First up the stupidly named Sabifoo. It converts IM messages to an RSS feed which is sort of useful, and the exact oppositie of what I want. what I want is something that spits out the contents of an RSS feed to my IM client (MSN, Google Talk, whatever) as the feed is updated, you know for things like cricket commentary. I would use the stupidly named feed43 to rip the Guardian or BBC over by over to an RSS feed which I would then feed to my IM client.
Second up Inform v7 is launched. Inform allows you to create text adventures (or interactive fiction if you insist) in the Infocom style. The exciting thing about version 7 is that it allows these adventures to be written in natural language i.e. not computer code, so you can say things like The cargo trunk is an openable container. and this will be understood by the computer and will give certain properites to the notional trunk object. I’m totally into programing languages getting easier for the layman to use and this is one of the best examples I’ve seen, a far cry from the ugly, counterintuitive Lingo that used to come with Director… set the puppet of the sprite mysprite to be true* indeed.
Anyway, the web design trend is that the web sites for both these pieces of software and quite a few more I’ve seen over the last few weeks have the distinctive look of sites made in Apples iWeb application. It’s quite a web 2.0 look but not over designed or over glossed like so much of the stuff were seeing at the moment. I really like it, though in common with many WYSIWYG editors the code produced isn’t pretty. As this guy says though, what’s good for programmers isn’t necessarily good for viewers/readers (though text rendered as a graphic is probably taking it a bit too far unless you’re tvgohome) or amateur producers**. I think this is the same idea that informs the aforementioned Inform’s natural language programing tools, both are for people who want to create without the hassle of having to gain a whole load of arcane knowledge to do so.
*I just made this up, but it’s not far from the truth.
**Actually I have quite a lot to say about this so called ‘amateurisation’ but a lot of it’s fairly boring stuff about the shifting definition of amateur and the advent of super publics which is probably left to when I’m drunk or the comments section or something.
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