Photoshop has been around for 20 years now, and I found a really awesome timeline image showing the development of Photoshop over time, which key features were added in which versions, as well as a visual evolution of the Photoshop toolbox. Check it out!

Hey, neat! I was featured on a list of 100+ Resources for Video Game Professionals.

This looks to be a pretty solid list full of useful sites and really good people. I’m pretty flattered to be included in a list full of this much awesome!

I’ve been invited to run a panel and speak at Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg, Germany Feb 10-12! The subject is managing external teams and outsourcing, and I’ve got some stellar panelists lined up to discuss it all with.

If you’re a game developer and you deal with art production and outsourcing, come on by and check us out! If you can’t make it, drop me a line and we can meet for beers somewhere after. :)

Germany, here I come!

Hello, world! I recent found a Firefox extension that’s helped me enormously in sorting out my tabs and keeping track of my most important ones. I would like to introduce you to App Tabs.

In a nutshell, this lets you turn a tab into a smaller, space-saving semi-permanent tab for tabs you always have open. See this:

For example, I always have Gmail, Google Voice and Google Calendar open. Ordinarily they take up a lot of real estate on my tab bar. I turned them into App Tabs with a simple right-click, and now they’re permanent fixtures on my tab bar without cluttering up the other tabs I have open.

It sounds like a pretty small feature, but it’s improved my Firefox experience dramatically. I’d suggest giving it a shot if you keep certain tabs open all the time and are sick of accidentally closing them. :)

Have fun!

They appear to be recruiters creating fake Facebook profiles posing as attractive, single women interested in men, and adding people from the game industry. The best guess so far is that they’re mining game developers’ profiles for information to take advantage of for the purposes of selling to game companies and for recruiting.

Myself and MANY other game developers (50+) have been approached by them. We’ve asked who they are and what they want and they don’t respond, and they’re adding absolutely ridiculous amounts of people all at once. They don’t show up on Google or MobyGames, no one I know has any idea who they are, and their only Facebook activity is adding game industry people I know to their friends list. VERY VERY suspicious.

Defriend them on Facebook and spread the word. This type of behavior shall not stand.

I am again pimping more indie game dev friends! Go check out Tile Poker for the iPhone, a clever, pretty and absurdly addictive game from Quiet Mime Studios. Only $1.99, less than coffee. Go support hard-working, worthy indie game developers! Here’s an iTunes link to download:

This is awesome. TweetDeck, my favorite Twitter client, now added support for LinkedIn, my favorite business development networking tool! Now you can follow your connections’ activity feeds in realtime. Every time someone joins a company, updates their profile, answers a question, updates their status, etc, Tweetdeck updates to reflect the change and it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on day by day. I’ve actually spotted many layoffs and studio closures first through LinkedIn based on the type of activity that happens immediately before and after.

I’ll explain what TweetDeck is. It’s a full-featured, well-designed and easy to use Twitter client that has support for not only Twitter but also Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn as well. It provides a customizable multi-column view with many configuration options and special filters. You can customize which types of notices it shows you, such as Status, Q&A, Connections, Profile updates, Recommendations, Group joinings, and Application installs.

It’s becoming flexible enough that even if you hate Twitter, you can simply not use Twitter at all and instead use TweetDeck as simply a nearly-live news ticker of information from ONLY LinkedIn. It can be a tremendously useful business intelligence tool. :)

Here’s a screenshot of the TweetDeck interface: http://assets.tweetdeck.com/splashes/frontpage.png

To give you an example of how it can be used, I use TweetDeck for both Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ve set up several different columns with various filters:

• One for my full Twitter feed (~400 people)
• One to collect all replies to my tweets
• One for all my private messages
• One for all the Twitter news sites I follow
• One for my close friends
• One for LinkedIn

In other words, the whole world at my fingertips! bwahah!

TweetDeck is available for PC, Mac, and the iPhone, and your custom columns \ filters \ etc are synced to the server so they’re the same on every device you use it on, which is slick. :) You can download it here: http://www.tweetdeck.com

Enjoy!

One of my friends, Mike Arkin at Big Boat Interactive, just released his company’s first iPhone game, CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link), a free MMO for the iPhone. I’ve been playing it in beta quite a bit and it’s a blast. It’s really reminiscient of all the fun parts of Mafia Wars, except without all the spamming and pointlessness of combat if you have less than 500 friends. Outfitting your gang, sending them into battle, getting new armor and weapons and teaming up against other players is gratifying, and the fact that it’s all real players and is technically an MMO on the iPhone is impressive as hell.

So come support an indie game developer and CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link)! It’s free, and fun! Clicky-clicky, and spread the word! :)

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple years now and I’ve gradually gotten the hang of it. A lot of people have trouble seeing what the appeal of Twitter is, though, and it can be puzzlingly difficult to explain for some reason. Someone I know asked me to explain what the appeal is, and after a bit of work, I came up with an explanation of Twitter that people seem to really respond to and understand. I thought I’d repost it here for those interested.

I use Twitter because I like to follow people I find interesting to keep up with. I see Twitter as being a single open IM session with all of my friends at once, without the pressure to respond, but with the freedom to pop in and comment, join an interesting ongoing conversation, or to just lurk quietly and enjoy other people. For me it’s not really a way for people to just yak about what they’re eating. It’s a public conversation… a way to have a massive, distributed conversation that’s only as synchronous as you feel like letting it be. Almost like having a conversation in a bar. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear — you said you’re playing Modern Warfare 2 as well?”

Once you get a decent-sized network, you have an awesome instant support structure to bounce ideas off of and ask questions. I ask technical art questions, information about games or companies, get new music and movie recommendations, and I even had people offering me a place to sleep when I was nearly stranded in Chicago overnight just last night and asked for help.

And the fact that there are so many ways to access it makes it a lot easier to get closer to people, in a way. The quality of your Twitter experience is in some small part a combination of how social you are, how much you ‘get’ the concept of it, and whether or not the people you follow ‘get’ it as well. Honestly, Twitter’s probably useless for 90% of people, but the 10% that use it have a *blast*. It’s tremendously exciting seeing the evolution of personal communication and how small the world is becoming.

Hello, everyone! As I told everyone at the MIGS 2009 “How To Love Outsourcing” speech, here are the slides:

How To Love Outsourcing

Sorry it took me until later today to post them. We were stranded in the Montreal airport for awhile yesterday and didn’t get back to Austin until really late, and I’m still dead tired.

Thanks to everyone that attended!

Good news, everyone! I’ve been invited to speak on the subject of outsourcing art at the Montreal International Game Summit on Tuesday, November 17, 2009!

This should be a lot of fun. I enjoy speaking publicly a great deal, and this will be a great opportunity to meet new people, network, and to visit Montreal for the first time.

I’ll be in town from Saturday the 14th through Tuesday the 17th, so if you’re in Montreal and would like to meet, drop me a line! :)

Wow. I have no idea how long comments have been broken, but they are now fixed. Sorry about that. Total fail on my part. :( Sorry!

In other news, I accidentally hosed my site completely trying to fix that. I submitted a help ticket with my hosting provider, Bluehost, and within *two minutes* they had responded, upgraded my WP installation (which is what I was trying to do), set it up with a new app and made it all work again. Fastest customer service response I’ve ever gotten. They totally rule as a host and deserve your business.