Restaurant menus on the web

If any one out there with a restaurant is listening...

Making me click to view different categories annoys me unless you have different menus at different times. If you have completely different menus for breakfast and lunch/dinner, then splitting them that way on the web is useful. Making me click to view appetizers and then go back and click again to view one subset of entrées and then go back and click again to view a second subset of entrées...this isn’t useful. I want to be able to see all your dishes by merely scrolling instead of clicking.

(You may have read something against scrolling web pages. That was an over-reaction. Scrolling is fine when appropriate. Not scrolling when scrolling is appropriate is inappropriate.)

When should I have to click to get more information? To get the kind of specifics that I can’t get from a paper menu. e.g. a complete list of ingredients and nutritional information. The real power of the web is its ability for you to deliver this kind of in-depth information to your customers. You really should take advantage of it.

And pictures. You ought to have a picture of every dish. Ideally with thumbnails on the main menu page and a full-size image when I click for more information about a particular dish.

The simple argument against DRM

I don’t know that I’ve ever put it this way before, but it seemed so simple when I did.

Except perhaps in some very specific circumstances, I have not been convinced that anti-piracy measures ever increase sales, much less pay for themselves.

Piracy doesn’t matter; sales do. Any anti-piracy measure has to prove that it is going to generate additional sales to more than make up for its costs.

Convergence

This is Android TV

Android TV may sound like a semantic difference — after all, Google TV was based on Android — but it’s something very different. Android TV is no longer a crazy attempt to turn your TV into a bigger, more powerful smartphone. "Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform," writes Google. "It’s all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction." It will be "cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast."

The thing about convergence was that people wanted the technologies in the background to converge, but they never wanted the experiences to converge. Watching video is ideally done on a TV; web surfing is ideally done on a tablet, and writing a novel is ideally done on a PC. That’s not to say that we shouldn't be able to do all three tasks on all three platforms, but we don’t want, e.g., the full PC experience on our TVs.

Flappy bird

Yesterday’s post about Threes and 2048 reminded me of some things I wanted to say about Flappy Bird. Maybe Flappy Bird is a horrible game that doesn’t deserve the popularity it garnered, but I do think there are a lot of lessons game developers could take from it.

A couple I can think of: It starts up fast. You get to playing fast. There is as little as possible between launching the game and playing the game. There is no point at which the gameplay that the player has been enjoying changes to gameplay they may not enjoy.

There is also an idea out there that players today will not accept a difficult game. Flappy Bird soundly refutes that. While I greatly enjoy some games that are basically “no lose”, it is satisfying to have games that are significant challenges too.