“Design & Typography” articles cover a topic near and dear to my heart: Making things look pretty.

Once I have time to myself again, I’d like to make a video game.

Not a huge production, just a little easy Flash game, the sort of thing that everybody tosses together at one point or another.

One thing I find about a lot of Flash games, though, is that they seem stilted and awkward. The graphics always have that ‘made-in-flash’ sheen to them, and the animation has that ‘awkward automatically-tweened’ feel to them.

So, I thought I’d experiment with ‘real animation’, you know, the old fashioned kind where you draw every frame. In my case, I drew every frame… in Illustrator. So that made things a little easier.

First things first – a lot of frames need to be drawn, and consistency – an area where I’m notably pretty weak – is key. However, I’m thinking that, for more detailed work, so long as the hips are covered by whatever the protagonist is wearing and the feet can be visually separated from the legs (with boots, maybe) – the whole process can be made much faster with good ol’ fashioned copying and pasting. With a little bit of programming ingenuity, I could probably mount ’static’ props (hat, shirt) on to a base model (like this one), or arms (definitely need arms)…

Well, for the first animation, I had the whole thing animated ‘on twos’ – every second frame – and it looked like this. Jumpy, right? Things smoothed considerably when I filled in all of the inbetweens.

While time-consuming, it was also pretty fun. I’m going to be fiddling with this some more.

So, Phil’s project at SAP has finally launched!

When it was in beta, it was called “12sprints”, which sounds like sort of a post-37signals Web 2.0 name for collaboration software that doesn’t really do anything. If I were a customer, I’d just go with 37signals. Why? They’re 25 higher!. Ba dum-tsh.

It’s critical, when naming your product, not to put yourself down like that. Phil’s team should have called it “74sprints” – that way, if somebody asked them about the name, they could at least claim to be twice as good as 37signals.

So, they had to drop “12sprints” and go with the new name, “SAP StreamWork”. We’ve gone from a meaningless Web 2.0 name to a meaningless Enterprise name. SAP StreamWork. Well, I was just about to work on some streams, perhaps this software will be useful to me.

Let’s look at the front page, shall we?

Now let’s imagine that I have a big red marker, and I can draw RIGHT ON THAT WEBSITE. What will I draw? Well, this.

I want to know about this product. Let’s extract every last juicy tidbit of information from the front page.

Looking at the whole page, the only words that seem to describe what the software actually does are “Share documents and data”, and “Tools for brainstorming and decision-making”. Mmm. It’s collaboration software. Collaboration software? Never heard of it – they do, after all, claim to be “the first and only solution“.

If we want to learn more, we’re going to have to go on the tour that they’ve provided. It’s on YouTube, how bad could it be?

It’s a … uh… Powerpoint Presentation. Without any voice. There’s a guitar, though. GUITAR TUNES. We start with sweeping generalities and move to confusing, directionless screenshots.

Okay, I still have no idea what the hell it is that this software does. On to the features page!

I’ve taken the liberty of cutting out all of the business mumbo jumbo from this page, to make it a little bit more readable.

The first feature that they mention on the page is “notifications, activity streams, and action items”. Oh, I’m sold. Just this morning, over an Egg McMuffin and a orange juice, I was saying to my friends, “do you know what my day is missing?”.

“What?”, they asked.

“Activity streams.”

“Oh, man, you have got to get some activity streams, ” my friends told me. “They are awesome. But at least you have action items, right? ”

Shit. I am a dude without Action Items or Activity Streams. Do you see the trouble that I am in? Already, this software is right for me.

But it would be prudent to explore further. Next, we have integration with a variety of products that business people know how to use and are unwilling to part with. “Outlook Integration!”, they will go. “I use Outlook all the time! Once I get the IT guys to configure it properly, it’s pretty much the only software I know how to use, except for that Internet thing!” Okay, bam, bonus here.

The next point is that “all discussions, information, feedback, methods, and decisions are saved and can be shared or re-used.” Okay, so I’m still not sure what it is that the product does, but I know that when it does it, it will do it with Action Streams, it will integrate with my Outlook, and it’ll Save a Copy. Somehow, this combination of features will allow me to drive to a resolution. Excellent.

Okay, I’m not getting anywhere with this. On to the tutorials. Maybe they will tell me what this product does.

Creating an Activity. Oh, maybe we will find out what an Activity is! Apparetly, an Activity aids in the process of decision-making by:

• Eliminating long, hard-to-follow e-mail threads. You know, like Gmail. Or properly configured mailing lists. Or Google Groups. Or IRC.
• Providing a workspace conducive to collaborative decision making. Have you tried open spaces and whiteboards?
• Giving the user powerful tools that guide the decision-making process. You mean, like, common sense?

And then, what happens afterwards is some sort of … thing. The part of my brain that says ‘couldn’t this all just be resolved with a discussion?’ would likely shut down if I watched any more of these tutorials.

Okay, I give up, I can’t figure out what the heck this product is good for. Heck, I could probably build better collaboration software myself – it’d need to be easy, flexible, well-understood by developers, synchronous to allow for discussion, group-inclusive, and keep a record of past discussions. You know, like IRC with a decent logger.

Okay, so, Potater was fun to build (a lot of fun to build, really), sort of fun to run for a month, but it’s not really picking up any sort of audience, it’s a lot of work, and it’s actually decreasing my overall enjoyment of Google Reader.

Kerry pointed out that – why follow my potater if everything shows up in my Google Shared items, anyways? Well, uh, yeah.

Really, Potater was more “Curtis having fun with web design and tooling about in Python” then it was an idea for a long-lasting project.

So, I think that’s about it for the Potater Top 10.

If you’re not already following my Google Shared items – perhaps you don’t even use Google Reader (shame on you) – you can get exactly the same content that you got from Potater, witty asides and all, from here. (Okay, it’s less easy to remember than ‘potater’, but… )

I still love the domain name ‘potater’ – it’s memorable and fun. I wonder what I’ll put there, next…

So, yesterday, I bought 1 pound of Irish Breakfast tea from a local tea merchant.

I brought it home, filled my tea jars, and thought ‘whoa, that’s a lot of friggin’ tea. It had better be good’

Then, this morning, I made myself a cup.

Suspiciously.

Put some milk and sugar in. I ran out of loose-leaf Irish Breakfast months ago, it’s been nothin’ but tea bags for me…

Pressed the cup to my lips, gingerly took a sip, and … well… this happened.