Archive for June 11th, 2008
iPhone 3G gets more and more ridiculous publicity. This is a classic. Google co-founder decides to go into space on a Russian rocket. Big story beginning: TV viewers do not know to switch from analog to digital. HP new machine takes on MacBook Air. Some guy take 13,000 cell processors with 7000 dual core AMD chips and makes machine to do a quadrillion calculation a second. YouTube scandal over punks doing YouTube video. Carl Icahn won’t go away. My thoughts on Microsoft Office. Employees said they would take a pay cut to work at home.
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Capcom is releasing a new version of the classic Street Fighter game, called Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.. I am assuming that HD stands for High Def.
This initial picture looks good though
Capcom has also indicated that a beta test of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is coming very soon.
On June 25, anyone who has purchased Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 from xbox Live Arcade will be able to download the beta. Capcom announced the details of the beta earlier this year: It will feature the characters Ryu and Ken fighting on a single stage and run for eight weeks. Players, Capcom says, will be able to alert them to bugs and make suggestions on game play.
PlayStation 3 owners won’t be able to participate in the beta, but the xbox 360 crowd’s testing will affect both the PS3 and xbox versions of the game.
From someone who is old enough to have dumped many many quarters into the Street Fighter video game at the 7-Eleven up the street from my house, I am pretty excited for the release of this game. However, I am not sure why they are attaching beta testing privileges to the Wolf of the Battlefeild game, other then to try and promote it. It would make more sense to me to have it be attached to people who have purchased and downloaded the OG Street Fighter game on the xbox Live Arcade… Like me.. Hint Hint.. c’mon Capcom, I know your reading this, show some love to your long time fans.
This week at WWDC, developers were seeded the Mac OS X Snow Leopard and [ LogicielMac ] produced a screen shot of the system requirements. The requirements list the following:
- An Intel Processor
- An internal, external, or shared DVD drive
- At least 512 MB of RAM
- Display connected to an Apple-supplied video card
- 9GB of disk space, or 12GB for developer tools
The system requirements are still subject to change since this is still pre-release development version only, but it does fuel the already prevelant rumors that Apple will be ditching the PowerPC.
The title speaks for itself: I’m a designer, not a coder. Then why is it that every job posting I read requires that their art director/creative director is able to write and edit their own HTML, PHP, XML, and of course “action scripting and SEO a plus!” Excuse me? Correct me if I’m wrong here, and know you will, why on earth would you want your senior level designer worrying, nay, writing their own code?
In my last post, I did admit that it is each designer’s responsibility in this web design world we live in, that he or she can at least understand code and its implications to their design: “Being a well-rounded designer does not consist solely of you mastering photo selection and grids, being able to discuss your design with a coder and how they both interact is paramount.” However, that does not mean the ability to write/edit code while the front or back end coder is say, taking a 2 hour smoke break again, or, on their fifth hour of World of Warcraft with their “friends” from Vietnam. Or, not hiring a coder at all. It simply means you can have an intelligent conversation about the code needed to assemble your design, and somewhere down the line, the conversation forks, the designer’s head starts to hurt and the coder returns to his lair.
Personally, I am taking things to the next level professionally. I have indeed returned to school, after a mere fourteen year hiatus, and obtaining my Web Development certificate at a local university. HTML, XML, PHP and MySQL will be, hopefully, pounded into my brain, thusly, giving me that proverbial leg up on the competition. This does not mean I will be hired as a coder, it simply means I have a background and, with all luck, a very good understand of code, what it is capable of doing, and hopefully, writing my own code when and where needed. This does not negate the idea of having an in house coder, never has, never will.
Of course you’ll say, “But Andrew, I’m a designer and I am fully versed in all aspects of code AND designing. What do you have to say to that?” I say bugger off! You are either one of two people: 1. Graduated within the past five years with a web/design degree and your schedule was filled with coding/web classes because that is the state of design schools these days, or 2. You are a freak of nature and must be shot.
Okay, I might have been a bit harsh back there, let me explain. “Back in my day…” (I’m balling my fists up now and shaking them violently at you) there was print. Plain and simple. Brochures, posters, logos and good old mailers. AOL was barely alive and Prodigy was a gleam in someone’s forward thinking eye. Print people taught themselves, in most cases, what they needed to know about this new Information Highway, using their print skills and diving into web jobs they new hardly anything about. I was one of them. In fact, my first web job was with our one and only Stephen Johnson. Hi Stephen. As scary as it might sound, for those of you who know him, he was my first introduction to the world of web design. I still cry at night.
I digress…
I have met and worked with many brilliant coders and amazing designers, however, I have rarely met the brood of the two, where in one person was fluent in both mediums. It has happened, but you want your coders to code and your designers to design. Simple as that. If you have cross-over, count your lucky stars and get back to work.
Back to Warcraft…. I mean work.