Memories of Fake Buttons Past & Present

January 26th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized
Tags: design, hardware, ui, ux

I remember using an app called PacerForum on my IIfx back in the mid 90s. You wouldn’t mistake it for something complicated, it was just a glorified discussion forum. But the memory I kept of that app was the simple presentation of discussion topics:

Just a short title, a little graphic if you wanted and some color (not demonstrated here.) This is about actual size which means the icon size strikes a good balance between too much/too little. This icon/button combo always worked for me. There’s something physical about the size and the presentation. You want to touch them.

If you bank with Wells Fargo you hopefully have seen the new(ish) ATM design using the modern-day equivalent of PacerForum buttons:

It’s finger-friendly, the controls are big, almost physical. Minimal amounts of info on the screen means less clutter and more focus. There’s some nice background on the project from one of the designers available too.

Frog’s Celltop project takes the big button concept and shrinks it for the mobile phone.

However this video overview probably does a better job of communicating how it works:

There’s always the danger of taking a perfectly good UI concept and shoehorning it awkwardly into a new environment. The PacerForum and Wells Fargo ATM design succeeded because of what they left out. Celltop took the button and made it a data-rich widget–dense with info and light on context. You no longer think about “touching” these things.

But touch is everywhere now. The iPhone still defines the experience with HTC (Android handsets), Blackberry and maybe even Palm coming up fast. Finger-friendly is only getting more important.

The people over jazzmutant.com have come up with a generic input device for controlling music and video apps, custom things, etc. etc. And it is totally multi-touch. You design the interface and you design how that interface controls your app. Meet the Lemur:

The videos are quite interesting, as is paging thru the manual (PDF).

Here’s an actual live use of a Lemur:

Links January 26th

January 26th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized

• Plugins – Textmate Footnotes – Agile Web Development – "This plugin saves you time when moving between your browser and Textmate. It adds clickable links to the Rails backtrace when an error occurs, and clickable footnotes to the bottom of each page (in development mode only). These links open the correct file in Textmate and move your cursor to the precise line of interest."
• Juice Analytics – Bubble, bubble toil and trouble – "Recently we wanted to show how Concentrate, our new long-tail search analytics tool, could give you a view of search patterns across travel websites. As political junkies, we were inspired by this chart from our friends at the NY Times." and they use nodebox
• How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!) – well there is a spreadsheet….
• Compojure on a Slicehost VPS « Eric Lavigne –
• Data Mining with R: learning by case studies – "The goal of this document is not to describe all facets of data mining processes. Many books exist that cover this area. Instead we propose to introduce the reader to the power of R and data mining, by means of several case studies."

Bookmarks for January 18th through January 21st

January 21st, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized

• Web Design Resources I Use – everything on one single page
• Automating Data Visualization with Ruby and Graphviz – OmniNerd – interesting simple manufacturing logistics example
• CSCI B656 Web Mining – Web Mining class syllabus
• VAIO P催生者 – 詫摩智朗訪談實錄 | 癮科科討論區 – some interesting pics of the vaio p, engadget has a translation. see design sketches, accessories, etc.
• Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: pirates and scalpels – "Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides. What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday." i sure love paper. but i resent having to use it.

Best Mac Ever

January 21st, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized

2009 will bring the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh and the question: what is the greatest Mac ever?

Some folks are already calling the Mac SE/30 the winner. I can understand that. It was my first Mac too. A true workhorse.

I was first introduced to what became my Greatest Mac Ever in the late 80s with the Mac IIci. I think I paired it with a Radius monitor. Fast, reliable and expandable. Had this one for a long time.

And what does Mr Jobs think?

At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Reading between the lines: look forward to a new Mac Mini rev soon! Sounds like a legitimate rumor to me.

This is how I’ll remember it

January 19th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized
Tags: architecture, photography, retail

NOTIFBUTWHEN #2: January 2009

Bookmarks for January 12th through January 15th

January 15th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized

• Noisy Decent Graphics: All the ephemera that's fit to print * – this one post contains everything i get excited about: typography, design, printing, newsprint, the internet and big loud machines.
• sketch.basement.org –
• Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition with Phusion Passenger | Perplexed Labs – "I’ve been using Phusion Passenger for a few months now and I’m really pleased with it. The performace vs. Mongrel is better, but what makes it so useful is the ease of deployment. Being able to setup a vhost in Apache just like you would for a PHP application was very appealing to me. Having previously worked with the Apache/Rails/Mongrel/mod_proxy stack in an “enterprise” environment for over a year, I have experienced pretty much every nightmare deployment scenario possible. I recently decided to install Phusion’s Ruby Enterprise Edition, which promises up to a 33% savings in memory usage."
• The New Examined Life – WSJ.com – "The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data — every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren't random, and are more orderly than some might expect."
• Nine By Blue » Nine By Blue – "The future of business is online, where everything can be counted, measured, and tracked. From this overwhelming sea of data exist the key insights to guide product strategy and customer engagement for greater overall success. You need those key insights. Not the overwhelming sea."

Good bye Mr McGoohan

January 14th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized
Tags: architecture, design, video

Someone gave me The Prisoner TV series DVD box set long ago. Had no idea what to expect but was totally absorbed once I started watching. This was great TV. Obvious the care and thought that went into every aspect, from the dialog to the things hanging on the walls. Sadly #6 just passed away.

Bookmarks for January 8th through January 12th

January 12th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized

• Quick-R: Home Page – "R is an elegant and comprehensive statistical and graphical programming language. Unfortunately, it can also have a steep learning curve. I created this website for experienced users of popular statistical packages such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, and Systat (although current R users should also find it useful). My goal is to help you quickly access this language in your work."
• Free Websites Performance, Availability, Traffic Monitoring –
• Introducing Concentrate for Long Tail Search Analytics: Juice Analytics – "We want you to understand and act on all your search data. Concentrate ingests data from sources that most sites already have available (e.g Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, Hitwise, Compete, etc.), enhances this data by finding common patterns and query types, and visualizes search phrases for exploration and analysis."
• How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic – ReadWriteWeb – "In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post." someone comments on how this should be automated….
• 21 Free Apps For Mac OS X That Are Absolutely Useful –
• This Rimy River: Vaughn Oliver and Graphic Works 1988-94 — The Designer's Review of Books – "Not a standard ‘design’ book, This Rimy River is actually an elaborate gallery catalogue to Vaughn Oliver’s show at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles in 1994 with the catalogue not only made for the show, but also serving as a unique snapshot of Oliver’s work in the period 1988 – 1994 when he went freelance and started the ‘v23‘ freelance moniker."

The Making of Forever / Victoria & Albert Museum

January 9th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized
Tags: design, processing.org, video, visualization

The Making of Forever / Victoria & Albert Museum from Universal Everything.

And catch a glimpse of Karsten Schmidt’s sketchbook as he works out the details.

Debugging with a drill

January 8th, 2009 • Comments Off Uncategorized
Tags: hardware

We’ve got this great old lamp that blew up recently. Smoke, black charred bits, scary. Easy enough to fix right? NO! The Master Craftsman that originally put this together must’ve been able to bend space & time. Wire doesn’t normally bend at right angles unassisted, much less an acute angle like this:

But the person that wired this up back in the 1960s did it. Twice even.

I spent a couple of days trying to make it happen. Different gauge wire, wire lube (such a thing exists!), hacks with hooks, pulling, pushing, whatever. Other than sore thumbs, nothing.

So could applying some practical real-world software engineering experience help? When facing a code problem, the first tool out of the bag is usually the log statement. (Logging helps you get a better grasp on how a particular piece of code works by exposing the inner workings. Very low-tech, very hacky.)

In my case, I dragged out the power drill and starting adding log statements to my lamp assembly. Luckily I just needed one:

That little black hole at the junction there was all it took. Under real lighting I was able to see how it all came together. Once again, props to the original builder, pretty clever. Sure it’s unsightly but like most code bases, that’s life. Anyway the light works now and everything is hidden by the lampshade.