We have an “On notice” whiteboard at work. I have been on it lately for not posting to my blog. I am bad at doing that. If you do the chronomath, you will see that it has been almost a year since my last post to regnskygge.net. I need to be better about it. I admire friends like Aprille, Danny, Scott and Holly who can be dedicated to posting regularly.
I officially declare myself “Off notice”.
Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 1530
Alex Steffen, Executive Editor, Worldchanging.com
The debate is basically over about the need to change our course before we overreach the world’s carrying capacity.
There is a lot of room for innovation
Earth sandwich – http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/
Good example: Car sharing. About half the resources of a car are used to make it for you, get it to you, and, in the end, take it away. Car sharing reduces the need for cars by 1 to 6. People who share cars make more efficient trips.
The same applies to other items. For example, a power drill is actually used for 15-20 minutes during its entire life.
The British found that moving the energy meter inside the house and visible reduced energy usage by 10-12% without changing anything else.
Why don’t companies take everything back once we are done with them.
Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 1130
David Merkoski, Assoc Creative Dir, Frog Design
Television is broken because the current generation is growing up when the internet is the primary media force that offers choice and interactive options.
“massive passive” and “tragically equipped”
“Ten-foot UI” — TV / user interface
EPG – electronic programming guide
Problems with current EPGs: linear and not scalable; they are based in time
Non-linear video has so much going for it except it lacks the televisual experience (i.e., edge-to-edge, immersive experience). If the non-linear video can achieve this, the tragically equipped will bail the tradition TV box.
Mondrian is the system they developed at Frog. Combines traditional, time-anchored TV streams with time-shifted videos of my choosing or by recommedation.
ZUIs – zoomable user interfaces (not so much about depth as perspective) a class of GUI
Think of it as modern day hunter-gatherers. Berries and nuts are north; fresh water is west….etc.
The four-way rocker switch “embodies the cardinality of direction in its design”
It allows control without interupting the televisual experience – cognitive interopability
WIMP (windows, icons, menu, and pointer) – Basically, the class of GUI that we use all the time. Problems: There is no pointer in the 10-foot UI and icons are too abstract and need to be too large for the 10ft UI.
Supermodality
First, what is modality. Modality is something we deal with all the time: dialog boxes, Clippy, context of the interface (e.g., typing ‘M’ in Word as compared to the desktop which selects a file). Modal interfaces expect the user to act in a certain way and when she/he does not a modal dialog results signifying error. It traps users in the process that is designed for them by the engineers and designers.
Modelessness does not apply the restrictions. Although it is an amazing design goal to approach, a total lack of interface would not work. A good example of a successful simplification of modes is the iPod. However, we can still experience modal errors/traps with the iPod (e.g., while searching the iPod one is unable to change the volume of a currently playing song).
Supermodality is a lifting of borders and restrictions. The extremes are evident in choice.
Great example: Half-Life Portal video
In supermodality there can be doors anywhere. It is hyperlinking an interface – folding its space to eliminate barriers.
Supermodality is a superset of GUI/ZUI/WIMP
It is about ridiculously-constrained interface design that gives the user amazing freedom.
haptics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic
Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 1000
Mark Boulton, Owner, Mark Boulton Design
Richard Rutter, Production Dir, Clearleft Ltd
Presentation link: http://webtypography.net/sxsw2007/
typography: the mechanical notation and arrangement of language
[See the List Apart article about em and en dashes – http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/]
Tools: Smartypants (http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/) and TextStyle for blogging engines
In headings and titles, use the best possible ampersand. Look at Simplebits span wrap of ampersands — cool.
Vertical rhythm
Layout
Fonts and typefaces
Conclusion
My lingering thoughts
Book: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (link)
…the water smells like it has been filtered from the river with dual rounds of chickenwire.
Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1700
Aza Raskin, Pres, Humanized
Presentation (or facsimile): http://www.humanized.com/presentations/Ajaxian/
GOMS modeling: allows you to take an interface and figure out how long it will take a user to use an interface.
Information efficiency: how much info put into a system vs. how much is minimally needed.
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/
Interface: The way you accomplish tasks with a product
To a user, the interface is the product. Beautiful and clever solutions under the hood mean nothing without an elegant user interface.
I don’t know what percentage of our time on any computer-based project is spent getting the equipment to work right, but if I had a gardener who spent as much of her time fixing her shovel as we spend fooling with our computers, I’d buy her a good shovel. – Erasmus Smums
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein
The problem is that applications are like isolated cities.
Word <-> Photoshop <-> Mathematica example of the application centric model
What does an interface do?
Everything is an outgrowth of these four basic transformations.
Just like Asimov’s laws of robotics:
Content is Everything
The desktop is not about content.
How does the web have better examples?
Language has untapped power.
What does the desktop do?
It lets you create a state to enter content
Categorization
Navigation
huge 2D desktop: enso
Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1530
Marcel Molina, Rails Core
Steven Smith, CEO
[Since I don’t use Rails, this one may be a bit over my head, but I am tall, intelligent and, darn it, people like me.]
Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1400
Frances Berriman, Volume
Michael Kaply, IBM (backnetwork) (kaply.com/weblog/)
Glenn Jones, Creative Dir, Madgex
Tantek Çelik, Chief Technologist, Technorati
Microformats started at SXSW 2003 with xfn (the rel tag).
Site (http://microformats.org/) launched in 2005.
Event sites have benefited greatly from microformats.
Stanford has marked up everything with hcard and hcal.
Firefox plug-in: Operator – exploits any found microformats on any page and connects them to upcoming.org, Google Calendar or Maps, etc. (This is so friggin’ cool!). Check out the debugging mode to peer into the DOM.
backnetwork
Tantek is folding his t-shirts during the presentation.
Microformats do not have working groups like the W3C. The concern that this would lead to too many microformats has not happened. The process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats) keeps this from happening.
Microformats evolve in the real world of the web – describing real data rather than being prescribed.
www.edgeio.com – hosting/aggregator for hlistings
hcard crawler – alexa
Who is Jeremy Keith (guest panelist) (he later helped pay for free drinks for gobs of SXSWites at the Lava Lounge as part of the Boffins).
Research:
Drew Mclellan has created a DW plugin to support microformats.
Microformats could be thought of as low-level, read-only APIs.
Hiding your address from spammers: checkout Mike’s Musings and see how it is parsed on his page?
Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1130
Randal Moss, Mgr of Innovation Based Strategies, American Cancer Society
Erin Anderson, eCommunity Mgr, American Cancer Society
Keith Morris, Electric Sheep Company
David Neff, Director of Online Communications, American Cancer Society
As a steward of voluteer-raised money, the ACS must be extra careful when investing money into the next big thing/tech on the internet.
They use del.icio.us as their web glossary.
They use Flickr to post photos from all kinds of events (e.g., tag:relayforlife). Along with a CC license they use those for promotion.
Blogs are used to create very small communities (e.g., a group of 5 people using TypePad to create a blog to quite smoking).
labs.cancer.org – an idea from Google Labs
They use Drupal (relayforlife.org) because of the vibrant community surrounding it.
Lots of people know PHP and can help maintain/augment the code.
Second Life Relay for Life – all I can say is wow.
http://slrfl.org/