On CSS Menu Hacks

I've always wanted to emulate Apple's navigation bar. I've seen other similar navigation's that changed the background image on mouse hover. But this navigation bar went one further and has another special state for on mouse click that draws an outline on the button. So I whipped out my Firebug and dug into how this sucka worked.

It turns out to not be tedious and slow javascript operation, but a rather clever CSS hack. Instead of messing with the DOM whenever there's a mouse event, the clever solution is to selectively shift the background image around until the correct 'image state' is in view. In the image above, when a mouse hovers over a button, we shift the image up a row. To prevent all the buttons from being in a hover state, just have each button keeps a reference to it's own shifted background image. For a good clean tutorial, check out ghettocooler.

On OLPC

I haven't been following the OLPC project very closely, but I ran across a NY Times article on it today. This shows a few things. For starters, I still hate David Pogue because he dumbs down technology too much for my tastes. Fortunately, the fact that it's him writing on a paper whose tagline is "All the news that's fit to print" means that the project is both alive and receiving a new fresh jolt of interest.

I'm a huge fan of the machine and it's guiding design principles. It's engineering and open source at it's best. The laptop needs to have a long lasting battery, be built of cheap components, survive the harsh environments of underdeveloped countries and the grubby fingers of children. And as if each of these alone weren't lofty enough goals, the device has to be FUN enough to use. It's freaking amazing this can be done.

Not only is it an amazing feat of hardware, but they've also made sure the software doesn't waste it. The interface is thought up from the ground up, and focused for it's audience. The software is open and allows children to poke around in the source. That means that future developments are also open!

On Using Games to Transform Behavior

Today's Art23ac lecture doubled as a CITRIS presentation. I'm not sure what the topic of the talk was supposed to be, but it started off with a vague description of 'service' and 'co-production' that I didn't really buy .

There were two key concepts that stood out from the talk. One was how an image 'performs' for us rather than simply encoding information. Prof. Niemeyer started with an image with flat text data from a weather station for an example of an image with lots of data, but one with a performance that was boring. Then we moved to a line graph of weather data over a time axis. This we could relate to and understand as a trend of global warming. Then there were a series of colored maps and globes, each more eye-catching, but with less data information. The final picture was a cover of 'Gears of War' and a YouTube trailer with flames and fallout in the background. The images that caught my attention and evoked thoughts of heat and evil were the later ones, but really the earlier images were the ones that actually encoded the most information. The warning is to carefully tradeoff between raw dramatic performance and useful information.

The other big concept I really liked is what games can do to transform a person's consciousness. When I walked into the room, I saw a person playing a game with a balance board that looked like a shrunken DDR mat. The board controls a paddle in the center of the screen which can be used to deflect colored balls into correspondingly colored hoops as the hoops revolved around the board. After the player made a few successful shots, the game got harder by making the radius of the circle of hoops smaller, and changing the speed of revolution. Then it would take a while for the player to adjust and make finer grained movements to control the paddle. Besides having an incredibly novel interface, I was amazed by how this system is used by physical therapists for injuries and old people to improve balance. In fact, all the games he later demonstrated had a message and was meant to change the player in some way. One of them wanted to focus on pollution, another on global warming. They all had interesting interfaces and were all intrinsically fun and addictive. The other really cool interface was one that required 3 players to control forward/backward, lateral movement, and altitude respectively. The way a player increased or decreased their control was by making sound into a mic. They'd navigate through a 3d world of some part of human anatomy. There were games for trauma, games for memory loss, and other concepts that were helpful to society.

I thought the talk was great. It gave a good overview of how one can control and manipulate a person's thinking in a indirect way. By using various media combined with an interface that makes the player interact and become part of the game, these games encouraged the player to take a part of that game back with them into their daily lives.

Check out his bio page for links to the games he's collaborated on