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The Animation object extends the Processing development environment. It's a new object which removes much of the tedious bookkeeping involved in creating graphical motion effects.
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I am immersing myself into the world of dials and meters for FRED project and I wanted to share with you some of the lovely things we’ve unearthed in our research.
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Augmented reality pundits, myself included, purport that the nascent technology will change our lives. But really, that’s what technology is all about. Even the lowly vacuum cleaner was sold as a way to free the housewife from her oppressive chores.
A better question might be to ask how augmented reality will change our lives, and more importantly, how will it change our brains. The brief snapshot of its effect in the story above was to illustrate the result of a ubiquitous computing environment. But to truly understand, we have to go deeper into the actual brain matter and watch how AR might change it. -
I've been reading and learning about non-speech audio feedback and how it might be used in NUI. A particularly good resource on the subject is a book that was being written by Bill Buxton and others in the early 90's, but was never finished called Auditory Interfaces: The Use of Non-speech Audio at the Interface – the unfinished book is on-line and free to read.
There is a lot of ways to slice and dice the topic non-speech audio feedback, but one way of looking at it is in terms of signals and data representation.
Archive for the ‘Links’ Category
William Heath has put up a post called “What the smart government IT supplier needs to say in 12 weeks’ time“. I started a comment there which grew to the size of a post, so I figured I might as well put it up here as well.
He asks the question:
“Now: here’s the crux. Britain’s new post-election government may be pretty hostile to its IT suppliers. Whichever colour it is it faces the same problems, but let us assume for sake of argument it is Conservative.
Relations have not improved since the unseemly spat between Intellect and David Davies over ID System contracts. Big IT suppliers and their big bills are definitely seen as “part of the problem” in Tory HQ, as is the trade association, and an ineffectual (overpromoted/overpaid) CIO culture and the excessively big, out-of control IT projects they have cooked up.
What is a smart government IT supplier to do in this situation?”
I suspect that the big IT houses are going to be having more and more conversations with people like James Gardner, a former banker who is now Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Earlier this month he posted about his experiences of spending a week in a Job Centre somewhere in the Rust Belt of Scotland.
Apologies for quoting from his post at length, but I think this is a significant illustration of a mind shift taking place:
“But here is another thing I’ve found in this Job Centre, and it is something I’m not surprised about.
Staff build their own stuff to get around the limitations of systems we provide. There are Excel based spreadsheets which are used for diary management (“oh, I can’t have this open too long, otherwise no-one else will be able to make appointments”). There is email based workflow, where each step is a new inbox that gets manually monitored. And there’s any number of self-made data capturing things that are used for statistics and business reporting.
And all of it is stitched together with another technology: paper. They create their own forms, and their own paper based systems in order to supplement their jobs.
Consequently, the work is processed in a highly efficient way. I’d make a guess that each JobCentre does things slightly differently, depending on how good their custom additions to each of our centrally provided processes are.
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.”
Having been involved in the peripheries of Big Projects in the past, I’ve often wondered if the reason that they fail is linked to their sheer size and the capacity of an ordinary human being to cope with the scale.
Beyond a certain size, it seems that the probability of success by any definition tends to zero, and no amount of tinkering with the political complexions or terminology or methodology-of-the-month will change that.
At some point in history, the processes that cause these problematic systems to be created in the first place either didn’t exist, or were paper-based. That suggests a couple of questions.
Perhaps if the processes didn’t exist before IT, they can’t exist after IT – because they’re too large and complex to be administered in the first place.
And maybe moving from paper to digital processes doesn’t actually increase efficiency once you account for the eleventy-billion pound cost of the digital process itself.
Sure, there’s a superficial improvement by virtue of being able to call up a record on the screen rather than retrieve it from a shelf somewhere – but the true cost of the operation is a lot greater than the immediately-apparent interaction would suggest.
I spent half an hour yesterday trying to update a gas bill online, and failing because the British Gas system didn’t like the combination of address and name on the account. Talking (eventually) to a call centre agent, it turns out that this is a routine problem for them.
Viewed simplistically, the online process is a Good Thing, because it’s more (apparently) efficient. But viewed holistically, it’s a disaster, because it’s creating additional work for both customer AND organisation. The issue is that the process won’t ever be seen holistically, because the organisation isn’t taking into account my contribution.
What all this suggests – it’s just my gut feel, I’ve no empirical evidence to back this up other than a hunch – is that the days of the monumentally collossal top-down design is over, simply because they’re too expensive and too complex to work.
That the future is more likely to consist of patchworks of systems – and a realisation that apparent inefficiencies aren’t actually curable without spending more time and money than was wasted in the first place.
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I'll show you a little update of my code where I've put a table view controller in the second tab that is displaying some dummy data. Actually it's really pretty simple.
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With as3swf you can automatically generate Objective-C source code (Core Graphics, Quartz) from SWF Shapes, to reuse those shapes in your iPhone projects. The as3swf Core Graphics shape exporter generates ready-to-use Objective-C class files (UIView subclasses).
Another day, another Daily Mail-esque panic about how social networking is causing the downfall of modern society as we know it. This time it’s pleaserobme.com, a site that scrapes location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla and publicises the fact that you’re – shock, horror – not at home.
It’s a clever idea, but it does of course rely on a certain amount of coding skill to be able to set it up in the first place.
So, in the spirit of opening the web to wider participation, I’m putting *my* method of figuring out which house is worth robbing into the public domain. No copyright, no patents, fully Creative Commonsed for your remixing pleasure of this simple four-step process.
Step One.
Drive or walk around your intended target area during the hours of darkness, and make careful note of houses with cars parked outside.
Step Two.
Return the following day during office hours, and carefully note the location of those houses which no longer have cars parked outside.
Step Three.
Break into those houses which are sans-car – the owners are likely to be out.
Step Four.
Profit!
You’ll notice that *my* process has no internet component, unless you want to keep those notes in a Google spreadsheet or something.
Clearly the ease with which I – and you, with a little training and practice – can detect which houses are potentially empty is a serious threat to the cohesion of modern society, so I fully expect that insurance companies will react accordingly. I’m looking forward to reading the press releases which mutter darkly about how people who have the temerity to park their cars outside their houses will see their insurance premiums rise to counter this threat.
And no doubt the Daily Mail will start a campaign to ban the use of non-garage parking – isn’t it better to be safe than sorry, after all?
Unfortunately this is just another demonstration of how “internet” somehow gets equated with “new” when it comes to potential risks. The additional risk posed to your belongings by posting your whereabouts on Gowalla is so small as to be impossible to calculate, however much the actuaries would love to try. If we stopped to contemplate every risk of this type, we’d cower in corners and never go anywhere – let alone multiplying them by the bogeyman factor of teh Interwebs.
It’s lazy journalism at best, and lazy thinking if you *do* take it too seriously.
Oh, and if you are planning on using my Gowalla checkins to work out when you can pop round to relieve me of my belongings, there’s a couple of things you should bear in mind. Firstly, just because I’m out it doesn’t necessarily follow that my house is empty. And secondly, be sure to introduce yourself to my large, snarly and (potentially) bitey dog while you’re round…
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"Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.
This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page's user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a "donate now" button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling."
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"The new couple, freshly back from their honeymoon, remove the wrapping to reveal a book-sized wooden box elaborately carved with elephant images. (I didn’t carve it; I bought it that way at World Market.) Mounted into the lid, perhaps incongruously, are an illuminated button, a small display, and a mysterious module that sharp-eyed readers might recognize as a GPS. There’s also some kind of connector tucked away on the box’s left side."
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"About 2 years ago, after printing out the site onto what has now become jokingly known as the 'Wall of Shame' we decided to embark on an ambitious project, called Global Visual Language 2.0, with the aim of unifying the visual and interaction design of bbc.co.uk and the mobile website."
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"Urban Defender is a location-aware game that takes place in cities and towns. The game and its main interface, the ball, are situated inside the real world. Other location based games often only work with displays or have navigational character. This game is based upon elements that are fundamental to people in urban situations: districts and their habitants. Targeting children and young adults, the goal and main rule of the game is: try to conquer as many quarters as possible, reinforce these quarters and defend them against other players."
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"This page is dedicated to making available for download all the episodes of In Our Time, an extremely informative BBC radio program discussing the history of ideas that have shaped our time."
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10 ways you know you’re with smart people
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Table of Linux alternatives for Mac apps
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"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."
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Worked example of pull-to-reload TableView
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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.
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"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…
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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.
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Demo of augmented reality for mobiles through touch
