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Posted by mattc at Oct 31, 08 05:05 AM

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Posted by mattc at Oct 20, 08 10:52 PM ... Comments (0)

I've been playing with TUAW's and Receding Hairline's fake tilt-shift. The illusion of a shallow depth of field makes your photo's look like they were taken above a model village.

A not-to-great example from the French coast ...

It's reminded me of how much I like playing with Photoshop tutorials (I hardly ever open it these days, unless I need to chop or resize a JPG!) and how you can lose and entire evening tinkering with the sliders, filters, channels, gradients to get it just right ... It feels very creative even thought you are essentially just adjusting numbers that are fed in to Adobe's canned CS3 image algorithms.

Some of the work Cisnky and Matt have been doing recently (cinematic tweening and ui widgets, respectively) have reminded me of the importance of tinkering, getting the interface in your hands and poking at it until it feels right.

I've seen (and worked on) so many projects where version 0.1 of the interface was built and everyone moved on to the next project before anyone had time to tinker, it's so easy to keep cramming product requirements to the very last minute that there's no time to let things settle. Good UI developers can intuatively fine-tune their app's if they have the time.

So I'm making an effort to justify the dumping of requirements (or do some extra hiring) and finish projects early to give the developers time to tinker with their interface code.


Posted by mattc at Oct 19, 08 07:54 PM ... Comments (0)

Was hoping to do chicken marinaded in Tequila but I accidentally defrosted the duck instead. There's seemingly not a lot of South American duck recipes, so soup to the rescue.

- 750(ish) pints of strong duck stock
- some duck fat
- 2 duck legs, cooked and meat shredded
- 2 onions, chopped
- 100ml Tequila
- 3 red chillies (or more)
- 4 garlic cloves
- squirt of tomato purée
- 1 juiced lime
- 1 chopped carrot 
- 100ml cream cheese (or maybe some strong cheese)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- sauté the onions in the Tequila, put to one side
- fry the garlic, then the chilli in a little duck fat
- add the stock and the onions, tomato purée, carrot
- cook for 25 mins
- add the shredded duck and the lime juice
- blend slightly (10 secs) to thicken

Inspired by Garlic Breath.

Posted by mattc at Oct 18, 08 05:05 AM

Posted by mattc at Oct 17, 08 05:05 AM

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Posted by mattc at Oct 5, 08 05:05 AM

Posted by mattc at Oct 3, 08 05:05 AM

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