On April 11, 2018, our team at Tages-Anzeiger received the prestigious Henri Nannen Award for our multimedia story «Into the Deep».
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Apple has announced Apple Pay in Switzerland and PostFinance has decided to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s how things work out, after all: if you just put your head into the sand long enough, things will go away on their own.
Instead, they want to push people to use Twint, their own mobile payment solution. That’s fine. Why not.
I have the app installed on my phone. I have everything set up. I have tried to use it four times so far. Here’s what’s happened.
They promised us the future, but it’s just not here yet.
All these “connected” devices fail all around me.
It’s a luxury problem, for sure – but still I get the feeling that we have been shortchanged.
A few weeks ago I received an invitation to try and use Refind, a new startup that tries to (re-)invent social bookmarking. By tapping into your social network, it is supposed to surface relevant information.
If that sounds a lot like Delicious, then … well, it sounds a lot like Delicious.
I have used Delicious for several years, and it worked pretty well - before it got sold to Yahoo, which pretty much forgot about it almost before the ink dried on the contract, and then resold to another company, and afterwards to another company, which is now busy adding more and more ads into the site.
I consider it sheer luck that I haven’t lost my collection of bookmarks so far, and I’m constantly on the lookout for an alternative. Refind looked like a good alternative, but there were a few points that did not make it work for me at first.
The profession one chooses is hardly an accident, but influenced by a large part by people that you’ve been around during your childhood and your teenage years.
In my case as a game designer, my grandad has no small part in it.
You see, he taught me a lot of things.
The VR Experience Sherlock Holmes: The Wagner Ritual by Ateo has been finished, polished and published to the Gear VR Store. If you’d like to see the future of entertainment, then you should definitely take your Samsung Gear VR and check out this interactive VR experience.
For a long time, (as in: almost 10 years, since its first inception as xeophin.tapestry) this blog has allowed comments to be posted – after all, that was what blogging was all about.
After I updated the design of the website this spring, comments haven’t been shown anymore. Originally, this was because I was not happy how they were looking and needed some additional theme adaptions.
It’s April Fools’ day, and as is customary, Guild Wars 2 used the occasion to play a few pranks on their players.
It was … enlightening, if you forgive me the pun.
Not because all player characters had the arms outstretched, donned pilot caps and made “Vroooom, vrooom” noises when walking around.1
It was the completely desaturated, sepia-tinted environment. It gave me literal headaches.
It’s funny how I read article after article (the last one in German) about Soylent and every one of them goes into full-blown panic mode in the second half: OMG, it’s going to destroy all our food, we’re going to be forced to drink this, this isn’t fun, what’s with the cultural heritage of preparing and eating food – alone and in a social setting?
Or: How to Rediscover a Classic without Even Playing It
Sometimes, you need to see the cheap knockoff to appreciate the original.
I picked up Magrunner: Dark Pulse quite by accident. I liked the picture of the main protagonist on the promo images. The problem is of course that the game is played in first person perspective so you never see the protagonist in the first place. Pity really.
In Magrunner, you have a gun. You can fire at things (mostly cubes) and charge them magnetically. They will then attract or repel each other. Use these contraptions to solve puzzles. Does it sound familiar? Of course it does. It is a Portal clone. And, as I can say after playing three quarters of the game, not the very best. You can watch me play the game here. Or read my review of it. Warning: slight spoilers ahead.