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Sketching Working Experience: The Workbook provides information about the step-by-step process of the different sketching techniques. It offers methods called design thinking, as a way to think as a user, and sketching, a way to think as a designer. User-experience designers are designers who sketch based on their actions, interactions, and experiences. The book discusses the differences between the normal ways to sketch and sketching used by user-experience designers. It also describes some motivation on why a person should sketch and introduces the sketchbook. The book reviews the different sketching methods and the modules that contain a particular sketching method. It also explains how the sketching methods are used. Readers who are interested in learning, understanding, practicing, and teaching experience design, information design, interface design, and information architecture will find this book relevant.Features standalone modules detailing methods and exercises for practitioners who want to learn and develop their sketching skills Extremely practical, with illustrated examples detailing all steps on how to do a method Excellent for individual learning, for classrooms, and for a team that wants to develop a culture of design practice Perfect complement to Buxton’s Sketching User Experience or any UX text Author-maintained companion website at http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/sketchbook/

An examination of the player's experience of sound in video games and the many ways that players interact with the sonic elements in games. In Playing with Sound , Karen Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects—which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds—both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.

Designed for researchers, engineers, IT professionals, and graduate students in parallel and cloud computing, this volume covers the state of the art in cloud computing theory and practice. It spans the background, concepts, services, and middleware of cloud computing. A range of scientific researchers and professors in cloud computing, grid computing, high-performance computing, and Internet computing discuss enabling techniques, system implementation, service functionalities, and various applications. Numerous case studies are included throughout the text.

This handbook introduces an in-depth overview of service description efforts. It also highlights the recent unified service description language (USDL) in detail and discusses its methods.

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here , the world's first true multimedia personal computer. Maher argues that the Amiga's capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform--from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware--in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga's technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing.

CSS3 is behind most of the eye-catching visuals on the Web today, but the official documentation can be dry and hard to follow and browser implementations are scattershot at best. The Book of CSS3 distills the dense technical language of the CSS3 specification into plain English and shows you what CSS3 can do right now, in all major browsers. With real-world examples and a focus on the principles of good design, it extends your CSS skills, helping you transform ordinary markup into stunning, richly-styled web pages. You'll master the latest cutting-edge CSS3 features and learn how to: –Stylize text with fully customizable outlines, drop shadows, and other effects –Create, position, and resize background images on the fly – Spice up static web pages with event-driven transitions and animations –Apply 2D and 3D transformations to text and images –Use linear and radial gradients to create smooth color transitions –Tailor a website's appearance to smartphones and other devices A companion website includes up-to-date browser compatibility charts and live CSS3 examples for you to explore. The Web can be an ugly place—add a little style to it with The Book of CSS3.

How to make customers feel good about doing what you want Learn how companies make us feel good about doing what they want. Approaching persuasive design from the dark side, this book melds psychology, marketing, and design concepts to show why we're susceptible to certain persuasive techniques. Packed with examples from every nook and cranny of the web, it provides easily digestible and applicable patterns for putting these design techniques to work. Organized by the seven deadly sins, it includes: * Pride — use social proof to position your product in line with your visitors' values * Sloth — build a path of least resistance that leads users where you want them to go * Gluttony — escalate customers' commitment and use loss aversion to keep them there * Anger — understand the power of metaphysical arguments and anonymity * Envy — create a culture of status around your product and feed aspirational desires * Lust — turn desire into commitment by using emotion to defeat rational behavior * Greed — keep customers engaged by reinforcing the behaviors you desire Now you too can leverage human fallibility to create powerful persuasive interfaces that people will love to use — but will you use your new knowledge for good or evil? Learn more on the companion website, evilbydesign.info.

Create complex websites quickly and easily using the building blocks of Drupal 8, the most powerful version of Drupal yet About This Book • Build complete, complex websites with no prior knowledge of web development entirely using the intuitive Drupal user interface • Follow a practical case study chapter-by-chapter to construct a complete website as you progress • Ensure your sites are modern, responsive and mobile-friendly through utilizing the full features available in Drupal 8 Who This Book Is For If you want to learn to use Drupal 8 for the first time, or you are transitioning over from a previous version of Drupal, this is the book for you. No knowledge of PHP, MySQL, or HTML is assumed or required What You Will Learn • Set up a local “stack” development environment and install your first Drupal 8 site • Find out what is available in Drupal 8 core • Define content types and taxonomies—and find out when you should do so • Use the powerful Views module • Get hands-on with image and media handling • Extend Drupal using custom community modules • Develop the look and feel of your website using Drupal themes • Manage site users and permissions In Detail Drupal 8 sets a new standard for ease of use, while offering countless new ways to tailor and deploy your content to the Web. Drupal 8 allows user to easily customize data structures, listings, and pages, and take advantage of new capabilities for displaying data on mobile devices, building APIs, and adapting to multilingual needs. The book takes you step by step through building a Drupal 8 website. Start with the basics, such as setting up a local “stack” development environment and installing your first Drupal 8 site, then move on to image and media handling, and extending Drupal modules. Push your knowledge by getting to grips with the modular nature of Drupal, and learning to extend it by adding new functionalities to create your new modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and manage a modern and responsive website using Drupal. Style and approach This is an absolute beginners' guide, providing step-by-step instructions to help you learn Drupal 8 from scratch.