Hi readers (both of you!) -- Here’s a quick post that I hope to expand on soon: the Netflix Player from Roku has shipped and is getting great reviews. Since January 2005 I was doing user interface design, UI prototyping, and user testing on this project, and I’m really happy to see it launch and get such great feedback.

The Netflix player is a small box that you hook up to your TV, and it wirelessly streams movies so you can watch instantly. If you’ve got a Netflix account already, it’s a $100 one time fee, and then you get unlimited hours of movie playback -- all included in your monthly Netflix subscription.

I want to write more about the development, because we had one of the most progressive UI design processes I’ve ever seen for a consumer electronics product, and I think it shows when you use it.

Here’s a video of it in action (this guy has an incredibly slow net connection, but he video gives a good cross-section of the UI):

The press and public are loving it. Here’s what’s being said about it:

“this one-time $100 expenditure is practically a no-brainer” David Pogue, The New York Times

“the most impressive product we’ve seen attached to a TV this decade” Richard Doherty, Envisioneering Group

“a streaming video box friendly enough to rival the Apple TV -- or to give your folks” Ryan Block, Engadget

“I’ve been using the Player … and I have to say, I honestly love it to death… If you’re a Netflix fan, put one on your wish list immediately.” Christopher Null, Yahoo! Tech

“it is better than any other set-top box I’ve ever seen” Saul Hansell, The New York Times

“This is one of the most elegant and surprisingly usable … devices I’ve seen in a long time.” John Biggs, CrunchGear

“Worth buying if you’re a Netflix customer (or thinking of becoming a Netflix customer)” Brian Lam, Gizmodo

“the Roku-Netflix combination [is] a far better deal than its competitors.” Peter Svensson, Associated Press

“it’s a no-brainer for the 8 million-plus Netflix customers out there. If you’re not one, this is an added reason to become one.” Peter Svensson, Associated Press

“the Netflix Player by Roku is a true gem.” John Biggs, CrunchGear

Congrats to Tim, Donna, Marcello, William, and the rest of the Netflix and Roku crew! I had a blast working on it, and I’m really proud of the results.

When you’re a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it’s messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.

The end result is this little web app I wrote. It’s got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.

Here’s a brief rundown of how it works:

+ The canvas is made up of “passes” of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it’s own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you’ll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the “Copy to clipboard” button or “copy inverted”, which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There’s no way to save settings yet.

you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy

According to popular technology news blog GigaOM, the most popular MMO behind World Of Warcraft is the shockwave-enabled Habbo Hotel. I know that for a long time now Director has played second fiddle to Flash, but this shows that Adobe Director is still a great choice for games.

The Java-powered dungeon game Runescape comes in at number 3, the Flash-enabled Club Penguin comes in at #4, and PR-savvy SecondLife ranks at a lowly 10. It’s quite an eye-opening list for those who believe MMOs are all swords and dragons *. Check out the entire list over at GigaOM.com

Other Director news: Director Survey

There’s a semi-official Director survey that’s been put together by Charles Parcell. The results will be collected and given to Adobe, who is currently hard at work on Director 11.

Take the Director Survey now

*: If you’re got the hardcore-mindset that a game can’t be an MMO without 3d dragons and swords, check out the excellent free Shockwave game Sherwood Dungeon, and my interview with it’s creator.

... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.

Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.

So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:

Read the rest of this entry

... do what they’re telling you. This came up at GDC when talking to the Mawsoft guys so I thought I’d blog about it here.

Community is big these days. You’ll hear lots of designers tell you that it’s important to build a strong community and listen to them, because they are your core users. And I agree with that.

But in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things. It is rare that a user outright lies for no reason. There is almost always a root cause for what your users are saying. The trick is to find that root issue to truly get what the user is telling you. And it is often a bit different than what their words are saying. Read the rest of this entry

In a GDC presentation on Spore’s editors (called Spore’s Magic Crayons), there were some interesting bits mentioned:

• Everything that people make will automatically be uploaded to the Spore servers.
  
• Stuff on the Spore servers will be automatically downloaded to Spore players and will populate the gamer’s universe.
  
• The editors are designed to create great looking things quickly, and without needing artistic talent.
  
• The editors are powerful enough to make realistic looking Navy battleships and the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

The battleship and Enterprise were shown during the presentation of examples of things that could be built with the editor. All those points kind of have me worried. I love the idea that I can go to other planets and interact with stuff that other people have built, but if I run into the Starship Enterprise I know I am going to be sucked out of the game and won’t want to play it. Read the rest of this entry

While I’m going to be at GDC all next week to soak up as much as I can, I’ll actually be regurgitating exaggerations humbly discussing my misadventures in game development in a panel session about the challenges indie game developers face (although, most of the time I’ll be sitting there silent). It’s titled Challenges for New Game Developers and is a panel discussion including the following superstars of the indie game scene:

• Kalle Wik—President and CTO, Skunk Studios
  
• Patrick Wylie—Vice President, Big Fish Studios
  
• Peter Glover—VP, New Business and Technology, Atom Entertainment
  
• Ritesh Banglani—Product Manager, Director and Shockwave, Adobe Systems

Plus me. It’s on Thursday March 8, from 4:00pm — 5:00pm in room 3004, West Hall

Hope to see you there.

Wired News contributor Clive Thompson has an article on some top Indie Games of 2007, although I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be “so far in 2007” or if the games are actually from 2006. He ranking based on ‘IGF worthy’ gameplay, meaning more of a focus on innovation and risk taking rather than overall polish -- you won’t find Quake clones or casual games here. Most of the games I had not heard of, so I thought I’d link to the article. Here’s a snip:

The good news? The world of indie games is booming -- supercharged by a growing number of schools that teach game design, cheaper game-design tools and the emergence of festivals devoted to indie gaming. Last year, I wrote a column describing some of my favorite right-brained games that were freely available online. I’ve decided to make this an annual tradition, so here’s round two: This year’s sampling, by no means comprehensive, of the latest oddball gameplay.

None of them are perfect, but all of them do at least one thing amazingly well in a new way.

He’s got some interesting game articles, including the myth of the 40-hour gamer (which mirrors some of the thoughts Will Wright was expounding on in the Spore article) and a great piece on episodic gaming.

Check out his top Indie Games article and try the games he links to.

On Sunday I woke up at 7:45 to get a Wii. My plan was to head over to Best Buy (which opens at 11:00) because they advertised having at least twenty in stock. On the drive over I decided to stop in and see if Target had any in stock because they open at 8:00. When I pulled into the parking lot, I was pretty shocked to see there was a huge line. They had eighty Wiis, and gave out vouchers to eighty people, I was told.

I figured if Target had eighty, then Best Buy must have hundreds. I was wrong. When I got there, there was one person in line, but there were signs saying they had already handed out vouchers for their twenty units. Defeated, I headed on home, but stopped by Gamestop just in case. I saw a small group of people outside, and decided to park the car and head on over. Read the rest of this entry

There is a new blog carnival about game development that has been launched by Juuso over at gameproducer.net. What’s it called? Why it’s appropriately called the Carnival of Game Production, and there’s a good variety of articles in it, including one from me.

One of my favorite articles in this edition is the 10 reasons why you’ll never finish your game. Here’s a snippet:

Blogs – Writing them or reading them. Sure they are fun, interesting and quirky. But you will learn a lot more by experimenting with a tool or writing some code then you could reading about it in a blog.

And with that, it’s back to work for me, but have fun reading the Carnival of Game Production!