-
"Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design."
This has actually turned out to be a biweek note, because I didn’t get around to posting anything last Friday.
Last week was mainly a quick trip to London – partly to chase down a few potential opportunities, and partly as a chance to behave more like a tourist than an inmate.
The Victoria & Albert Museum is running the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition which is something I’d been wanting to see. From the exhibition microsite:
“Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.”
I’m not convinced it managed to reach those aims. The interactive exhibits were pretty good in the main – some fell firmly into the “draw something on a screen” category, but a couple seemed to have the ability to make people stop and think. Weave Mirror uses a camera to capture visitors, then displays a low fidelity image of them on a grid of rotating rings that are shaded from light to dark. The resolution is only 32 x 24, but I was surprised by how recognisable the results were, and how you “fill in” detail to recognise yourself.
Videogrid displays a grid of individual 1 second clips captured by a camera pointing at the passers-by – what fascinated me was how within the expected mosaic of people waving frantically at themselves, there were a few who would stand still, or embrace, or look away from the camera. The effect was to create little oases of calm in the middle of the blur of activity.
The ‘code’ exhibits were something of a let-down for me – the problem is that the standard of everyday computer generated imagery is so high, it renders the impact of the artworks at the level of “wow, another iTunes visualisation”. There were a couple which felt more like “my first Processing sketch” puffed up by catalogue-worthy statements of intent.
And on the whole, the ‘network’ section seemed to either rehash old ideas that work best on the screen of a laptop – We Feel Fine, or Flight Patterns – or simply didn’t work. There were a number of exhibits that were broken or had crashed – in one case with a Windows error dialogue displayed prominently. Or perhaps that was a statement in itself?
However, the rest of the Museum more than made up for the Decode letdown – much of it has been redone since I last had a chance to just wander around. The new medieval galleries are overwhelming with the sheer volume of exhibits, but it’s the smaller, more tucked-away galleries where the real gems lie. I hadn’t seen the jewellery or silver collections before, both of which are displayed to real effect.
This week was divided in the middle by the Sheffield Social Media surgery, and Geekup. There were more surgeons than were needed this time around, so it was a chance to chat to some very interesting individuals about wider stuff. Then after 12 months of trying, I finally managed to make it to a Sheffield Geekup, and was talked into doing a presentation. I find it difficult to think of a topic when faced with that kind of audience – there’s not much I can really tell a Geekup crowd about technology – so instead I went for a “what you can do with it” angle and did 15 mins on “Mad Things To Do With Twitter”. Some of those were mine – River Thames and the Shipping Forecast – while the others were things like the twittering bridges. People laughed more than I’d expected, which I’m going to assume was because it went reasonably well – whenever I speak in public, I always end up doing it in a haze of adrenalin which makes it impossible to remember afterwards if it was successful or whether I died on my feet.
And inbetween everything else, I’ve been plugging away at Objective-C and the iPhone SDK to put together an app for Wordr. It’s taking far, far longer than I’d ever have anticipated, but the learning curve is fairly steep and seems to be best handled by my subconscious trying to make sense of things while I’m sleeping or walking the dog and so on. The basics are in place, so now comes the stage of trying to embed oAuth authentication into it so that it will use Twitter to log into the Wordr site itself. Which should take care of most of next week…
-
Worked example of pull-to-reload TableView
-
MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects (NSArrays, NSDictionarys, NSStrings, NSDates and so on), for very easy integration into your own application.
-
"If there was ever proof needed that decentralisation of the core is a good thing, then I’ve been immersed in it for the week so far. I wonder what would happen if we put the appropriate end-user computing tools in the hands of these people and said “design the perfect Job Centre system”. My guess would be something good."
The Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Work and Pensions GETS IT. You can't overemphasise what an insightful comment that last sentence is, coming from someone in the heart of Big Government. Maybe there is hope after all…
-
After pointing out very tongue-in-cheek why your community is such a painful group of people (e.g. "They mess up your marketing plans by doing their own marketing and PR" or "They mess up your product plans with unexpected innovation"), he proceeds to give you a perfect run down of ten ways to be rid of them with excellent examples.
-
Demo of augmented reality for mobiles through touch
-
"But the general idea of the app we will build is that it will use an XML file online to get the URL and title of a given picture. For each URL and Title pair a view will be created with a UIImageView showing the image and a UILabel showing the title. Each of these views will be placed in a UIScrollView to flip through, like th functinoality of the Photos app."
-
"Using OAuth allows you to write applications that access the Twitter API but do not require your users to give you their Twitter username and password" Plain English explanation of OAuth in a Twitter context.
-
iProxy does not give you tethering – it just gives you the next best thing. A SOCKS5 proxy on your iPhone. Essentially what the famous netshare app did before it got pulled from the App Store.
This is going to be a quick one, ostensibly because I’ve been on holiday all week in the Lakes. This has involved doing as little as possible, which translated in practice into getting my head around the way iPhones handle multiple views within an application; and reading an entire 756-page novel from end to end.
I hadn’t intended to do *anything* technically-inclined, but that was obviously the cue my brain needed to slot various different bits of Objective-C syntax into place in a way that now (seems) to make sense. The book is the first entire piece of fiction I’ve read in a sitting for several years, and it’s something I’ll try to make a habit of given the time.
