logorrhoea.net

All the people, so many people… Actually, probably only 5% of the people at Hyde Park, originally uploaded by logorrhoea.

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I don’t normally blog about games but I just love the graphics in Parachute Panic [iTunes store link] (a new game for the iPhone, available for the introductory price of 59p at the time of writing). The background is ever-so-slightly crumpled notepaper, and the animated figures are stick figures and simple line drawings. It’s the antithesis of the glossy 3D rendered stuff you see elsewhere yet somehow manages to look beautiful for it.

I’m looking to redesign this blog soon and suspect ParaPanic will prove to be a strong influence.

[Edited 9th June to give 'ParaPanic' its full name and to add iTunes Store link.]

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Measuring content strategy: Not a piece of cake | Words Are Delicious

Interesting blog post that gives an insight into the difficulties of measuring content effectiveness when content is part of an overall design process.  ((There’s an almost incidental insight into the compromises that are made when your company’s culture is most certainly not to sweat the details, although the author of the blog post may disagree with me on the culture.))

This bit in particular I found interesting.

‘

We need to recognize content is the voice of our brand, and we have to take responsibility for what we say to our customers and how we say it. I want us to ask ourselves not, “Will this new content make us more money?” but, “Is this new content right for our brand?”

The company referred to in the blog post is the company I used to work for up until eight days ago, but it seems that a battle we fought and won a couple of years ago in the UK – working with the brand team so that the tone of voice guidelines are an integral part of the overall brand guidelines – is something yet to be tackled at the mothership.

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Seems like Twitter’s really starting to hit the mainstream now¹ so in the absence of an established etiquette (no, not ‘twettiquette’ or ‘etwiquette’) I’m putting up my very personal reasons for not following you in the first place or not following you any more, even if you are kind enough to follow me on Twitter.

Reasons why I don’t follow you or have stopped following you on Twitter:

1. Your grammar or spelling is consistently poor.  (For example, not knowing when to use your/you’re or they’re/their/there, comma splicing (usually when using the word ‘however’), incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe.)  I don’t want to get into a discussion about whether it matters if your English is perfect when you’re online.  It’s just that I write and edit for a living, ergo correcting other people’s English is second nature to me, and it’s irritating for me if I find myself constantly mentally putting Word into ‘track changes’ mode.
2. Your tweet signal-to-noise ratio is low.  This is a difficult one, because what counts as signal to me depends on who you are.  If you’re a mate or even someone I’ve met just once, I’m going to put up with seemingly inane crap or personal rants because the personal connection makes it interesting to me.  If you’re a software house or service provider, I expect your tweets to give me something on top of what I could find out from my RSS subscriptions.  If all you’re doing is tweeting links to press releases or blog posts, then that is Not A Good Thing.
3. Your tweets mainly consist of links to your blog posts.  If you’re only using Twitter to publicise other online activity then a) I think you’re missing the potential of Twitter and b) it comes across as really needy or narcissistic.  Make your tweets interesting in themselves, and when you tweet the occasional link to your other work, I’ll be infinitely more inclined to click through.
4. You retweet unthinkingly. RT juter @logorrhoea I have a rule about overuse of re-tweets: it’s such lazy me-tooism.
5. You put up several tweets about the same subject within a short space of time.  If you need more than 140 characters, may I humbly suggest you write a blog post instead (but bear in mind no.3 and no. 6 of this list).
6. You’re using Twitter to broadcast, not to interact.  Unless your tweets are really interesting, if I get the feeling that you think Twitter’s just another broadcasting medium rather than an exciting way to interact with people, then I ain’t gonna follow you.
7. It’s not obvious why you’re following me.  If you start following me, it’s nice to know why, unless the reason’s obvious.  (If it’s obvious that you’re following me to plug your stuff, I definitely won’t be following back.)
8. You don’t/hardly tweet.  Even if you’re really new to Twitter, or are returning to an old account, it doesn’t do any harm to put up a couple of tweets to show signs of life so that I know that you’re not following me for voyeuristic reasons.
9. You don’t follow me.  If I follow you and you don’t follow me back, then I’m less inclined to keep following you (unless your tweet SNR is particularly high).  That’s ok, though, because I really don’t take it personally.  Equally, you shouldn’t take it personally if you follow me and I don’t follow you back.

I’m deliberately leaving it at 9 reasons, lest anyone think I’ve contrived this blog post.  I’ve written this mainly so I could point people to it if they’re offended by me not following them.

The key point is, if I don’t follow you on Twitter it’s not personal.  Ok, it is personal in the sense that I specifically do not want to follow you, but that doesn’t mean that I think you’re a bad person or even a boring person. It just means that the things you tweet or the way you tweet isn’t my cup of tea.  I may absolutely love your company when we meet in person, though, so don’t let this come between us.  The list above isn’t aimed at any person in particular, so don’t flatter yourself or feed your paranoia that I’ve written something just about you.

1. or it might be that I just happen to read/listen to the old media that has an obsession with it, a bit like The Observer’s puzzling preoccupation with Second Life [↩]

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RipIt is an easy-to-use DVD ripping tool for Macs.  It rips DVDs onto your hard drive (whether internal or external) into a format that can be read by the DVD player app just like any other DVD, which means it preserves the whole DVD structure, including menus, chapters, and bonus material.  (I’ve yet to try it out for Easter Eggs, though.)    At only $18.99 it’s an absolute bargain.

When I first embarked on The Great DVD Project (making hard drive backups of the family’s DVD collection and converting them to Apple TV format), I used the setup you’ll see mentioned in a lot of blogs: Mac The Ripper (MTR) to rip the DVD to hard disk then Handbrake to convert MTR’s output into Apple TV format.

This served me adequately for a while, although I found MTR’s interface somewhat inscrutable at times, until I came across a few DVDs with copy protection that couldn’t be read by MTR. Without wishing to get into a debate about copy protection’s rights and wrongs, I spent a fruitless few hours on various sites and a scary-looking MTR forum, but nothing I tried could get MTR to work on these DVDs.

That’s when I stumbled across RipIt. It’s a simple app to use – once installed, you insert the DVD, ask RipIt to do its stuff, and you end up with a DVD image that can be played just like any other DVD. RipIt will even look up the DVD’s name in an online catalogue for you so you end up with a filename that’s vaguely intelligible (results are variable, though).

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