…best educated, best prepared, best equipped troops refuse to fight. In fact it is safe to says they would rather swwwiiiitch… than fight…”*
Yup – I’ve gone over… traded in my ‘orrible grey tower work PC for a shiny OSX TiBook… Omnigraffle and Perlhackin’ here I come… yeah!!!
[*With profuse apologies to the late Dr. King, Chuck D. and the Bomb Squad.]
My alignment-test results.
“Law: 0
Chaos: 6
Good: 4
Evil: 2
Your alignment: Chaotic Good
Lazyweb challenge of the day then, is hack up a dynamic/statist/big/little IA-alignment test…
🙂
I’ve sworn off talking about what I do, in place of just doing it; but can’t resist this. Clay, in his continuing metamorphosis toward being the James Randi of the web; has a new piece up debunking some digital-divide myths. In it he points to an interesting idea – Dynamists vs. Statists.
“Virginia Postrel, in her book “The Future and Its Enemies”, (ISBN: 0684862697) suggests that the old distinctions of right and left are now less important than a distinction between statists and dynamists. Statists are people who believe that the world either is or should be a controlled, predictable place. Dynamists, by contrast, see the world as a set of dynamic processes”
This is great! It give us all another axis of definition to argue about! I like it because it reminds me of alignment in D&D… I was always chaotic-good… and now I guess I’m a “Big-Dynamist” IA… Heheh.
“Developed by self-confessed cricket nut Dr Paul Hawkins in collaboration with contract research and development outfit Roke Manor Research, Hawk-Eye uses vision processing technology to track the progress of a cricket ball as it is released from the bowler’s fingers and travels towards the batsman. Three high-speed cameras placed around the ground take around 450 images of the ball in flight. These are processed into a 3D graphical track of the ball, in an action that takes about 1.5 seconds. “Hawk-Eye can track the flight of a ball and position it to within a tolerance of 5mm anywhere on the field,” says Hawkins.
Designed principally as a tool to explain and aid lbw decisions, Hawk-Eye’s graphical representations have become a crucial part of the commentator’s arsenal. “Hawk-Eye can show where the ball was pitched, how the line deviated, whether the bowler put any swing on the ball, how high it bounced and what speed it was travelling at, as well as predicting if it would have hit the wicket in any lbw decision,” says Hawkins.”
Alex Wright has got some of the prototype sketches for the UI designs seen in the new Spielberg movie, Minority Report.
» Alex Wright’s blog: 6.26.2002 : UI prototyping, Hollywood-style
Bit busy with low-tech augmentation of reality at the moment but just time to ctrl-d this entry of Yoz’s which looks to have tons of good stuff in it about ubiquitous computing, simulation of urban patterns and augmented reality.
Somebody out there on the Lazyweb[tm] do this. Please! Personal mind-marketmaps…
“Random Idea:
- take the access logs from a weblog
- work out how many hits each individual entry gets
- use this to choose a background colour for that entry
Now adapt this process to work in realtime. The more popular stuff (which is likely to be the most interesting) will stick out, less popular stuff will fade into the background, giving attentive visitors an easy way to jump straight to the best content.”
Really, really going to have to write up some stuff about Ben Fry‘s talk; but in the mean time, Peter’s been talking with another info.vis.Guru, Marti Hearst:
“Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they’ve been treated as standalone applications, “Look at this thing! And how beautiful it is!” Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations.
Nathan:
“Experiences happen through time and space and reflect a context thatÂ’s always greater than we realize. Building understanding for our audience and participants necessarily starts with context, yet most of our experiences with computers and devices, including application software, hardware, operating systems, websites, etc. operate as if theyÂ’re somehow independent of whatÂ’s happening around them. Most people donÂ’t make these distinctions.”
…which leads nicely into Quinn:
“CLIs have long been our retarded little friends that do whatever we say, but only if we say it exactly right.
GUIs are more intimidating; they get the first and last words in. They use language and visuals to speak to us as something closer to equals. We’ve kept them largely separate and tried to keep them both very non threatening.
Our metaphors were as dry and workaday as you can get: our solopsist desktop, WIMP. The next metaphor which has already started to poke out a bit (especially from the net) is more organic.
It changes and flows with us and engages us more completely. It exists and is even active when we aren’t looking at it. It incorporates language, written and verbal and the virtual physicality that we have now without the GUI. As such, it incorporates more of us and has the opportunity to move with us and with the network as a whole, both other machines and people.
Computers don’t exist in vacuums anymore, nourished by long carefully drawn out strings of characters. It would be good to stop behaving as if this is the more powerful way to use them. This isn’t just a new metaphor for the GUI, it’s a new metaphor for computer use that the GUI and CLI and a verbal component could wrap around.”
» Boxesandarrows.com: Computer Human Values by Nathan Shedroff
You decide!
Petafloptimism 