John writes about a usability discussion that is going on at the CHI-WEB mailinglist. Involving, amongst others - Donald A. Norman of Nielsen Norman Group and Chris MacGregor of Flazoom.com.

Check out the postings so far

Donald A. Norman (from Nielsen Norman Group):

That is precisely backwards. The U-Turn, if there was one, was at Macromedia. The Nielsen Norman group has not changed its stance about what makes a good design. We should be applauding companies that listen to criticism and work to remedy the problems.

Chris MacGregor (from Flazoom.com):

I believe that U-turn is certainly an appropriate term to describe Jakob
Nielsen's change of heart about Flash. In 2000 Nielsen commented that Flash was
99% bad, and suggested that in most cases the web would be better off without
Flash. Now that Macromeida has hired your firm, Nielsen's tune has changed. The
change seems so dramatic that Nielsen seems to disregard his stance about what
makes good web design.

Mary Keitelman
Kevin Spruill
Yazdi, Reza
Al Abut
Christopher Fahey
Michael Kay

And while we are on the subject of usability, the web-archive of the CHI-WEB might even have been usable if it was possible to link directly to threads. If you want to keep updated on this discussion, you will have to go here and look for "The Flash turn-around". In fact, you might even have to go there and choose week 3 (when it appears) to continue to follow the discussion - if it extends into next week.

[Via JD on MX via John Rhodes]

Thought I would start collecting original descriptions to how words/terms started out. The first is RFC, by Vint Cerf.

Vint Cerf on the origin of RFCs

Steve Crocker wrote RFC #1 - he knew that we needed to document our design work but was very conscious of the fact that we were just graduate students, not the principal investigators on the ARPANET project. Early in the a.m. he was casting about for some way to describe these documents and came up with "Request for Comments" - a kind of humble way of saying "we're just rank amateurs, can you help us make this design any better".

[Via Scripting News]

Flash Player "is a developers and enthusiast portal for viewer driven content" to quote the guys over at Flash Player. In many ways it seems like they are looking for the same kind of content that Shockwave.com provides, but focused soley on Flash. That means games, animations and music files all in Flash.

They already have some good content, and I am sure that the Flash community will provide them with even more great content to showcase. The site might not be Shockwave.com yet, but if they keep making it easy to provide content and have it showcased, it could become a much more democratic Flash entertainement site that any of the existing ones.

My only problem with the site was that I wasn't allowed to vote for the excellent game I tried - they seem to be having some problems with their MS SQL server.

The site is run by Huw Reddick and Bill Kara.

[Via FlashGuru]

JoshDura.com is (surprise surprise) Josh Dura's weblog, Josh is know as a moderator at FlashKit.com, co-founder of the Flashcomponent.com website, and involved Flash community member.

His blog will probably be filled with good news and projects from the Flash world. He already has some interesting sub-sites to the JoshDura.com domain, with open source Flash projects located at flash.joshdura.com and photos at photos.joshdura.com

Found a new Flash blog today, its called Quasimondo. I haven't gotten this confirmed yet, but the site seems to belong to Collin Croome

[Update]
The Quasimondo blog is actually run by Mario Klingemann of Coma2.com. Thats how it goes when guessing :-)

There are some interesting projects on the site:

Flash Photoshop EPS Parser with the source code for those that want to try it. Its slow, but it works. Take note of how you have to save the EPS file from Photoshop..

And the follow-up project: dot-couture.com which is an interesting image manipulator made in Flash.

There seems to be in the works a project for steering behaviors, I quote:

Basically it is about rules that control the motion of groups or flocks of elements. By applying various rules you get some very interesting motion patterns. Of course this whole issue is very tempting to be transferred to flash. So that is what I'm trying at the moment.

This is a blog that I'll have to keep updated on, it's only been up for a couple of days, and its already filled with interesting projects. Hereby included in my Amphetadesk subscriptions :-)