There’s a lot of ebook devices out there (Kindle, Sony reader, Iliad et al), and obviously the iphone/touch and other mobile phones. The one technical feature that I think makes a device suitable for extended text reading is the pixel density of the screen. Here’s a good illustration of the effect of pixel density. A [...] Read more – ‘The forgotten perfect ebook device’.
Wow, Apple’s new version of Pages includes a proper outliner. Great stuff…nice to see outlining as a writing/thinking tool getting prominence _and_ actually being decent (MS Word’s outliner is frankly, shit). Also nice to see in Pages, and obviously influenced by WriteRoom, is the new fullscreen view. I use iWork pretty much every day (still haven’t [...] Read more – ‘Apple’s Outliner’.
Remember the Playstation EyeToy? Here’s a technology preview using a webcam and -printed- (no printer, so I figured a scribbled logo would work just as well – it did)… The video on the site shows it in action… I can this imagine printing off a bunch of symbols, drawing live paths for the game characters, [...] Read more – ‘Augmenting reality’.
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter created this fantastic Firefox plugin that Visualises Political Bias on Memeorandum (a US-centric political news+blog aggregator) by highlighting perceived dem/rep red or blue. Memeorandum is focused mainly on showing blog conversations around key news stories… As the story about the investigation into Palin’s -(alleged)- abuse of power investigation broke this (UK) [...] Read more – ‘Visualizing Political Bias?’.
This solves a personal 10 yr quest; Stewart Brand’s BBC TV series from 1997 ‘How Buildings Learn’ has been uploaded. The fantastic curated Smashing Telly spotted them and wrote a really good introduction to the series: “…Almost no computer software is actually designed by ‘architects’ who sit in between the people who commission software and [...] Read more – ‘How Buildings Learn – the full TV series online’.
BBC NEWS | Business | The life of a New York broker A lightweight video, with an incredibly brief overview of trading…but really interesting however, to see the physical environment. E.g. the way that displays and positioning are used…everyone stands, eye-level monitors grouped together on ‘islands’, that make for walkable destinations and congration points for [...] Read more – ‘BBC News Business | The life of a New York broker’.
Just saw this Kevin Kelly’s ace documentary reviews ebook linked up on BoingBoing. It’s a PDF in which Kelly (author, ex founder of Wired, CoolTools, etc etc) lists reviews of a bunch of decent documentaries…I micropaid for the PDF a few months ago. The PDF is now a free d/l…powered by sidebar Yahoo ads. Definitely [...] Read more – ‘True Films…’.
Dopplr Blog » In rainbows: “As you add trips to different destinations, Dopplr’s logo becomes your logo, reflecting what you’re doing – right the way through to the ‘favicon‘ that shows up in the address field of most browsers…” Lovely. Trouble is, I didn’t notice it – I often access the site through a mobile [...] Read more – ‘Dopplr Blog » In rainbows’.
Wii Sports dominates Bafta awards Great news and ‘intellectual’ confirmation for the Wii – but where’s the next Wii Sports? I’ve not seen as compelling a game in the year since I’ve had my Wii..(maybe the Super Mario?). I guess I want to see the new Electroplankton on the Wii. And not to cost £40 [...] Read more – ‘Wii Sports dominates Bafta awards’.
Wow. I got home this evening to find, amongst the mail, the ‘Architecture Pack’ a popup book by Ron van der Meer. I ordered it ta while ago (£15, second-hand!), but postal strikes etc delayed – I’d half forgotten I’d bought it – lovely suprise; compeltely energised me, even after a 4hr drive. It’s just [...] Read more – ‘Architecture popup book’.
Wonderful new ‘man (presume woman coming soon) on the street’ ads from Apple. They’re so perfect because: The iPhone is moving from early adopter to ‘smart mainstream’ – these ads are not for geeks (they already bought, hacked and so on). They’re unapolegitically about how the device helps normal people – none of the aspirational [...] Read more – ‘Very smart iPhone ads…’.
PG&E Ambient Energy Orb Now this is bloody interesting – a power company in the States has an incentive program to reduce usage during peak times (heard usage surges are big problem in the US). So, the orb glows red – customers in the thousands now have a glanceable view of energy load – and [...] Read more – ‘Ambient Orb used for glanceable energy load’.
A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers Interesting phone design – I think I’d like these features to appear if I’m driving: “Instead of icons or menus, the phone presents features as a series of simple questions, which the user answers with the bold YES and NO buttons on the handset: Do you want to check [...] Read more – ‘Designing handsets for old people…’.
Having just finished organising the micropresentation session at Reboot, and experiencing some incredible ideas, compressed into 20 slides and 15 second explanations, I’m completely obsessed with short-form content. The webby awards, have a 5 word limit on their speeches – used to profound effect by the BBC News team, reminding everyone that Alan Johnston is [...] Read more – ‘micro-speeches’.
Guardian Unlimited – the new look explained from Guardian Unlimited I’ve never really got into the Guardian’s online presence (although I _love_ their redesigned newspaper format), but they’ve just launched a massively re-engineered page design. I’ve waited for this for a while…they’d really got their design chops on with Comment Is Free, and I can [...] Read more – ‘Guardian Unlimited’s new look.’.
The BBC (and Guardian) are hosting a multi-page, printable Gilbert & George work for the next 48 hrs. Fab – I love Gilbert & George – there was an amazing retrospective of their work in the Tate Modern…and it was amazing to see their development over the last 40 years. It was everything art should [...] Read more – ‘here’s one they made earlier’.
Hey, i got an nice email from one of the Metacritic guys re. my comparison with Rotten Tomatoes…one thing that I really think Metacritic should do, is a decent mobile optimised version – at the moment, their offering is Vindigo and Avantgo, neither of which I have used for years. Anyway, I mocked up a [...] Read more – ‘Mobile metacritic?’.
I’m a huge fan of MetaCritic, and I was really bored sometime back last year (I think I was waiting for my car to be serviced), so I thought I’d compare the site with it’s rival, Rotten Tomatoes. for some reason, I’ve left this on my desktop for, er, several months – anyway, if you’re [...] Read more – ‘Comparing film review sites…’.
I’ve been using this week – really interesting ‘short-form’ blogging service…(mine’s at http://participo.tumblr.com/) Apart from the very easy/pleasant interface, the medium definitely affords a more spontaneous, less ‘aggh, I’ve got to write something long and meaningful’ type interaction with blogging… It’s had a really interesting affect on me – almost a sense of relief(!) that [...] Read more – ‘Tumblr – short form blogging…’.
You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen. Nice riff on why the technology of paper books isn’t doomed… I agree, but there’s a stronger element to his argument about thin sliced content in general, particularly for computer and handheld devices. Long form content, i.e. the novel, suits a book format, because the medium itself [...] Read more – ‘Cory Doctorow: You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen’.
Many Eyes is an IBM sponsored(?) site with loads of visualisation examples; took a cursory look, seems pretty varied and interesting (not quite Tufte, though, although I don’t thin that’s the point :-) (Via O’Reilly Radar.) Read more – ‘Many Eyes – data visualisation gallery..’.
Just found this link ( IDEO’s Urban Pre-Planning | Metropolis Magazine) in my ‘todo’ blog list – it’s an interesting article about IDEO and their ‘value-add’, angle-free consulting approach: “Williams puts it another way: “They don’t have a dog in the fight.” Unlike most urban planners (a term IDEO resists), not only does IDEO avoid [...] Read more – ‘another example of non-partisan consultancy…IDEO%u2019s Urban Pre-Planning | Metropolis Magazine’.
Excellent info-graphic from NYTimes showing the flightpath of the plane that hit the Manhattan residential building. Obviously an awful accident, superbly explained in visual builds. (Via 37 Signals.) Read more – ‘NY Times infographic’.
IGN: Wii Channel Breakdown “An example of a channel is the Disk Drive Channel, which shows what’s currently in the Wii disk drive, be it a Wii game or a GameCube game. You’ll also find a picture channel, which gives you access to the pictures located on your system, and a news channel, which uses [...] Read more – ‘Nintendo Wii Channels…’.
Availabot (Schulze & Webb) is a fab idea – one of those collapsible toys, but it’s wired to an IM client and pops up/collapses based on the presence of an IM contact. It’s great glanceable technology. My mate Paul mentioned it – it’s a (pre-production) product produced by Matt Webb, whose talks we’ve listened to [...] Read more – ‘Availabot’.
I watched a TED video of a talk by Ross Lovegrove a few weeks back, and I keep thinking about it… This is a guy almost _overwhelmed_ about his singular vision he holds for the design of objects using bio-polymers and organic, natural forms (I can’t possibly do it justice, go see the video :-). [...] Read more – ‘Ross Lovegrove talk…’.
Flow is a lovely ‘game’ – read about in Wired. Well. it’s more a form of mouse-based yoga…very relaxing, lovely physics. Read more – ‘Welcome to Flow in Games’.
Lovely New York Times article on the Rockwell designing the interaction space of an airport terminal through collaboration with a choreographer. It’s really interesting to look at public spaces and try and work out how the ‘traffic flow’ has been designed. I did this everywhere I walked in Manchester yesterday, but I’m buggered if I [...] Read more – ‘At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3’.
I linked to the TED talks a week or so ago…I finally got around to watching Hans Rosling’s talk showing some extraordinarily powerful data visualisations of stats of fertility rates vs. GDP. It’s incredibile – some of the most compelling ways to tell real stories with data in an engaging way. I followed the link [...] Read more – ‘Extraordinary visualisations…’.
An extraordinary and powerful set of ads for Amnesty International that use ‘transparent’ framing. Kind of reminds me of another campaign that used an entire side of a lorry. An image of a set of photorealistic palettes was striped across a load of pivoted cubes. When the lorry was moving the pivoted cubes would roll [...] Read more – ‘Amnesty International Ads’.
Field tested books: “The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience.” A lovely idea and [...] Read more – ‘Coudal Partners ‘field tested books’’.
mySociety: “Using colours and contour lines they show how long it takes to travel between one particular place and every other place in the area, using public transport.” Wow. Excellent use of heatmapping…I’ll plan my next journey by this…although I’m sure the social implications of these maps is more to the point. (Via Ben Griffiths.) Read more – ‘Transport heatmaps for the UK’.
A guy called Pete Barr-Wilson has a photoset on Flickr of working prototypes of the $100 laptop, also known as the OLPC (one laptop per child). It’s a great idea, and the actual units are inspired. I’d personally love to get hold of one, and there’s a pledge to get the project to sell them [...] Read more – ‘working prototypes of the $100 laptop…’.
Interactive Architecture dot Org is a blog I’ve just come across, that documents interactive environments. i think designed interactions with physical space is a fascinating area. It’s probably why I’m _so_ looking forward to the Wii Read more – ‘Interactive Architecture’.
I don’t think I’ve written about Pecha Kucha before. I came across it from a presentation uploaded by Jan Chipchase, a Nokia ethnographer (beautiful blog, btw) who had done a presentation in Tokyo. The presentation format is deliberately simple and constrained – 20 slides, 20 seconds each. On anything you like. Adopted as the cool [...] Read more – ‘Pecha Kucha’.
For Tiny Screens, Some Big Dreams – New York Times is a reasonable overview of the mobile entertainment ‘ space’. Interesting, because it’s clear there’s a design pattern that’s emerging – simple games, 5 minute ‘catchup’s’ of TV shows, a few minutes of comedy, and: ” Wide-angle shots are to be avoided, while slow-motion clips [...] Read more – ‘Casual content…’.
Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory? is an excellent look into the inefficient page design of MySpace and the pageviews the inefficiency creates. Apart from the odd metrics, there’s the interesting dilemma of whether to actually fix the problem and reduce the required pageviews to actually do stuff. It’s also interesting, because the guy who [...] Read more – ‘MySpace: Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?’.
sketches of Frank Gehry looks like a fantastic film (lovely high-def trailer here) – it’s got Sidney Pollack filming a documentary about Gehry’s creative processes – sketches, CAD (I’ve got a vague memory of some story about an ex IBMer innovating CAD in partnership with Gehry…ah, here it is… Read more – ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry’.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before – just saw this in New Scientist (my new favourite magazine). Fantastic maps, skewed to reflect economic and demographic details (like patents, or tourism spend). They’re incredibly powerful displays of quantitative data, not so much because they show proportion, but because of the massive distortion of [...] Read more – ‘Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before’.
I love these short narrated slide-shows from the NY Times. I think they’re just about perfect – 2 minutes in length, really evocative, but simple…if they were any longer, maybe they wouldn’t work as well. Read more – ‘Lovely NY Times audio slide shows…’.
Richard Florida article on the ‘spiky’ world – with 3D spikes of patents, creativity indexes etc – http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/TheWorldIsSpiky.pdf Read more – ‘Nice data visualisation…’.
Interesting article about how Toronto is approaching it’s goal of becoming a world-class city. It caught my eye, because it talks about the experiences of my adopted home city, Manchester: “‘He likes to cite Manchester, a decaying industrial city whose inner core was destroyed by an IRA bomb 10 years ago this summer. That catastrophe [...] Read more – ‘How to be a great city…Manchester’s creative destruction (and the lessons for IT innovation)’.
I got a Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com) becuase I wanted to see the utility/benefit of an ‘ambient device’ , and living in the UK, can’t use “Ambient devices”:http://www.ambientdevices.com . The nabaztag is a lot of fun, but turn off the clock – it gets irritating. It is, at the moment, slightly gimmicky, but as the services develop [...] Read more – ‘My Nabaztag ‘ambient’ device…’.
Check out the BBC2 Homepage, it’s completely focused around the actual shows – showing them, launching long clips and even full series archives, including the opportunity to see the entire series of ‘The Armstrongs’ – one of the most beautifully edited, absorbing documentary series I’ve seen for a long time… I love how they’ve simplified [...] Read more – ‘The BBC massively improves it’s web offerings…’.
It just doesn’t matter is a great treatise by Jason Fried of 37signals of why they’ve left out certain stuff from their latest product. From the man himself: “…if it doesn’t change your behavior then it just doesn’t matter…Would these things be nice to have? Sure. Would they be great to have? Sure. Would they [...] Read more – ‘It just doesn’t matter – choosing what not to build…’.
I really like the phrase ‘brain training’ – it’s a great phrase and feels ‘right’. I guess we all train our brains to some extent. But lately I’ve been getting very aware of some of my mental ‘flab’ and want to think leaner, faster, and more creatively. Almost certainly a side-effect of approaching my 34th [...] Read more – ‘tools for brain training…’.
see one of the best ads of the year here I watch so little TV, when I do, I’m eternally grateful for cool adverts. Honda, over the last year, have run some excellent ads about ‘the power of dreams’. The above is one of the family, although a slight departure, because it actually features a [...] Read more – ‘Beautiful Honda (UK) ad…’.
Guy pointed towards Pligg in his “Links for 2006-01-14″ post. Having played around with Digg for a while, I was amazed at the similarity of the two sites. In fact, except for Digg’s use of a blue-and-yellow theme and Pligg’s use of a green-and-orange (blecch) theme, it was hard to ascertain the difference between the [...] Read more – ‘Digg, Pligg, and the Internet Echo Chamber’.
How to use Copenhagen City Bikes. Lovely write up of Copenhagen’s rather nifty bike rental scheme. I just found this in my drafts folder. What a great few days attending the Reboot conference. So this would have been much more in chronological context if I’d posted it back in May. And I rode one of [...] Read more – ‘How to use Copenhagen City Bikes’.
Using some excellent miniature photography, humor and a playful sensibility, Ping Mag takes you through an initial presentation to a client — y’know, the one where they ask, “Can we get this done by next Friday?” They go through what they call the work-feedback-rework process in 15 steps. (Strangely, “work-feedback-rework” — which is an excellent [...] Read more – ‘The Website Development Process’.
personalworldmap.org is a lovely interactive and _shifting_ world map that adjusts its spacial orientation according to ability to travel…the land masses actually shift shape and proximity according to airfare value (African destinations move further away than Australian), distance or travel time. I love stuff like this. TheThe Map Book looks rather nifty as well, and [...] Read more – ‘personalworldmap.org’.
Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features Twitchr is a fascinating sounding ‘game’ that uses constructivism to teach features and use of a mobile phone…which is exactly the approach I was pushing with Vodafone a few years back, except I’d come up with the idea of teaching photoblogging – inroduce the camera, MMS, email photos [...] Read more – ‘Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features’.
So, we’ve begun the looong overdue process of a redesign…I say we, ‘cos I haven’t done it – a mate, Paul, from Salted has done me proud… I’ll be sorting out related posts, archive templates, playing around with tags (well, one really must) and so on… So, if you could bear with us… Read more – ‘redesign’.
Doug Kaye’s new ad-venture… “We will cover not just IT or even technology, but literally every topic about which someone speaks and another person finds it valuable enough to capture.” (Via Doc Searls.) Read more – ‘Fantastic’.
Adobe Studio Presents: Milton Glaser Lovely video of (ok, I profess I hadn’t heard of him) Milton Glaser, a designer whose work through the decades I definitely recognise. Nice shooting, editing, and the theme of the monologue is the power of being continually surprised and interested in stuff…”i think a lot of people as they [...] Read more – ‘Milton Glaser’.
The Sect of Homokaasu – The Rasterbator Trust me , the title of the link is not what it may appear – it’s a brilliant web-based app that takes photos, rasterises (makes them dotted, newspaper-style) that enables them to blown up to HUGE sizes – like up to 20 metres! I just took an image [...] Read more – ‘Amazing poster generator’.
Best Practices for Webcast Meetings “…eLearning Forum has attempted to webcast six sessions. Centra, Groove, and Interwise have contributed their services. Experience has taught us:” Pretty good summation of ideas to make web presentations work. Their Nokia elearning meeting should be online soon. That should be interesting. Read more – ‘Making web presentations work…’.
One of the most basic rules in interface design is known as Fitts’ Law , after Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University who studied human response time in rapid aimed movements. Basically, Fitts’ model claimed that accuracy in rapid hand movements decreases in inverse relation to the distance from and size of the [...] Read more – ‘Fitts’ Law and alternatives’.
It’s funny, in a Beavis & Butthead sort of way. (Especially disgusting are the learning objectives.) But it does go to show that there is a need for (good) e-Learning in many unexpected places. Manure Pit Hazards is one of the chapters from Lessons in Farm Safety, an interactive curriculum used to teach children about [...] Read more – ‘e-Learning down on the farm…’.
Self-paced Courses in html4 and xhtml/css Over the next few months, in weekly installments you’ll find here our foundation course HTML 4.0 and XHTML for CSS. By way of zeldman Read more – ‘free web courses in html4 and xhtml/css’.
We all know that different students have different learning styles. Students and online learners can determine their particular learning style with Diablo Valley College’s Learning Style Survey for College designed by Catherine Jester & Suzanne Miller. Read more – ‘Learning Styles’.
Well, I know it’s only been functional for a few days, but we are now three authors – Evan meet Paul, Paul meet Evan! Evan is a colleague in Baltimore – web designer and raconteur – Paul is a freelance web designer and racketeer in Bristol, UK. Basically, you’re both designers, I think this site [...] Read more – ‘This site – redesign?’.
ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – Patent fight holds up Web standards In true Micro-mafia stylee….. Microsoft and IBM are trying to muscle in on the W3C over licensing of future multimedia and web standards, with Sun tugging at their shirt tails like an annoying younger brother (as they do) to keep it all [...] Read more – ‘Patent fight holds up Web standards’.
