Thoughts on Don Norman and Disney

Don Norman said Disney know everyone hates the queues, but it doesn't matter. The memory is still good. I think that's not true. They do their best to provide entertainment in the queues, came up with the fast pass stuff, make sure the queues are shaded. In short make it a much better experience than all other theme parks I've been to.

Maybe that's why the memory is so good - less crud to be ignored?

Happiness research?

Might be worth looking up some happiness research on cooperation. Apparently provokes positive emotions. According to reality is broken, anyway.

Cyber play

Got turned into the linked article on the Green Revolution Brain Dump blog.

Introduction has some useful descriptions of how online text differs from both letter writing and talking.

Pg 56 gives a quick overview of the templates brought to online communications. Also 'lost its physicality' so clues from the form of writing, pressure etc. Not thought of that.

Pg 64 ethics. Looking at comms form in chat would be difficult for ethical reasons.

Chrome OS

Interesting. Sounds like apps will be defined using HTML5, CSS. Not sure what it'll look like offline, so the backend is still going to be server-side code of some description.

Ties in with some of Aral's tweets about what you need to design for mobile (HTML5, CSS3). Sounds like it would be about right.

Course, no reason at all why the front ends of any OS shouldn't be defined in HTML5, rather than the various other markup types. Make the screen render like a browser. Does that move the browser wars to the next level though?!

Love this - what to do?

Post on ruricomp from Russell Davies, http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/09/small-town-computing.html. Love the concept. How to use it?

Also interested by the remark about cities as island states cut off from the land. Pull in the CPULs thing?