oulipian

Try living in a time zone that is a half-hour deviation from standard time (Newfoundland & Labrador). When I first got an iPod my time zone simply wasn't supported by the software: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/179539

MetaFilter can be hard to describe but I think this is one of the best descriptions I've seen of what makes it special.

Fortunately, 80% of the games people will play on this involve avatars wearing space helmets! Ingrained facial grease just makes it more immersive!

And down.

I don't see why there isn't a bigger push to move all these underemployed programmers to careers as cashiers. They'll make more money and get better benefits than what they get as an underemployed programmer. They won't necessarily get much time to "solve problems," but with their typing and math skills, cashiering should be a breeze!

$sidebar.html("Do this"); $sidebar.html("instead");

Should maybe be: $sidebar.html("Do this").html("instead");

Regarding 4 (Newfoundland): the Harper government pretty much pisses off the entire provice on a weekly basis. Harper's conservative base is out west, Newfoundlanders certainly don't think much of him. Peter Penashue was the only Conservative MP voted in here in the last election, and he's gone now, thankfully.

I've used Illustrator to draft website designs for years, and drawing in vector is especially useful now that I often find myself needing larger versions of graphics for hi-res screens.

This is a good idea, but a conceptual introduction to web development that dismisses UI/UX as "basically, what makes sites look good" is not one I could ever recommend to anyone.

In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.

The new one is not completely flat, there's some really subtle shading there. I like it a lot. More elegant.

The idiotic modal window is bad enough, but the new Gmail Compose also breaks basic shortcut keys (such as Command+left or right arrow to skip to the end of a line), at least in Firefox on my Mac. And pasting text in "Plain text" mode often adds weird line breaks. Gmail used to be such a pleasure to use and I cringe to click Compose now.

For the most part it's excellent, and I love Hische's work, but the lowercase 'm' is not as distinct as before. It looks like it says "MailChirry".

Firefox already has that, there's a little "Box Model" tab with a little diagram showing padding, margins, and so on.

Oh I agree, but you might as well get them right if that's the effect you're going for.

You have got to be kidding. That looks terrible and wastes half the space on the screen. It's not even very good skeuomorphism, the drop shadows aren't in a consistent direction, and the layering of the brushes and canvas doesn't make sense.

The home page looks terrible on my 13" Macbook Pro, the illustration takes up almost the entire screen. Everything feels oversized and unbalanced.

I have emailed you! Thanks for the follow-up.

Thank you, pmoz and callahad. Email received. I assumed it had just slipped through the cracks, no hard feelings. I did receive an awesome Game On t-shirt, and the Buckyballs.

Fair warning: participate for the fun, not for the prizes. Mozilla ran a competition like this in 2010. My game "Favimon" won the "Most Original" category. I never did receive most of the prizes they claimed all winners received, including a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, a guest post on the Yahoo! Games blog, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, and John Resig's "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" book. This was despite many polite inquiries to the competition organizer. Overall I thought the competition was excellent, but Mozilla's lacklustre follow-up afterwards was disappointing.

Ah, I understand. Thanks!

"Does Apple have a single other remaining app with a modal preferences dialog?"

What is Gruber talking about? The "Preferences" dialogs in Pages, Keynote and iBooks Author work exactly the same way as the one in iTunes.

If you're looking for suggestions: If you really want people to use this as a writing tool, make the interface itself more tranquil - the "Tranquillity" title is distracting, and the poem title typeface is awful. Not everyone who writes poetry is into that kind of frilly aesthetic. Find a few well-designed poetry books to use as design examples. A full-screen mode would be easy to implement and super useful.

Similarly, the rhyming tools are interesting, but make them hideable for anyone who is not using them. I would use a thesaurus a thousand times more often than a rhyming dictionary.

I actually like the fixed-width font but suspect many wouldn't. Maybe an option to switch between fixed-width and not. Also, I expect to be able to use the tab key to indent, but it doesn't work here.

Saving and revision control would be great.

Sure. But it's like using a picture of a circle, a triangle, a square, and a swastika to suggest "geometric shapes".

That is not how most people are going to interpret that image. It comes across as completely clueless, since Rand is both a notoriously terrible writer and someone who would absolutely abhor the idea of collaborative writing, not to mention the idea of giving someone money.

Using Ayn "Virtue of Selfishness" Rand to advertise your collaborative writing app is like using Donald Trump to advertise hair-care products.

Your logo doesn't work. I'm using the latest Firefox on a Mac. Error: strengths is undefined.

True, but for the purposes of the game, it doesn't really make a difference, as www.example.com is unlikely to have a different favicon than example.com. So I am clipping them just to make it simpler to input URLs.

I made Favimon, so I can answer with great certainty: nope!

Hi, I am the creator of Favimon! Thanks for the link and the feedback. The game is still in beta - I'm working on making it more challenging, improving performance on mobile browsers, and a few other things. Favimon is basically a wild idea I had a few months ago - I've been amazed by the traffic it's been receiving.

As a few people have pointed out, each time you encounter a favimon it has a new set of actions, randomized from a pool of actions that correspond to its classes (such as 'blog', 'shop', or site-specific classes like 'google').

Favimon was recently awarded Most Original in the Mozilla Labs Game On 2010 competition: https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/games/winners

You can follow development on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/favimon