I’ve been playing the massive multiplayer online RPG (is it an RPG?) EVE Online in 2006 – I left at some point, having played for several months and gotten to a point where I couldn’t find any excitement in it. CCP (the company that makes an maintains EVE Online) also promised my account, with all its assets, would remain saved, if I would ever want to reactivate it when there had been another upgrade or such. A few weeks ago, the Mac client (which is actually the windows client wrapped in Transgaming’s Cider engine) was released, and I couldn’t fight the temptation to join EVE again and see what it had to offer. A lot has changed for me, personally, which inspired me to write a bit about the curious system that keeps EVE alive as a game, and the parts of EVE that aren’t really a game anymore.

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In browsing my RSS feed, I found that Susumu Yoshida’s blog had a link that pointed to several ‘drawer’-like icons containing the stack icons behind them in a Leopard dock. With a bit of guessing (I can’t read Japanese ;)) I found the original website, Optica Optima. Here’s the ‘Leopard Stack Drawers’ in action;

There’s but a few things that I really rush to download and use for usefulness, aesthetics and innovation; this one’s one of them. I wish I could write some Japanese so I could comment ‘Domo Arigato!’ to Susumu Yoshida, whose blog made me aware of this pretty cool idea, and the creator of the icons of course!

Get the Stack drawers here.

It seems I haven’t been the only one raving about SimCity being great in every possible aspect; The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative has gotten a generous donation by EA; the original (aka ‘Classic’, aka ‘1.0’) SimCity, for use on all these cheap laptops in developing countries. In another cool move;

the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”

I think this is a very good move from EA; although the game is dated, it’s still a very useful and educational game. It was quite inspiring for me in my younger years as well.

Fellow designer Fernando Lins pointed out this link to a website that grabbed my attention.

Naked Light, as previewed, promises to be a fully resolution-independent image editor with all the powerful features a designer might need. I won’t be making my judgement until I have actually used the application (the public beta will be due in a day and 10 hours, at the moment of writing) but it seems promising, going from the website;

Naked light throws away antiquated concepts like pixels; layers; 8-bit color; and destructive, non-re-editable filters and operations. Instead, compositions in Naked light represent a sort of Platonic ideal—with infinite resolution, an astounding 590 quintillion colors, and perpetually re-editable nodes.

Hopefully, this will help alleviate the high hopes users had for a Photoshop replacement in Pixelmator, which apparently failed to deliver.