My new home away from home.

Got these in the mail today. I know this catalog doesn’t mean much to people outside of our company, but seeing this project all come together so nicely really makes me feel fantastic.

I’m working on a few posts that outline the process we used for designing and producing this catalog. In some regard, I’m writing to solidify what worked and what didn’t work in my own mind. I hope that the series also helps others like myself who decide to design a catalog with very little (if any) previous print experience.

Python Safety is a company I have been working with for just over half a year now.

We upgraded our office space at Python Safety this past week. I’ve got more of a dedicated “studio” now for working on the new 2012 catalog.

And the catalog is shaping up very nicely. Still plenty to do, but if things continue at this rate, we should have a beautiful 80 page catalog ready for print by the end of December.

Pretty exciting for us all. In less than a year, we’ve moved and upgraded our headquarters twice. The company is growing quickly, and having a lot of fun :)

Battlefield, Zelda, Halo, Skyrim, and Uncharted all released within a month of each other.

Someone is out to get me.

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with DICE’s Lead Gamer Tester and Executive Producer that I found really interesting. Awesome to have more insight into user testing outside of the web/application realm.

There was one bit in particular that struck a chord with me:

I don’t know why, but I always feel ashamed about the games I’m involved in making. I can’t even bring myself to start up “Battlefield Bad Company 2,” our last game, because I feel so ashamed. I know it is a great product but still I only see the things we could have done better.

Patrick Bach, DICE Executive Producer

UX, Interaction designers, and others who help plan, execute and analyze user tests are often perfectionists, and also tend to be their own worst critics. It’s true in web design, and apparently it’s also true in game design.

For what it’s worth, Battlefield Bad Company 2 was a ridiculously good game (one of my all time favorites), and Battlefield 3 is looking to raise the bar quite a bit. Just more evidence that investing in user centric design, just like investing in outstanding talent and leadership, is crucial to building great products.

Most normal people I know have at least one sport they try and keep up with. Could be Football, Tennis, or maybe even something like competitive Poker.

Myself? I’m a fan of competitive video games. Starcraft, specifically.

It’s a geeky choice for evening entertainment, but I’m definitely not alone in my programming selection. Over 60,000 people tuned in from all over the world this past weekend to watch a live tournament in Spain called DreamHack. Some events see even more attention than this—and the winners often take home prizes in the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars.

A lot of the individuals who “cast” live video streams use live video streaming service Justin.tv. JTV is great, but I find it a little difficult to navigate my way around the site, or watch video on my tablet. Thankfully, JTV has put together an API that has allowed me to create my own customized stream browser :)

I spent some time last night putting together a basic video browser with the API that tracks some of my favorite streams. I don’t currently have any plans for it, but I’m hosting the app at GamerChannels.com for the time being.

With how much momentum I’ve seen competitive gaming gain in the past 2 years, who knows… I may invest some more time into this project so it will be more useful for others.

Just spent the past 2 hours troubleshooting a problem I was having with the Justin.tv API. Thought I’d save a few headaches for anyone else who runs into this problem and post about it.

I was having no trouble getting the API to do the things I wanted, but the Embed code for streams seemed to be borked.

I kept getting: “Something went wrong: Error #2048″

Did some digging and wasn’t able to find any error code documentation. I couldn’t even get embed codes working directly from channels.

Turns out that for whatever reason, Justin.tv doesn’t like “localhost”. That’s a pretty strange quirk… not sure if it’s intentional or not (haven’t seen any mention of it in the API documentation). I added a new host “test.local” and was immediately able to see the embed codes working.

Guide for setting up custom hosts on Mac →
…and on Windows →

Today, my good friend Michael Caldwell launched his 2012 campaign for the Georgia State House (District 20). I’m happy to once again be a part of his campaign. Here are a few screenshots from the site we launched this morning.

I’m very proud to support Caldwell’s campaign. In 2010, I believe we ran one of the best campaigns in Georgia, and I’m looking forward to once again setting an example of how local campaigns can be operated honestly and transparently.

Had some fun with the Wufoo API while working on this project. Really impressed with how easy it was working with Wufoo and MailChimp together.

Working with Andrew Maier and Carl Smith from nGen works out in Crested Butte, CO this week. Loving the weather and the location out here!

…and the food.

Spent a good chunk of the day working on a nifty filter system for a project I’m assisting nGen Works with. We needed a way to filter entries by multiple key/value pairs.

In other words, if a table has the columns “Name” and “Eye Color”, there needed to be a way to search for both at the same time (ie: “David” and “Brown” would return any entries where the “Name” column contained “David”, and the “Eye Color” column matches “Brown Eyes”.)

Pretty straightforward stuff, but it was my first time building a system like this almost entirely with Javascript. Filters can be applied and deleted instantly, and there is an autoassist feature that prints out all the unique values of searchable columns.

We’ve barely touched the styles on the app, but it’s shaping up nicely.

Quick note: Hopefully it’s clear that this is all just fakesy dummy data!

I’d like to write a post about the code for the system sometime. There is still some work to be done, and it would need some tweaking to be more useful in areas outside the application we’re building.