Hawken King » ideas

Compatible with iPad logo

seijin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:04:50 +0000

Couldn’t find one so I made one. Please use freely. Cite me at this URL if you are feeling generous.

(click on the image above to download a vector EPS)

CS4 looms; my favourite quotes from "dear adobe"

seijin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:13:08 +0000

With the imminent release of CS4, I take a look at the funny side of the long requested features from users of Adobe products.

Recently I found Dear Adobe. It was such a relief to find that there are literally thousands of other disgruntled creatives that work in the print and web industry that have also found this site – posing questions to adobe. Whether Adobe reads and acts upon these requests is another thing. Here are some of the funny gems:

Photoshop

- “Why does Photoshop cost as much as a pre-owned small car? Drop the price please!!”

Dreamweaver

- “Why do you build programs (Dreamweaver) based on JavaScript, which run slower than my grandmother?”

Flash

- “Yes, please support SVG in Flash player – or better yet accept the fact that open standards are the way of the future.”

Illustrator

- “I’ve been sitting here for the last 5 mins looking through all the bitching and that spinning ball of death is still going for no reason in Illustrator. ”

InDesign

- “Why can’t I Hide InDesign? I just wont go away… ”

Bridge

- “Destroy Bridge, it’s completely useless”

My only real request was tabs for all applications, which they are doing! Isometric grids for illustrator would be nice but I really don’t see it happening any time this decade.

top11 missing mail features for iPhone! update

seijin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 06:50:17 +0000

As we use e-mail more than SMS here in Japan, I have a look at what could be changed for the Japanese device, by means of a software update. This is basically my wish list for this already amazing device. Practically all of the wished for features listed are apparent on a normal everyday Japanese phone.

11. NEW: cannot forward attachments

Often, phone emails written in Japanese are delivered as “mime-attachment.txt”. Without any form of copy and paste I often forward mails to my computer for difficult kanji translation. When they arrive as attachments, I have no means of forwarding them.
10. E-Mail Names

E-Mails are sometimes listed in the inbox under the email address and not the persons name, however clicking on the e-mail will show you their name not the e-mail address.
9. Heavy Data

Replying to an e-mail always includes the senders message, this must be highly annoying for the recipient on a mobile phone, and increases data sent over the networks.
8. No Alert!

Arriving e-mails don’t make the bell (or user editable) noise!! Only SMS do this, however in Japan people use e-mail in the same way other countries use SMS. So often, you don’t know if an email has arrived. Just a dull plunk noise that can’t be changed.
7. No Add to Contacts

if someone sends you their e-mail address or phone number in an e-mail or SMS, when you click on it, iPhone wants to compose a new e-mail or call them, where as it should ask you if you want to save the email address to a new or existing contact, as well as calling/mailing them or canceling.
6. Emoji

Japanese phones have the ability to send “emoji” which are basically a set of 100 or so smiley faces and icons. (that are also used on the Japanese equivalent to “WAP” mobile net to save bandwidth). Personally I don’t mind, save for the e-mails full of meaningless blank squares, which is annoying.
5. No Auto Draft (intermittent)

When you have no reception or wifi and send an e-mail (for example on the train) sometimes the loading wheel just spins forever and the email is just lost, not saved as draft. Ideally the phone should know and not try to send and save a draft.
4. Contact Book is Slow

Contacts list is insanely slow to load, I only have 151 contacts but it can take up to 10 seconds to load, before finding the email or number I need.
3. No Groups for contacts

Adding a new contact does not let you file that contact away into a group (like “family” or “bitches”). In fact the only way to file a contact away into a group without adding them while in that group; sync with your computer’s address book; file contact into group; re sync with iPhone. (also you can’t make new photo groups [folders] and file photos, this all needs to be done on iPhoto)
2. Apple+C = no

No copy and paste. Nuff said.
1. Arg the Pain!

And number one, yep you might have guessed it; Japanese input hangs like a bastard. I can count 3 seconds between typing letters while the phone desperately searches some dark corner of the code libraries for the predictive Kanji. On a normal Japanese phone this is lightening-shit-off-a-shovel fast. This is the number one thing that needs to be updated as currently, it’s a royal pain in the arse for myself and people using the phone in Japanese, to type mails.

If you think about it they have had more than a year to make these bits better. Lets hope they do. (edit: 2.0.1 update didn’t list what was changed, no noticeable changes to the above)

iPhone homebrew

seijin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:53:50 +0000

Now that the iPhone is finally hitting Japan, and I’ve finally upgraded to Leopard, I’m looking for a pro-active programmer(s) to work with me on game development!

Requirements are fairly simple, you just need to be super interested in making games for the iPhone with ample games programming experience. However this is not a paid partnership – it is purely revenue (royalties) only.

What I’m bringing to the table:

many years of professional games company experience designing small, quick to play games.
graphics! 3d and 2d
unique game ideas
dadako brand

What I need:

experienced programmer, proficient in C++ and cocoa
no commercial experience necessary
interest in openGL 3d engine programming, especially with cocoa
eager to see project through to completion
ideally a mac user but not essential
us, canada, france, uk or japan based (please do not contact me if you are not based in these territories, this is for financial reasons)

Initially I have a few well thought out and documented game ideas, which can be started asap as homebrew projects.

Contact me for more details!

evoloution of currency fonts?

seijin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:27:48 +0000

I once read somewhere that all the best design is refined by the end user. Take greengrocers for example, they have to use currency symbols and measurement symbols every day. No computers, keyboards or pda’s. Just a scrap of paper and a pencil.

What ever happened to the double strike on currency symbols?

Refinement for the small screen during the 80′s saw the double strike vanish from the pound sterling mark, the dollar mark, the yen and also more recently the euro. This is understandable, as pixel density on screen fonts was vastly limited in the days of the computerised financial revolution. A maximum of 7 lines in height were available to build a font. It’s not say that all fonts now have removed the double strike, in fact most fonts have double strike for yen and euro, for pound and dollar it’s a different story however.

If you go back 20 or 30 years, there is no trace of the single strike on the pound and dollar. Even greengrocers, in their worst handwriting would strike twice. It’s a form, not a style. Two strikes denotes currency. A design language if you will. With the switch to DTP, the quest for new fonts began. The majority of early computer fonts were designed to be read at 7 lines high, which in turn lead to the single strike in publishing fonts, shop displays and other forms of currency denotation. All of these fonts are born from screen readable fonts, for the most part, and need to work well at 7 lines just as they do at 7 meters high.

future font development?

This is the new Ruble character.

It keeps the all important double strike, which is the un-official form of world currency, but it kinda looks like a railway company logo don’t you think? I could imagine network rail rolling this one out for 2008.

Even though this symbol is championing the staple of the double strike ethic, they have taken an unimaginative leap to use the R (which stands for Ruble, as Y does Yen, E does Euro).

The Latin alphabet doesn’t really lend it’s self too well for augmentation. Take the dollar the pound symbols for example. These marks have nothing to do with the currency in a literal sense. The “S” with it’s two strike through’s in the dollar comes from the Spanish coat of arms, the two Pillars of Hercules and was passed to the U.S.A from Spanish-Mexican traders in the 1770′s.

The “L” in the pound on the other hand simply comes from the Italian Lira, with two strike throughs to differentiate. (other UK currency symbols come from Roman words, “d” for example comes from “denarius“, or penny.)

So one form came from abstraction, another from literal intent. Both ended up with the same design doctrine. As screens become denser in clarity, shouldn’t this international design form be kept? It seems a shame to drop the two instigators of this pattern from history, when new symbols try to inherit their form.

WordPress hax. Authors page & individual post styling.

seijin — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 06:24:25 +0000

Bonus: limiting post count on pages

WordPress, however easy it is on the mind for non coders like me, is always going to come up short on the goods when turning a clients idea into reality. This article isn’t for those proficient in PHP to be honest. If you know PHP, you are well equipped to make wordpress do whatever you pretty much damn well like. If you like your full head of hair (and don’t fancy trading your design skills for learning PHP) the following may well help you keep it:

Authors page

With the new version of wordpress 2.2 most of us who use it for client CMS would have welcomed an expanded Authors function that could work in the loop. More specifically the ability to make a page that doesn’t just list all the authors but a page that can pull together the individual profiles of authors and list them on a page.

Thankfully, someone has made this a reality. Hats off to Kaf Oseo, for this unlisted page on his website. http://guff.szub.net/source/page-authors-2.0.php The basic premise is to make a new “page” (write page) and select this as a template from the right hand side menu. I’m sure you know about pages but if you didn’t, making pages is a small matter of including a line of PHP at the top of your template file. Like this:

< ?php

/*

Template Name: All Authors Template (WP2)

*/

?>

But more can be found on the wordpress codex as I’m sure you are aware.

Individual post styling

There comes a nightmare in everyones wordpress building, of changing a front page to show different posts in different styles. In essence, for those with the logical PHP brains and magic underpants this is easy. After some hair pulling and a bit of research into wildly complex ways to make posts alternate background colours, a solution came it’s way. An avid streamliner of code, I got this down into a single loop to display 3 different styled posts, with any other posts using the default style you may have made. Actually the catalyst for this is that my client wanted a “new” post, above two other posts which needed their own wizardry to sit on the page, the two posts needed to be styled differently and the whole job lot had to come from one single feed: the loop.

Here’s the code, explanation below:



< ?php if(have_posts()) : ?>

< ?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

< ?php if ( 1 == $i ) {

	?>â€œstyle1â€³< ?php

	} else if ( 2 == $i ) {

	?>â€œstyle2â€³< ?php

	} else if ( 3 == $i ) {

	?>â€œstyle3â€³< ?php

	} else {

	?>â€œstyleotherâ€< ?php

	} ?>

	< ?php $i++; ?>< ?php endwhile; else: ?>

< ?php endif; ?>

So why on earth would I not make a variable, say $thestyle, and call that in the div class? Well, the first post needed to have author info inside, and several other divs to make it fit into the design. As WordPress treats all built-in functions as you-want-this-right-now they cannot be included into strings of HTML spliced with PHP called by PHP variables. The above will only give you a div. No content.

So what does the code really look like?

Here is a sample of style1, inserted to the above code would give me everything I’m looking for even though it’s not incredibly elegant. Bare in mind stringing together wordpress functions and HTML string with PHP separator dots (how you join functions and text) would print the wordpress functions first, then dump the HTML after it. Not what we want at all.



< ?php if ( 1 == $i ) { ?>



		< ?php the_title(); ?>


		< ?php the_time('yå¹´mæœˆdæ—¥'); ?>< ?php the_author(); ?>


		
.jpg" class=\"face\" alt="< ?php the_author(); ?>"/>



			

				< ?php the_excerpt();?>

				ã¤ã¥ãŽã‚’èªã‚€ »


			


		

	


< ?php } else if ( 2 == $i ) { ?>

and so on.

I hope this helps.

Bonus

To limit the amount posts you can see on any one page (this being home.php), a lean meat idea is to use the following PHP while describing your loop:



< ?php while(have_posts() and $i <= 3) : the_post(); ?>

Many people search for this functionality in wordpress, as by default wordpress relies on you to specify this in the admin, but it’s a wide brush to paint your multi template blog with. There are many plugins out there to do the same thing, however this is such a super simple elegant hands-on-in-control way.

Lastly, remember to put this before your loop:



< ?php $i = 1; ?>

and this before the end of your loop:



< ?php $i++; ?>

or none of it will work! (these are for counting the posts!)

I hope I’ve saved some hair pulling for you non programmer-programmers like me out there.

Many thanks to mr.Varin for opening my eyes.

Blu-Ray Apple

seijin — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:54:25 +0000

Long awaited next mac mini, and how it may use blu-ray drives.

Apple TV is dead before it even left the shelf

Apple TV has arrived, but it has a few flaws. These flaws are virtually un-noticable in the current technology market.

The device will only support 720p HD at the maximum, whereas Blu-ray is a true full HD format, supporting upto 1080p. The difference being? 1080p is the highest standard currently available on the consumer market, with prices tumbling on FullHD televisions by the minute, 1080p will soon be the desired format, this is where Blu-ray fits in neatly. A graph showing 1080p and 720p conparisons can be found here.

Strangely enough the device only supports it’s own Codecs, and is not upgradable. At this time, that excludes some common industry formats like AC3 (used for 5.1 audio). Essentially this means audio from ripped DVD’s won’t work on the Apple TV. Currently frontrow can run DVD’s from the existing mac mini, Apple TV has no DVD support at all.

As we rip mp3′s today from CD’s, the future may well be ripping movies from DVD’s and storing them on our computers. Apple TV is no way “future proof” for this reality.

Blu-Ray for TV?

Apple have decided to ride the Blu-ray train, joining the big party over at Sony. Is it fun at the party? Are there free drinks? Well, not quite. You have to pay for your own drinks because, Blu-ray ain’t cheap. No free bar here.

In fact the cheapest player on the market is the PS3 (play station three), still carrying a heavy price tag.

Consumers will have a hard time using Blu-Ray for anything other than Movies. For data storage it will be fantastic, but do you really want to put 30gb of your data on one disc? I doubt Apple plan for anything but movie playback, with writable drives coming to scene later.

So where does Apple TV fit in?

What the market needs is a mid range player, taking Apple’s entry level home machine and beefing it up to play Blu-ray at 1080p via HDMI makes all the sense in the world, because then it would be a mid range consumer product. Forcing the Apple TV unit down one more notch – making it appear cheaper. Mac Mini on the other hand will be able to go up in price, considering it would need a graphics card of some sort – currently it can barely push 720p without serious slow down.

Several predictions have already been made about Blu-ray Intel Macintoshes, although the rumour mill has been fairly silent until recently, pointing all fingers at Apple’s imminent release of Leopard (OSX 10.5) having Blu-ray support.

An interesting question is; are Sony holding Apple back?

So will it really happen. Does the market really need a new Blu-ray HDTV product that is essentially going head-to-head with the other HDTV product, the AppleTV?

Timing would say yes!

NDS homebrew with passcard3 & M3Perfect

seijin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:47:49 +0000

I live out here in Tokyo, and despite what you might imagine, it is very hard to get ahold of homebrew kit out here. There are some dodgy shops here and there, but often they are geeky and un-comunicative about what they sell due to legal reasons.

So, out for a walk trying to find a dreamcast with my friend in Akihabara last weekend, I spotted a shelf full of NDS “stuff”.

I enquired to the geeks behind the counter about what hardware I need but they told me that they cannot give me any information about how it all works! They even told me that even if I do buy any of the kit I can’t take it back or have a receipt!

With that in mind, and a stubborn intent to buy at least something, I got a Passkey3. Outside I realised that it had no slot for adding SD cards and took it back, they let me exchange for the more expensive M3 Perfect (mini SD, I have a 1st gen NDS). In total I spent 13,000 yen. That’s about 55 quid currently. Having absolutely no idea how this works I thought I could run homebrew games from that bit of kit alone.

After a bit of searching on the internet I bought a Passcard3. You need both cards. One to pass the anti piracy features using slot 1 (top of DS) and another card to store the data (GBA slot).

Getting the system up and running was very easy. In windows I formatted my Mini SD card to Fat32, placed the software that came with my M3 Perfect on there. Used that upload software to add a rom to my card (lemmings homebrew) and I was away! it is also possible to run hacked Nintendo DS games using this combo.

easy

moan 2007

seijin — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:05:56 +0000

For all the benefits my Mac has brought me, there are still some improvements to be made. Here’s a list of features I have sent to Apple and other companies (Adobe) this year, in some kind of vain and possibly pointless hope that they may fix for the insane month of March. Where 2007 becomes “year of the Mac”:

“add image to iPhoto library”

Not sure how many times I’ve clicked on this by accident. It’s a right click menu option in Safari, right under Save image. Who needs this? Who uses it? iPhoto is absolutely archaic in it’s start up procedure, sucking resources from the machine, slowing everything down to a grinding halt for a few minutes. If you force quit the opening process, it crashes Safari.
Sent mail

When checking my sent mail folder in Mail, it shows my photo instead of the recipients photo. What use is this exactly? Surely it would make more logic to show the photo of the person I am sending it to!
Junk mail

In Mail, I am shown how many junk mails I have with a nice big bold number. I believe there should be an option to turn this off, because personally, I don’t care how many junk mails I have, so long as they are not in my inbox. I check my Junk folder from time to time, that’s enough to catch the strays.
Flash Library

Interesting one this, not exactly a bug, although Flash users will know how buggy the software has been over time. The library could really do with some “power” tools. Like search and replace, multiple rename. Also the import conflict dialogue could do with telling you what is actually conflicting with a re-name option, multiple re-name option. I’m still holding out for 3D features, seeing how Director has dropped the ball (3D in director currently unsupported on Intel macs)

Enough moaning for now! Hurry up with my Leopard osx 10.5 and Adobe universal apps! Rosetta runs like molasses!

Apple & Ikea

seijin — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 06:37:02 +0000

Marriage made in heaven?

Apple sells it’s products from it’s website. Apple sells products from it’s flagship inner-city stores and selected retailers. Is that really enough?

With 2007 being year of the Mac (on dadako.com at least) and Mac-daddy renaming it’s self from “Apple computer inc” to “Apple Inc” they may need some extra options, outlets, for offloading gadgets to consumers.

Mac’s are sexy in any environment, be it home or office. If it’s home furnishings you are after, buying a Mac or Apple products in a furniture retail establishment may actually make some sense.

Style-wise Apple is similar to MUJI. Apple is not similar to the brash Yellow + Blue IKEA. Apple is similar style wise to the products Ikea sell, at least. MUJI is unbranded, the Japanese word actually means unbranded goods. Apple is brand.

So why Ikea?

In terms of distribution, Ikea is a powerhouse with 237 stores in over 35 countries. They sell low price goods as well as high priced goods. Apple owns a few flagship stores, and also sell low to high price goods. Apple stores are not conducive to the masses though, who tend to buy the majority of goods in donut-ring superstores.

what is in it for Ikea?

Purely for complimenting their own goods. Replace all the ugly cardboard cut-out fake computers, put Apple there instead.

The aesthetics of Apple teamed with the new vision of home entertainment (it’s driving force), and how to get their products to the masses for their next billion in profits (it’s ultimate goal) make selling Apple in non-electronic stores, well, obvious, really.

Think different? -> Sell Apple in Ikea stores. It could just make sense.

Hawken King » ideas

Compatible with iPad logo

CS4 looms; my favourite quotes from "dear adobe"

Photoshop

Dreamweaver

Flash

Illustrator

InDesign

Bridge

top11 missing mail features for iPhone! *update*

11. NEW: cannot forward attachments

10. E-Mail Names

9. Heavy Data

8. No Alert!

7. No Add to Contacts

6. Emoji

5. No Auto Draft (intermittent)

4. Contact Book is Slow

3. No Groups for contacts

2. Apple+C = no

1. Arg the Pain!