Danbusha

Emerald Penthouse

Dream Interpretation Dictionary

Dug out

Basketball Hall of Famer and "secret nerd" Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shares a list of 20 things he wish he'd know when he was 30 years old.

18. Watch more TV. Yeah, you heard right, Little Kareem. It's great that you always have your nose in history books. That's made you more knowledgeable about your past and it has put the present in context. But pop culture is history in the making and watching some of the popular shows of each era reveals a lot about the average person, while history books often dwell on the powerful people.

Tags: basketball   Kareem Abdul-Jabbar   lists   sports

They were both wrong.

As the summer approaches rapidly, we sink into a deep state of melancholia, dreaming about our beloved moments of relaxation, when nothing and no one can put pressure on us. Away from the city rush, away from chaos, in the warm sapphire water of the Gulf of Thailand, lies the private Song Saa island, a tropical oasis dedicated to your senses, aiming to disconnect you from any kind of stress source. Luxurious and high class, the Song Saa Private Island Resort is the ultimate luxury spot, being located in a place where you can still find untainted beaches, with sparkly white sands.

Song Saa is Cambodia’s first private resort island. The villas that float on water capture a heaven-like picture, especially at dusk when the sky and the waters begin to change colours. By keeping the natural assets untainted, the private island looks like a framed piece of paradise. The Song Saa Private Island Resort is also known as The Sweethearts (being a wonderful place for young couple who want to experience the tropical ambience). Song Saa is all about luxury and intimacy. Here you can explore “dramatic sunsets, seascapes and starry nights”. 

You're reading Private Island Resort in Cambodia Offering The Ultimate Luxury Experience originally posted on Freshome.

The post Private Island Resort in Cambodia Offering The Ultimate Luxury Experience appeared first on Freshome.com.

Alex Honnold at Yosemite.


Image by Desre Tate/Barcroft Media /Landov

You have come to the end of the world. Keep walking.

The Mac Monocle™

Two brothers, Patrick and Daniel Klug, recently released their first game called 'Game Dev Tycoon'. In it, players start a small game development company in the 1980's and attempt to build it up to a development powerhouse over the next 30 years.

In a bit of an experiment, the Klugs released a cracked version of their game and uploaded it themselves to a torrent site. However, in the pirated version, the in-game developers begin to run into crippling piracy that eventually drives them into bankruptcy. In-game CEO's receive this message:

Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally.

If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.

Players who downloaded the game illegally then began posting questions in the game's support forums asking how to better fight the pirates.

After the first weekend, the company had 3100 gamers playing the cracked version, with 214 playing the genuine edition.


The game itself would be enjoyed by any fans of the tycoon series of games -- as CEO of the game company, players can research new technologies and game types, while hiring new employees and making bigger and bigger video games.

Fictional versions of major game platforms like NES, Sony PlayStation and the Xbox are all used in the game, with some clever thinking required to figure out what types of games will be bestsellers.

Game Dev Tycoon for Mac is $7.99 straight from the developers, with access to Windows and Linux versions also included in the purchase price.

Minoru Nomata


Minoru Nomata


Minoru Nomata


Minoru Nomata


Minoru Nomata

Towers of Babylon

A walk in bookcase.

This is far more appealing than a walk in closet.

Echo House in Ottawa, Canada

Back to work

Tuesday, April 30                10:30 p.m.            Detroit at Anaheim                             FSD, FSPLUS, NBCSN, TSN

Thursday, May 2                 10 p.m.                  Detroit at Anaheim                             FSD, NBCSN, TSN

Saturday, May 4                 7:30 p.m.               Anaheim at Detroit                             FSD, NBCSN, TSN

Monday, May 6                  8 p.m.                     Anaheim at Detroit                             FSD, CNBC, TSN

*Wednesday, May 8          10 p.m.                  Detroit at Anaheim                             FSD, FSPLUS, TSN

*Friday, May 10                  TBD                       Anaheim at Detroit                             FSD, TSN                             

*Sunday, May 12                TBD                       Detroit at Anaheim                             FSD, TSN

Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead. I knew Day-Lewis was good, but this is bonkers.

Tags: Barack Obama   Daniel Day-Lewis   Lincoln   movies   politics   Steven Spielberg   video

Seth

Jeanne Susplugas

Philippe Baudelocque

Philippe Baudelocque

C215

Dem189

ZeeR

Thomas Canto

YZ

YZ

YZ

Sambre (work in progress)

Sambre (work in progress)

Built as a municipal bathhouse in the late 19th century, Les Bains-Douches would eventually become one of the hottest night clubs in Paris known simply as Les Bains, a destination for the likes of Kate Moss, Mick Jagger, Johnny Depp and even Andy Warhol. Due to some faulty construction in 2010 the building was declared a safety hazard and is now slated for complete renovation in just a few days to pave way for La Société des Bains, a new space that will open in 2014. In the meantime, owner Jean-Pierre Marois turned over the building to 50 street artists commissioned by Magda Danysz Gallery who have been working since January to turn the decaying building into an endless canvas of artwork.

While the entire space will unfortunately remain closed to the public, photographers Stephane Bisseuil and Jérôme Coton were allowed in to shoot many of the artworks in progress. Above is just a small selection, head over to Les Bains “One Day One Artist” page to see much more. (via creative review)

isms

“After last season ended with a woman hitting on Don Draper, and Don Draper giving her—and us—that “I’m up for it” look, I feared we’d get a season just like the one we now have. I know the shot was meant to be ambiguous, but it never really struck me that way. I’ve written quite a bit about my annoyance with pop culture’s current obsession with cynicism, darkness, and anti-heroes. It’s not so much that I pine for naiveté, as I pine for something different and new—especially in the same series. Watching Don Draper in his sixth season, I can’t escape the feeling that I’m watching Don Draper in his third season.

Except he’s lost something. Don is a beautiful philandering stud. That was always there but it was wrapped in so much more—his role as father to a young daughter (gone thus far), his role as a kind of father to Peggy (gone by necessity of plot), his relationship with Roger as some future image of himself (also gone), his relationship with Anna (gone to the grave), his fear of unmasking (seemingly also gone.) What’s left is a dude who makes adultery look beautiful. ”

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The push button. It’s truly the blunt instrument of UI design. While most other controls provide some indication of the type of operation they’re performing – sliders are adjusting a value, a switch is moving between two states – buttons just mean “do something”. What? The only way to tell is to press it and see. But this shouldn’t be the case.

From mechanical to digital

In the pre-digital, mechanical world, buttons as we know them were pretty rare. Toggling switches were much more common. But when buttons did exist, by necessity they would have a direct physical connection to the thing they were acting on and usually some immediate effect. Unfortunately in the digital realm this relation no longer holds, and that’s what make it so easy to misuse buttons in a user interface.

UX – “Press me”

So, what experience do users have of the buttons in your application’s UI?

The biggest issue is: how will they know the button’s true purpose (without pressing it to see)? Will it open a file or delete the contents of your hard disk? In the wrong hands it could do either of those things, or none. Your only clue is the label. In much the same way as the “drink me” and “eat me” labels in Alice’s Wonderland: the appearance of the thing isn’t congruent with its effect.

The easy way out

Unfortunately the very non-specificity of a button is what makes it so easy to over-use by inexperienced UI creators. If they haven’t thought carefully about the specific operations their users are performing, the quickest thing to do is have pressing a button be the action that invokes whatever functionality you need.

The Apple human interface guidelines stress that you should use a verb to indicate what your button will do, and this is a useful guideline when deciding whether to use them at all. You should only use a button to perform a single well-defined action in a context where the corresponding noun is clear. If it’s not granular enough, maybe you need to break things down into smaller tasks. Think of examples like ‘Cancel’ (whatever operation is underway), ‘Close’ (the document you’re working on).

So how did we get to the current state-of-the-art in buttons?

A visual history

The early years

Even back in the pre-GUI days of the terminal there were buttons. All you need is some ASCII or ANSI characters to draw a box and you’ve got yourself a button. Of course it also helps if you add a drop shadow or some inverting to indicate a press. Here we can even see a nascent use of the double-border to indicate the default operation.

Anyone who’s tweaked their BIOS will also be familiar with the text-based buttons there. Unfortunately in these text-based environments, evolution hit a bit of a dead end.

Meanwhile around 1998, the forerunner of MacOS, NeXTStep, was blazing a trail with chiseled effect buttons. Probably because it only ran on hardware that was ridiculously high-end for the time.

Round rect

In the early days of the Macintosh it became obvious that its creative users wouldn’t make do with boring old rectangular buttons, so instead they got ones with nicely rounded corners. Actually, this was more of a clever workaround for the 1-bit, black and white display. In that environment how could you distinguish between some non-interactive text in a rectangle, and a button? The use of rounded corners served as a simple and obvious visual indicator of this difference. Rounded rectangles became so ubiquitous in the UI that functions to draw them existed in the low-level QuickDraw library, see FrameRoundRect in Inside Macintosh: Imaging with QuickDraw from the early 90s.

Strikingly similar is the OK button from the first, DOS-based, version of Windows, that appeared around 1990.

As Windows evolved, so did its buttons. Version 3.0 introduced 256 colour VGA and the button style previously seen in NeXTStep.

The Borland years

Around the time of Windows 3.1, Borland were king of the Windows development tool-set with their (VB precursor) Delphi and C++ compiler. These also shipped with a GUI library (the Visual Component Library) that enabled you to make full use of the 16 colours that were available to include an image with the button. So now you knew that, err, OK was good, Cancel was bad.

As time moved on and Windows became 95, 98, NT and XP, and MacOS 7, 8, 9 and X, resolutions and colour-depths improved across the board. Buttons became more heavily embossed, and that was about it. But, as the functionality that people put behind the button become more and more complex, sometimes simple word (preferably verb) labels were no longer enough.

Shiny!

Nowadays things are getting serious. We have graphical processing units that can generate squillions of pixels per second even on a run-of-the-mill machine. What shall we do with all this processing power? Let’s make our buttons shiny! And transparent. And with a gradient and specular highlight. And let’s make them pulse.

However shiny our buttons get, remember that they’re not a catch-all for every action in your user interface. The golden rule is to use the most specific control that maps closely to the operation that is occurring from the user’s point-of-view.

Fittingness

Ezra Stoller


Ezra Stoller


Ezra Stoller

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires

Portal

 Old Mexican house turned library/store

Designer and artist Rolf Sachs renovated the Olympic stadium that was used in the 1928 and 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz and turned it into his private residence.

And wow, St. Moritz still has a naturally made bobsled run...the entire thing is made out of ice and snow.

Tags: 1928 Winter Olympics   1948 Winter Olympics   architecture   Rolf Sachs

Julien Coquentin


Julien Coquentin


Julien Coquentin

Vanishing point

Ran Ortner


Ran Ortner


Ran Ortner


Ran Ortner


Ran Ortner


Ran Ortner

Paintings, Ran Ortner

TwopTwips

City of Books

Pretty Bad Advice

Marc Escañuelas is on a solo trip around the world. You may want to keep tabs on him.