Product Description• Authors are top game designers • Aspiring game writers and designers must have this complete bible There are other books about creating video games out there. Sure, they cover the basics. But The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design goes way beyond the basics. The authors, top game designers, focus on creating games that are an involving, emotional experience for the gamer. Topics include integrating story into the game, writing the game script, putting together the game bible, creating the design document, and working on original intellectual property versus working with licenses. Finally, there’s complete information on how to present a visionary new idea to developers and publishers. Got game? Get The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design.
The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design
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Tag: design
Will this help you get through the day?
If you’ve got an iPhone you’ll now that the battery is pretty awful, if you’ve got an iPhone 3GS then you’ll know that it’s even worse. So what are you to do? Well you could systematically go through the phone’s settings and turn off all the features you’ve paid extra for; the location services, the wireless, and even the 3G connectivity.
Mophie have other plans, promising to give iPhone users a new lease of life and more importantly a phone that will last longer than 4 O’clock without the battery warnings.
In steps the mophie juice pack air, a case for your iPhone that slots around the back just like any other case. The colours; white, black, and purple, (we got purple) aren’t the most designer friendly, however the hidden gem is that built with-in the case is a battery that, if you are careful, can mean that your iPhone lasts around 3 days without needing to say hello to a power socket.
I though that would get your attention.
As we’ve said the case is simple in it’s design, comes in a range of colours and slots into the docking connector. A USB cable out the bottom gives you connectivity to your Mac or PC so you can still dock it as well as providing charging capabilities for the battery itself.
Battery levels can be checked via four LED lights on the back at the press of a button and owners of a MacBook will be familiar with the design and concept.
The premise is simple. You charge the device, it then charges your iPhone throughout the day. When the mophie juice pack air runs out, the iPhone resumes using its own battery, allowing you to go thin if you want.
In practice it works just as it sounds. First we tested the juice pack air with overly heavy use of the iPhone; turning on location services and Wi-Fi, and then going to town with calls, surfing the web, and twitter. The result? It basically doubles the life of the phone and with the mophie juice pack installed we managed to get through to the following morning without needing to worry about power.
On light use, ie how we currently use our iPhone 3GS in the office, we managed a whopping 3 days of battery, yes 3 days, although it’s worth saying that this will drastically depend on how many calls you get and what you do.
In our two weeks of testing we not once had a battery warning half way through the day – or at a time in the bar where you really need to phone home to tell them you are going to be late.
So what’s the catch? There is always a catch right? Well it’s that for this need to have a phone that is capable of always being on, you have to live with the fact that the mophie juice pack air will double the thickness of your iPhone.
Then there is the case design, not exactly mind blowingly hot or exciting.
Verdict:
The mophie juice pack air does what it sets out to do – ie double the life of your iPhone battery and save you having to find a charging point at some point during the day.
However the payoff for that isn’t the cost (it’s £64/$80) but that you end up with a phone that isn’t as slinky or thin as it once was.
Leaving you with a feeling that while you’ll be able to order that late night cab home, your mates will ridicule you for having something that would look more comfortable in the 90s.
Tags:
Phones mobile phone accessories iPhone Mophie Cases
Mophie juice pack air iPhone battery case originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:28:41 +0100
The infamous color picker is present among many of the built-in OS X applications and is quite a powerful tool once you dig into it. With the ability to store your favorite colors in “wells” and use them between applications, the color picker can quickly become an indispensable tool in your daily workflow. Here’s some tips and plugins to supercharge the color picker.
Color Picker Basics
Not all applications support the OS X color picker, but to see if one does, look in Format, View, or Window menus for an entry called “Show Colors.” The color picker is not just limited to the Apple-developed applications, as third-party apps such as Coda, Billings, Daylite and others also include support.
The color picker features “tabs” across the top dividing it into the standard color wheel, color sliders (allowing to you fine tune a color by RGB, HSB, CMYK, or Grayscale sliders), color palettes, image palettes and crayons.
You can pick custom colors by tweaking them in the color picker, or by using the magnifying glass to “pluck” a color from anywhere in the system.
To apply a color, simply highlight text and click the color you want. Or drag the color onto an object.
As mentioned earlier, you can organize your favorite colors by dragging them into one of the wells at the bottom of the picker. If the default amount is not enough, simply click the dot and drag down to allow for a total of 250 places to store your color swatches.
Add Some Kuler
Users of Adobe’s Kuler service are quick to tote how great it is to be exposed to a wide array of beautiful color schemes shared among the Adobe community.
Using a free plugin called Mondrianum by Lithoglyph, users can now add Kuler integration to the standard OS X color picker. With quick access to search color schemes by keyword, browse them via Cover Flow, or quickly set them as your desktop background, Mondrianum is a great tool to add to your color picker.
Want a True Artist’s Approach?
With Painter’s Picker ($19.95, with a demo version here), you can add an artist’s color wheel to the color picker, giving you the ability to quickly choose complementary colors, analogous colors, and the like. More advanced options allow for precision modification of the brightness, saturation and more. As someone who moves between different types of media (web to print), I enjoy the ability to see the nearest CYMK colors and nearest web safe colors when working on projects.
What the Hex?
Developers out there will love the “Developer Color Picker,” a free plugin from Panic that quickly allows users to convert selected colors to NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, HTML or CSS declarations. The plugin itself is very barebones in style, but is priceless in terms of functionality.
Shades, Schemes and More
Shades ($18 from Chromatic Bytes) is another great plugin for the standard color picker, allowing users to quickly see related color shades. In the words of Chromatic Bytes, “you choose a center color, a step size and a color coordinate to hold constant. Shades then draws a grid of related colors.” This gives you something more akin to traditional paint chips and is useful for finding similar colors.
Another great application for creating and managing color schemes is Color Schemer Studio. While it does not run as a plugin to the OS X color picker, it is a very powerful standalone tool and a great compliment to some of these other plugins. A great feature of this application that really stands out is its ability to extract a simplified color palette from a photo. That’s just the tip of the iceberg and for more details, read our review of Color Schemer Studio here. This application is $49 and more information (including a demo version) is available from its website.
Color Pickers Everywhere
Most modern OS X applications support the color picker, but for those applications who are in the dark, you can use a little AppleScript trick to run the Color Picker as its own application.
Open up the AppleScript Editor (inside the Applications ? Utilities folder) and type in the following code:
choose color
Then save this as an application. Now when you run it, your traditional OS X color picker will appear. Drag and drop colors around to your heart’s content!
If you have any other tips or tricks to share about the color picker, I’d love to hear them!
Collapses down to 26-inches
Student Dominic Hargreaves is up for the this year’s James Dyson Award for innovation with his design for “The Contortionist” folding bike.
The bike’s ability to fold up completely into the space of the wheel’s 26-inch circumference is impressive.
Watching the video it seem the design is still in the realms of concept as the bike does not appear to be a full working model.
But, will the cycle’s clever contortions be cunning enough to net the £10k prize? We shall have to wait and see.
Tags:
Sports Fitness Bicycles Concepts Video
VIDEO: "The Contortionist" folding bike concept unveiled originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:05:20 +0100
Money saving deals, offers and innovations
We have a bargain MP3 player for you today in the form of the Stage 1GB MP3 player from Ebuyer.
At £12.99, this appears to be as cheap as you’ll get for a 1GB player and could be ideal for gym-ers and joggers as well as keeping any children amused since it should hold around 240 songs.
The downside is that it isn’t exactly packed with features, obvious by the way the site is pushing its integrated clip. Truly an innovation worth shouting about, it allows you to clip the device to your sleeve, lapel or pocket, whilst the design is cited as being “simple and trendy”.
Other functionality includes a LED power indicator, up to 10 hours of battery life and the shuffle-like ability of only playing on random.
Still it’s £13 and could prove handy. Let us know in the comments below if you’ve found it cheaper elsewhere or know of a better product for similar money.
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Audio MP3 players Stage Ebuyer Daily Tech Deal
Daily Tech Deal: Bargain MP3 player from Ebuyer originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:00:00 +0100
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