Games are the next best thing for the music industry!

Tap tap revenge 3 has just been launched for the iPhone. Check their site, or this review.

I think this is a great example of a way find new revenue for the music industry. No doubt that they have taken a heavy hit with illegal downloads on the rise.

The idea with tap tap is that you can buy this game for (almost) free. Only one problem, it hardly has any content (songs). This is not really a problem, because you can download a song for free a week. Because waiting a whole week for a new random song is probably too much for most users, they offer various bundles of songs you can buy for the game!

This is such a great idea: to control the player (the game in this instance) instead of the distribution of music. On top of that you have the possibility to sell the same song mulltiple times (in different games) to the same user.

So f*ck the illegal downloads, let them make your songs populair. Make money by being inventive!

Just found this Wired article about Guitar Hero which is has the same model of course. Instead of embracing this concept the music industry is still complaining:

"The success of these games is good news for the music biz. They're breathing new life into old bands (Weezer, anyone?) and helping popularize new ones. They're even becoming a significant distribution outlet for new releases. So the record labels ought to be ecstatic, right? Nope. They're whining over licensing fees.

"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told analysts last summer. The money Warner receives for the use of its songs is "paltry," he said, and if the gamemakers don't pony up more cash, "we will not license to those games." In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations."

Very weird if you ask me..

Top 10 UX Myths

"Al Gore invented the Internet. Drinking alcohol keeps your body warm. You won’t get pregnant if you stand on your head after … well, you get the idea. Myths are those hard-and-fast rules that often start as a plausible idea or once-off observation that grow and distill into ‘common knowledge’ as they virtually spread. I know I’ve believed a few of these. I’ve also asked my UX expert Twitter friends for their UX Myths – and they have many!
So, let me entertain you with a list I compiled of my favorite ‘User Experience myths’. Then perhaps you, like many UX folks, will have some myths of your own to share …"

Short summary via guuui.com:

- If the Design is a Good One, You Don't Need to Test It
- People Don't Change
- Design to Avoid Clicks
- UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product
- If you Have Great Search, You Don't Need Great Information Architecture
- Can't Decide? Make it a Preference
- Design Always with Implementation in Mind
- People Know What They Like
- People Read
- The Design Has to be Original

Crisis antidote?

Calm-vs-exited

Keep calm or get exited? :)

"
Nowadays, of course, it would be farmed out to an expensive communications agency. Back in the spring of 1939, it was an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace should, heaven forbid, the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel.

This was the third in a series. The first, designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril.

From August 1939, both posters began appearing all over the country, on billboards, in shops, on railway platforms. The third, though, was held back. This one was for the real crisis: invasion. A few may have made their way on to select officials' walls, but the vast majority of the British public never got to see it. This poster enjoined: Keep Calm And Carry On."

Nokia Maemo 5 promotion video

Vond dit demo filmpje errug gaaf! Ff kijken met geluid vol aan. Dit is het nieuwe mobile os van nokia. Moet het s60 platform gaan vervangen geloof ik?

Animatie is erg lekker gedaan, voelt allemaal super futuristisch.

Wat je kan zien in dit filmpje van het os zelf vind ik er ook goed uit zien. Goed gebruik van de beschikbare ruimte en veel gestures om makkelijk te navigeren.

Wat ik enorm komisch vind is dat je de indruk krijgt dat de hand heel hard 'klikt' iedere keer. De grap is dat dit niet voor de duidelijkheid is, maar ook echt moet omdat het een resistive scherm is (werkt met druk ipv geleiding zoals de iphone) waardoor je dus echt je best moet doen om iets aan te klikken :' )

Imageability: a dialogue between the person and the environment

In The Image of the City, on how people understand and wayfind in cities, Kevin Lynch introduces the concept of imageability (how easy it is for a dialogue between the person and the environment to build into a good mental image) [notes], and five basic elements of these images: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks [notes]. The book is brilliant; Lynch introduces a whole vocabulary for those emergent properties of human wiring and social habitation, then applies and explains. It's going to be enormously useful in thinking about how people learn to find their way around websites (and semantic spaces of all kinds), how we relate to space in general, and, more, how that space is collaboratively created and moulded. This is a modest book, self assured but not declarative or over-confident, quiet. A joy to read. (I also have notes on the book design.)

Heb het gevoel dat die vijf elementen ook voor interaction design goed zouden kunnen werken. Hier nog even iets uitgebreider wat de elementen zijn:

Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves.

Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.

Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent, which the observer mentally enters "inside of," and which are recognizable as having some common, identifying character.

Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.

Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external.