Very true. On that topic,
"...these communications consist of whistles, not words."
Not to suggest that they're actually speaking a language, but a language consisting of whistles could still easily contain words. It would just have a different set of sounds.
I think the double-PIN makes sense in the ATM case (because you don't want to alert the robber to your scheme), but in the phone case I think multiple PINs is far too complex.
Why not just have e.g. "swipe left to unlock to guest mode" or something similar? Then you can still have it be locked, but with the same old PIN; it will be far more attractive to users.
Just playing the devil's advocate here, but would you not say Google's search homepage has a lot of "wasted space"?
I don't think one can always make such a quick judgment about whether space is a bad thing or not.
I would not say that, no. Google's search homepage does not have a primary function that is similar in any way to Gmail's primary function.
The Gmail homepage, of course, should be showing you as much data as possible; as many emails as possible with enough contextual data and UI to read/delete/sort them.
Google's search homepage isn't an information-dense medium.
It's a fucking search dialog. It should be clear and simple.
Now: the search results pages should be informationally dense. And for the most part are (though I'm finding recent changes to be net negative).
Note that search engines which have gone in the direction of packing a shit-ton of distractions onto their homepages in a desperate move to chase "monitization" lose out -- look at Yahoo and Aol, virtually clones of one another at this point, as well as synonyms for Internet failure.
An Advent was a three tube projection system. It had a triangular arrangement of the CRT's, one red, one green, one blue. You had to focus and align them yourself, but with a good screen you could get a pretty good looking 60" television. It required a dark room.
Since it sat in the middle of the floor, it was subject to kids bumping into it (in my grandparents home anyhow) and also then subject to grandfathers shouting.
He later replaced it with a front projection set that bounced the CRT projectors off a mirror onto a screen. It was a beast.
It says at the bottom: "“Advent” was not a religious sanctuary, it was the demo room with the $3,000 projection TV[1] that we used for demos to Important People."
I think his point is that you'll still have fun playing the main story, but it'll take far less time away from you, and still leave you with the satisfaction of completion.
If you go for finishing side-quests, you may not feel satisfied until you've finished them all. That can take considerably longer and be considerably less worth-while than the main game. (e.g. saving princess and defeating nemesis vs. collect all 500 random blue hidden items. Both fun, one takes far less time, and is more "worthwhile".)
Fair point, although it depends on the game; I enjoyed the sidequests in Oblivion more than the main quest and would submit that most players would be really missing out if they didn't finish them.
Of course, that's quite a different thing to timesinks like "find all 400 hidden widgets" which can get pretty tedious...
Assassin's Creed II has some good examples of worthwhile and non-worthwhile side quests. I cannot imagine completing the game to one hundred percent, but half of that is activity which reveals more about the story (tombs, "truth" encodings), while the other half is just numbers (collecting feathers, weapons, and paintings, although I admit to having taken interest in the last one having been an art history minor).
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