Technicat

Topic

Design

A collection of 29 issues

Hyper Concepts

As part of my licensing arrangement for HyperBowl, I got my hands on some of the old concept videos for followup games. Some are missing, including some possible new HyperBowl lanes like a toy lane, bowling on ice with penguins, and a downhill motocross lane (my favorite - I added

Mac Dim Sum

I'm finally reaping the rewards of Flutter's multi-platform support by publishing a Mac version of Talk Dim Sum on itch.io, using the same codebase as the Android version, but with Cupertino widgets (sometimes "cross-platform" means duplicating a lot of code). The iOS version was already on the Mac App

To Program Is Human

When I worked in Silicon Valley, it seemed everyone wanted the title Software Architect. It’s a sexy-sounding title, maybe because in the movies all the cool people work in advertising or architecture firms, but in the real building world, while the architects get the glory, someone has to put

Creativity, Inc.

When I saw Creativity, Inc. on the bookshelf, I thought it was just another business book on creativity — in other words, dumb. But this book is by Ed Catmull on how Pixar is run. I mean, this is the guy who invented texture mapping. The early part of the book

Taco Stand

Las Vegas Chinatown is known locally as Spring Mountain Road. Chinatown is really more of a marketing term. It's a stretch, a long stretch, of continguous strip malls featuring Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Filipino,Vietnamese, European, Middle Eastern, Argentinian and...Mexican food. One that you might miss because it's

Cedar City

The Las Vegas summer heat, nation-leading covid numbers, and my neighbor's subwoofer impelled me to take a road trip into Utah. It's my first time in that state, so I experienced a bit of culture shock after I crossed the state border into St. George and saw the speed limit

Street Proposal

Las Vegas is known as a place to get married (especially if you want an Elvis presiding), but this street art proposal created by Tony Castillo for the owners of Bungalow Coffee is my favorite example.

History of Technicat

I have fantasized about selling a domain name for a million bucks and moving to Hawaii, but this inquiry looks pretty spammy. A "Hey there" salutation is always a warning sign, but the clincher is the "doesn't seem tocurrently be in use." I've been using technicat.com for over twenty

Invisible City

I love books that discuss real, functional (and non-functional) design, such as the books by Don Norman (the title The Design of Everyday Things speaks for itself), Christopher Alexander (whose A Pattern Language inspired, for better or worse, the current obsession with design patterns in software), and Henry Petroski (To

Color Theory Coasters

Anyone working in front end development, whether it's websites or apps, should know a bit of color theory, so when I see these coasters at the Writer's Block, I had to snap them up. They're pretty, but really, I need RGB values.