March 2009
WebVisitors blinker →
every time somebody visits this website, an LED light blinks once
“Sadly, I think a lot of the work there is better at illustrating the problem...”
– Sticks and Rocks: Illustrating the Problem?
“As any hobby psychologist knows, good metaphors are a key enabler for...”
– PostSpectacular: Social Collider
“We slowly narrowed down Sascha’s general visualization idea to the level...”
– Social Collider
Hide Tweet Chrome Bookmarklet →
This bookmarklet hides all the extra cruft on a single twitter status page. Handy for making screenshots of tweets.
“Humans beings can’t exist without communication. It’s one of those...”
– Predicting The Future
Sparklines: theory and practice →
“These are not just parking enforcement cameras, they’re for public order”
– Ahead of G20 summit, council told to switch off illegal £15m CCTV network
More Microprinting →
Another use of the Microprinter: printing books. I took the text of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (mainly because I can). It has over 47,000 thousand words, and if you print it at 64 characters per line on standard 80mm thermal paper it’s about 60 feet long. Printing a book Printing a book Printing time: about 40 minutes
“It was a great event, and despite not costing a penny the quality of the...”
– MobileCamp Brighton - As the organiser this makes me chuffed. *Camps are always so much more fun than paid conferences.
“When you design ubicomp devices, you’re designing appliances: focused, single...”
– Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design by Mike Kuniavsky
“The first is augmenting everyday objects. Why invent a new kind of object when...”
– Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design by Mike Kuniavsky
“Ubiquitous computing or ubicomp was coined by Mark Weiser in the early 1990s,...”
– Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design by Mike Kuniavsky
6 tags
Songs I will never hear again
One of my favourite pieces of music is not a conventional ‘song’. It’s a piece generated by the the iPhone app RjDj using the Gridskipper scene when the no 242 bus goes over the potholes near Liverpool St station.
Trouble is they’ve now resurface the road. Without the potholes my song is gone, never to be heard again.
I’m increasingly listening to pieces of music...
“This is all of course pointless and silly. But it’s also charming,...”
– Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones
Mobile Remotes and Dotted Lines →
in the future, objects will be more like avatars; simply dotted lines to the stuff that has real value - the information. There’s something about this idea that has a “there, there”, a convincing quality, that I think is truly magical and could fundamentally re-frames how we think about “stuff” in the world. It takes the value and preciousness away from the object. At UX Week, Mike talked about...
There is More Than One Mobile Context →
“I think I remember one cognitive vice at Dopplr is not invented here, but yay!...”
– Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones
“crafting elegant experiences—from the creative brief to user interface...”
– The Elegance of Imperfection
WatchMoving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing - Rogers
Introducing JSON Template →
makes some smart points about templating. Might try and port it to php, if I have time during appril.
False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself →
BarCampLondon6 →
A ~200 person barcamp that we organised this weekend in the Guardian offices. In the process of gathering up all the blog, images & slides to put on this page.
“I had a conversation this morning where I was told: [music] discovery is one of...”
– Jason’s take on music recommenders & more (via fascinated & artistspaid)
Playdar →
Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now. It will search your local disk (iTunes library, MP3 folder etc.), it will search your home or office network (kinda like searchable iTunes shared libraries) and it will search other sources
WatchWestminster Academy by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
WatchLego Is Inherently Digital
Playful Conference Recap →
Playful is one of those conference where I kick myself for not going afterwards. Next year for sure..
Seeqpod to Developers: Say Goodbye to Free Music
→
We’re concerned about this making it more difficult for late night coders around the world to bust out a shocking new interface for listening to music, but we presume that innovation will live on - even if inconvenienced. We hope it works out for both Seeqpod and the developers that require free access to music in order to do what they do.
“One of the rules of writing algorithms that I’ve recently been sort of...”
– On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley
“You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when...”
– On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley
WatchGreenhalgh Et Al Ubicomp07 - I find the idea of this EQUIP2 framework intriguing and am tempted to create something along these lines, only not in java. Possibly featuring webhooks, mqtt or protocol buffers
WatchReally Interesting Group via cartographer
Really Interesting Group is a multi disciplinary organisation working in post digital design. Ben and Russell will be talking about Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet. TOFHWOTI is a collection of things from the internet we thought would work well on paper. We made it into a newspaper and had it printed with a limited edition run of 1,000.
“After a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It...”
– How the Kindle will change the world
The "You're only a bunch of numbers" pattern
This UI convention is becoming increasingly common. I can see why it would work, it’s a ‘scoreboard’ that turns user activity into a game. Interesting to see facebook used to have it (displaying number of friends, photos & videos beneath the user profile pic) but has now de-emphasised it.
“Designs that encalm and inform meet two human needs not usually met together....”
– Designing Calm Technology
jQuery Fling →
a javascript pub/sub events library
Status bar styles for iPhone web apps →
