It's that time again: time for a redesign of this website.

I'm not really sure what it is that makes me think that the look of a website is 'old' or 'dated', but every now and then I come across a website design that makes me really pay attention; makes me bother to take a look at the page source, scripts, styling information, and how everything just works together to create this visual marvel before me. Then after having dipped my mind into that wonder of a website, I look back at this website with a bit of an inward sigh.

I've been doing that quite a bit lately - looking at other websites showcased on web design galleries, all bright, shiny, and new. It wasn't really triggered by the coming of the New Year (the usual checkpoint in life that makes people take stock of what they've got what they've done, and what they hope to do for the next 12 months), but rather with seeing this website through my iPad.

I viewed it first in landscape mode and, since the screen has a width of 1024 pixels in that orientation, this site showed-up just fine. Maybe the font is a little small, I thought, but otherwise it looked as it should.

Then I rotated the iPad to view the thing in landscape mode, and it scaled this site down to fit the new width of 768 pixels across. If I thought the font looked small before, everything looked really small now. Then I borrowed my brother's iPhone for another peek at an even smaller resolution and found that my website was pretty unusable (well, usable if you don't mind putting up with some serious eye strain).

Huh, this isn't ideal, I thought, eyes still squinting at the tiny font on the tiny screen on this tiny device, and thus began my trek through the web design world once again.

If I look back at the history of this site, it's had this general layout since 2009. That's 3 years of this light grey gradient, headed by a picture of a planet from one of my space pics from 2007, covered by GDI and Nod logos from the original Command & Conquer games of the 90s.

The internet has changed a lot since 2009, and so the web design landscape has also moved to try and keep up: HTML5 and CSS3 support have taken off thanks in part to innovative browsers like Firefox and Chrome (allowing web designers to do a whole lot more with their websites with less effort), and browsing on mobile devices is very prevalent with the proliferation of larger-screen smartphones and tablet devices.

All of this has created new challenges for web designers, many of which they've already taken to address with things like responsive and adaptive design philosophies. Things I didn't really know about until a month ago.

Combining all of the above, suddenly that 3 years seems like 30 and I feel like I'm at least 2 steps behind the internet curve.

So: site redesign time! The goals: a new look that scales/adjusts to different device resolutions, making use of the advances the HTML and CSS languages.

If it's anything like before, this should take about a month of my spare time to accomplish. I've already tried using this last long weekend to do something with it, but I ended-up spending that time scribbling layouts in a notebook then staring at the computer screen in an attempt to translate my scribbles into code, turning it into something that I actually like.

I also took at Google Analytics just to find out what browsers visitors used to come here so I can figure out where to put my effort, and found that 12% are still on Internet Explorer 7, which supports almost none of the goals I mentioned above :'(

Oh well, since when was life supposed to be easy anyway?

I don't often feel in the mood to write about any single movie, book, or video game - my only other 'review' being more of an exercise in what not to do to food (see: McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger) - but for the only video game to have ever made me so very close to crying, I think I can make an exception.

I discovered To the Moon when I was going through RPG Fan's list of top RPGs of 2011. It won the indie category with a lot of praise going towards its story. I never heard of the game before, but to have what RPG Fan were calling the best story of any video game this year, it intrigued me enough to read their full reviews on it, as well as find out what other people were saying about it.

For those who don't know (and to stop my dad from making some terrible joke about how RPG is a programming language), RPGs in the video game world are short for 'role-playing game' - a genre of video game where you assume the role of someone whose progression through the game is typically determined by classes/specializations (what kind of traits you want your character to have), statistics (assigned numbers to each of those traits), and story.

Now that I've told you that bit about RPGs, you can forget it all because To the Moon has neither classes nor statistics - it's basically an interactive story that just happens to be made with a tool called RPG Maker, so I don't know whether the RPG classification is really all that justified.

With that out of the way, To the Moon's premise goes something like this: in the future, people can be granted their dying wish thanks to a technology that allows doctors to create artificial memories in the patient, thus granting them the memories of having done something that they never actually happened.

In this game you take the role of 2 doctors, Dr Eva Rosaline and Dr Neil Watts, as they grant their latest patient, a dying man named Johnny, his wish to go to the moon. Johnny isn't entirely sure why he wants to go to the moon, so with only a day or 2 to live the doctors dive into Johnny's mind and retrace his memories back to his childhood to plant in his childhood self the ambition and drive to become an astronaut, and ultimately to go to the moon.

Telling a story in reverse isn't easy, and the last time I came across a reverse-story in the movie Memento, it messed with my head for the first couple of minutes. But like Memento, To the Moon, manages to pull-off this reverse narrative, teasing your own assumptions and experiences to fill-in the blanks and treating you to a different form of suspense - instead of the usual "what happens next?", you're instead left wondering "why/how did this all happen?"

It's in unravelling Johnny's life that a heart-felt human story takes place, and just to re-iterate so many other reviews of the game out there, it truly is one of the better written stories I have had the pleasure to play through. There's nothing 'grand scale' or 'sweeping epic' about it; it's just a story of a man and a life filled with friends, places, struggles, love, and loss, and it's in uncovering each of these memories through the doctors' (and your) eyes, reliving each emotion as it takes place, and piecing together the life of the man that is Johnny that the game really shines.

I'm trying to think of an example in the story, but mentioning anything beyond the initial few minutes feels almost like a spoiler since so much of what the game makes you feel is in discovering who Johnny is for yourself. Every little discovery isn't spelled-out for you, leaving you to come to your own conclusions and encouraging you to read between the lines, making each and every discovery your own.

Because it's a story about a life, many of Johnny's memories can hit quite close to home, so I found myself pretty emotionally involved. I would sympathize with Johnny quite a lot - laughing with him over a dinner with friends, mentally putting a hand on his shoulder when the situation got bad, and urging him forward when he struggled with nerves in the moments before talking to a girl. I've been there, I'd find myself thinking, I know how you feel...

As for other aspects of the game, the music is probably the next strongest part about To the Moon, helping only to add to the emotion that you're probably already experiencing. None of the pieces are too busy, and most are written around a simple piano motif that was stuck in my head (in a good way) for days afterwards.

There is no voice acting, but in this game that's hardly a negative. The characters of Dr Rosaline and Dr Watts are so well-written it's like listening to the witty banter between long-time friends. The things they say tend more towards the light-hearted side of things which, in a sombre tale such as this, is a welcome relief.

As I've mentioned, the game was put together using RPG Maker, so the game looks a lot like a top-down 2D adventure from the Super Nintendo era of the early 90s. Heck, even my widescreen monitor would complain whenever I'd load the game, telling me I shouldn't be running it at such low resolutions. Regardless, the 2D graphics still manage to set the scene, and To the Moon makes use of the 2D to paint some pretty good-looking scenes, even those that you visit over and over again in Johnny's memories, without feeling repetitive or copy-and-paste.

As a game though, it's very lacking in the ever-important gameplay department. Controlling the doctors is done primarily through the mouse (click on a spot on the ground to walk there, click on some object to investigate/interact with it), and some basic puzzle solving that feels incongruous at first is the only thing that stands between you and the next of Johnny's memories. The mouse controls didn't seem all that responsive, so I found myself reaching for the keyboard whenever I could (left hand on the arrow keys, right hand on the mouse to scan the environment). This left me in a bit of an awkward position though with both of my hands nearer the right side of my desk.

The strength of To the Moon lies entirely in its story, and wow is it a story to be experienced. Supported by the beautiful music tracks (some of which I learned is composed by Laura Shigihara of Plants vs Zombies fame) this game will tug at the heart strings and, not so much refuse to let go, but rather you'll find yourself giving them up to the game to see where it will take you. More of an 'interactive novel' than RPG, this game took me just over 4 hours to complete, but the impression it's left on me has stuck and, in the several days since, still refuses to leave.

And yes, at one point it did almost make me cry. I remember when it happened, my cheeks and eyes started to feel funny and I brought a hand up to them thinking, What the hell, what is this feeling? before rubbing at my face and shaking the feeling away. Was I about to cry?

I've never had a video game do that to me before.

9 out of 10.

---
To the Moon
PC video game, $11.95 USD, developed and published by Freebird Games
http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/

My brother managed to stumble across a joke that went something like this:

How do you know if someone has an iPad?
Because they'll tell you.

Oh yeah, I got an iPad 2 for Christmas :D

Unlike all the spoiled kids tweeting that they got a car from mom/dad instead of an iPhone/iPad, I bought the iPad as a Christmas present for myself which surprised me a little when I got the idea because I don't often buy flashy or expensive things like this. I mean, the last purchase I made (which I still think is very cool) is a mandoline. It slices vegetables very thinly. That's all it does.

I've also mentioned a few times that as a computer programmer, ie: one you'd expect to be enamoured and surrounded with cool electronic stuff, I'm still very much behind the tech curve when it comes to owning said stuff. I'm waaay behind the late majority and laggards, and so late that I'm practically pregnant.

"Food baby? No, that's just some tech from 5 years ago accumulating in my belly."

Also, the last time I spent such a large amount of money in one go I got a call from the bank to confirm that yes it was me that spent that money and no please don't block the transaction because otherwise my friends won't have a holiday house to spend New Year's in.

I'm pretty alien to big purchases and have managed to give my bank absolutely no reasons to increase my credit limit. So when I went to the store and the price of the purchase was repeated back to me by the nice young lady behind the counter, I very slowly forked over my credit card, all the while holding a face that I imagine looked like something you'd get if you crossed pain with a nervous smile.

I bought it on December 5, gave it straight to my mum to wrap and put under the family Christmas tree, and didn't open it until December 25. It was a very long 20 days.

My 'spending money' face

For my first ever Apple device, I'm very impressed. I've never really been an Apple fanboy, although I often find myself defending the company against my mainly Windows/Unix/Android group of developer/tech friends simply because nobody else will. What fun is an argument if everybody is on the same side?

(It usually goes that they pick on Apple for some thing they've done, like the comparison between Apple's walled-garden of an App Store vs the openness of the Android Marketplace: my friends will often attack it for being so developer unfriendly and I'd play devil's advocate, saying something like how Apple is ready to throw its developers under the bus for the benefit and safety of its customers. As a customer, this makes me feel a lot safer when perusing the app store; as a developer, I probably wouldn't want to develop an iOS app any time soon.)

Using the iPad has been a dream with pretty much no hiccups or complaints to speak of. As a customer, this makes me feel supremely satisfied; as a developer, this makes me ask why so many of the technologies I use at work and at home aren't this easy to use? I'm routinely surrounded by examples of difficult to use/understand software/websites/devices that it makes me wonder if we developers did this to ourselves on purpose.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I'd find myself thinking as I wrestle with another annoying system I have to use as part of my work.

I think it all started with that user interfaces course I took at university where we were taught to focus on the user, test interfaces with actual users, find out what users actually need and other general things to think about so as not to annoy your users. (Pretty much everything that this guy talks about.) Ever since then I've been very user-centric and trying to include that in my own work and to have it show that I do in-fact care about the person who has to use whatever I'm developing.

An offshoot of this is that I really believe that every computer-related frustration a person has ever had is avoidable and a reflection of something missed during development.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I would often think or say when debating user interface design in my head or with a co-worker.

Now I find myself wondering: Why can't everything be as easy as the stuff my iPad?

I've never been an Apple fanboy, but now I've had a taste of things on this side of the fence and it's pretty sweet over here. In this post-Steve Jobs Apple world, I really hope their user focus continues for years to come, because I am sooo very tired of wrestling with computers to make them do what I want. (I'm looking at you Linux...)