Recently in UI Category
Of course, this will all change next month when the SDK is released.
I've renamed my ITP thesis project Polarizr... since PolarWeb just sounds... stupid. The website and Firefox extension will be made public [well, it will be in exclusive, invite-only alpha] this weekend.
I've been working on a couple link visualizations for the browsing history network dashboard section/functionality... here's a sneak peak:
I'm not sure if the original PolarFox extension will be ready by next Wednesday May the 3rd (Has my 2 years at ITP gone by this fast? Crazy), though I will continue development [albeit slowly, gotta pay rent].
Check out the slides for my final Thesis Class presentation [with Nick Law].
Great new audio synthesis interface popping up around the blogosphere. Jeff Hanh on oscilators.
via City Of Sound
UPDATE :: project site can be found here — thanks Fino.
Why does UIE.com (User Interface Engineering) look as though it was built with MS Front Page? Maybe they should should consider a name-change. I would suggest: BAIPBIE (Boring Anachronistic and Innapropriate Paper-Based Interface Engineering).
Mog is a web-based social app for sharing musical tastes. Think Last.FM, MySpace, community blog, blah blah blah. Honestly, I don't like it at all. Why? Stupid name, Bad user interface, lackluster and unintuitive profiling, and really, not a robust or substantial enough concept.
After registering, the first thing a new user sees is a god-aweful group of blocks. Like the old New York Times, but poorly designed, with no reason behind the placement I could see. A good many of the blocks seemed like filler, and the entire concept hedges on the downloaded player. The attempt at transparent interfaces (hollar at you AJAX) is crap, not at all what it could be.
Registering was as far as I got. Is as far as I will ever go. The greatest thing about Mog, for my intents and purposes, is that the whole mess provides a bad example... A positive negative. WRNYC will not be like this. I promise.
I've recently been developing in JSP/EJB/Java with AJAX (all pulling from MySQL), and have to say, I really like it. Tough to get a handle on at first, the framework has proved to be super powerful. I find the JSP scripting is complimented nicely by Java. Will definately get more projects going with this toolset in the future.
Last Thursday, June 1, I attended the UMD Human Computer Interaction Labs Annual Symposium. Students presented a number of really interesting projects on subjects ranging from data-vis to network analysis to interface design. The day was divided into Visual Interfaces, Public Access, and Interaction & Devices.
The presentations opened with a talk by Ben Schneiderman on creativity. I thought the address was pretty dull and academic, though some interesting areas were touched upon. I've always found any kind of studied tool to enhance creativity to be... well... bullshit. But what's an opinion worth...
Another dissapointing talk came soon after, on the topic of search catagorization. I found this obtuse and outmoded, completely uninformed by all the recent positive developments in internet tech and culture. Kules and Schneiderman argued for 'meaningful and stable categories' — which is a hugely silly notion. There was no question of the authority imposing said categories, and how said categories can evolve, morph, change with the context.
James Rose, Catherine Plaisant, Matt Kirschenbaum, and others presented a body of work on data mining and visual interfaces that I found intelligent and enjoyable. The students took the body of Emily Dickenson's letters and studied the erotic content utilizing bayesian filtering. I was dissapointed at the weak metric used for classification—basically the hot-or-not interface—I found it weak. Would have been interesting to see some biometrics at work, or something with more sophistication.
Adam Perer presented a visually intense network-vis project. The rank-by-feature framework seemed a little goofy, and had quite a number of visible holes, but the filtering and aggregation made up a bulk of the slack.
NetLens really stood out in my eyes, an 'Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data.' This presented the first really great interface of the day (aside from the previous presentation—Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks). The presentation was not overly crowded, and the interaction was rich. Really, the amount of possibilities this interface provided was stunning. Definately worth checking out.
Its good to see that some people are thinking critically about web 2.0 technologies, namely AJAX. ThinkVitamin throws up a good read on the pitfalls presented by irresponsible use of AJAX.
With all the new innovation in mobile tech, one would think the interfaces would be improved. There's a growing frustration with the ridiculous effort navigating a mobile device requires. There are a number of screens, with interaction paths that are really non-sensical—and these are on every single handset interface.
An article in Wired, titled Just Give Me a Simple Phone outlines some of the exasperation the regular consumer feels when confronted with the red-tape and electronic beurocracy of mobile phones.
