widget arrangement in the sidebar, adding the twitter display from Twitter Tools, and added the Add-to-Any plugin for easy tweeting/bookmarking/sharing. (I also tried the AddThis plugin, but Add-to-Any exhibits slightly better behavior on the iPad, although both have trouble getting hidden by the video embed areas).

Courtesy of AppBoy, I discovered the app developer listing They Make Apps last week. I added Fugu Games and it was easy and free (with an option to pay for a more prominent display). You can list your rate rate in $5k quanta up to “over $20k”. I’m relieved to see many developers aren’t listing the minimum $5k – I’m often approached by prospective clients who want an app developed without paying much or anything, and I was beginning to wonder…

I should also mention the site looks fantastic (I say enviously). Apparently standards based, as it looks fine on the iPad with just a slight glitch on the side tabs. Look Ma, no Flash!

Popups have evolved from just popping up to jumping in front of you. In some cases, they are “nice” enough to only pop up when your mouse moves over them (the evil twin of tooltips), in which case you end up playing a browser game called Avoid-the-Hotspot. Here’s one that jumps in over the reading area from the right. Surprise!

Worse are the ones that abandon restraint and just say “Here I am. Look at me! Look at me! It’s time for my close-up, Mr. Demille!” I ran into this popup while scrolling down and trying to read the article – and of course it pops up right where you’re trying to read. It’s as if those ubiquitous television badges (reminding you that you’re watching “Syfy”!) were placed in the center of the TV screen instead of the corner.

From an advertising perspective I suppose it might be considered effective in that you can’t ignore it (you could say the same about a punch in the face), but I make a point of not “sharing” those sites via Twitter or whatever – I’m not going to inflict that on anyone else.

I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about EULA’s or TOS’s, but I’ll say one thing about Apple – their general reputation for good user interfaces extends to EULA display. Nothing fancy, but they generally present them in a large window that is actually suitable for reading a document, like the one I just read for my iTunes update.

You might say of course, what’s the big deal, but then I started up Microsoft Works on my new Windows laptop and got a lengthy EULA displayed in a tiny text window you usually see with installers, except this is a startup window. The fact that the window is non-resizeable might lead one to conspiracy theories. I can’t imagine anyone actually bothering to scroll through a few lines at a time to read the entire agreement, which I’m sure is the point.

And then I decided to take enter some tax deductions and started up Deduction Pro, which isn’t even a real app anymore but takes you online (yes, I really want to put my financial information on your web site!). In a browser, the inappropriate tiny size of the EULA window is ridiculously obvious. There’s barely enough room to display “PLEASE READ CAREFULLY”. Yeah, right.