Normally, throughout the week, I star a whole bunch of things in Google Reader that I want to go back to when I’m not busy jostling for space on the New York subways or when I’m back at my comfortable desk at home with my giant monitors. Unfortunately for me, I star articles about 500% faster than I can read them, so every once in a while, I have to give myself a weekend dedicated to purging that star list so that I don’t forget about things that I really really did want to read (Mr. Siracusa doesn’t write as often as most people, but he makes up for it).
So it’s time for the first-ever Links O’Clock here; most of these articles go back at least two months or more, but hey, maybe you missed it the first time the Internet collectively decided they were worth reading. I don’t think Links O’Clock will normally be this long, but we’ll see.
Also gonna try giving Google Reader’s “Shared items” feature a ride—I keep hitting it by accident in my main newsreader, but now I’ll hit it on purpose (link).
It seems fitting that my desire to purge my starred article backlog leads me to this article likening obesity to information overload:
http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/no_more_feeds_please_how_abundant_information_is_making_us_fat_14248.asp
I once tried using a 3D designing app once. I flung the mouse out the window in disgust after several hours of hair-pulling madness. This would have been a far more entertaining experience:
http://www.ilovesketch.com/
For those of you trying to skin your latest GUI, you might be tearing your hair out trying to pick perfect colors. Don’t go bald—just use this:
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Matthias Shapiro talking about effective visualization with some very concrete and awesome examples—it’s an Ignite Show video, so it’s five minutes long, which is about the longest video I’ll watch before I start wishing I had my computer hooked up to my TV:
http://www.designerwpf.com/2009/09/16/now-playing-on-the-ignite-show/
Another interesting visualization by Ben Fry—living in this country is often defined by driving, so I shouldn’t be so surprised that roads alone do such a remarkable job punctuating the landscape:
http://benfry.com/allstreets/index.html
I’m always a sucker for a good how’d-they-done-it story: The making of the NPR News iPhone App, complete with mockups, requirements identification and gathering—all that good process-y stuff:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2009/08/the_making_of_the_npr_news_iph.html
If you’re working on building iPhone applications and you want to generate super-realistic pictures of what your app will look like before you even install the Developer Tools:
http://mockapp.com/
Another UI mocking tool for iPhone apps, but you’ll have to write a little code
http://giveabrief.com/
—DKT