Victor – Page 38 – Noise Between Stations

Instantaneous Posting

There’s a sidebar on your blog and it too is a blog. But it’s simply a list of links. And the list is powered by your visitors. They stop by and, like a coin in the metal box at the cathedral, leave you a link. The metal box in this case is a text box with a ‘Post it’ button. No seperate pages, no passwords, nothing else. The page refreshes and the link is added instantaneously.

(I kinda like the cathedral metaphor, because the donations benefit all future visitors)

I’m sure this is a quick scripting excercise, but is anyone already doing this, or does the script already exist?

Ward on IAWiki

Wow, Ward Cunningham stopped by the IAWiki. That’s like Warren Buffett stopping by your local investment group to see what’s up.

Training Down the Hudson

Heading north from New York City the rail line runs along the Hudson river and all sorts of mid-20th Century infrastructure. Just pointing my Elph out the window as it all sped by, and hoping Amtrak doesn’t collapse.

Webby Award Winner

Tolerance.org, for which I did the original IA and led the experience team, won a Webby for best Activism site. And Guggenheim.com, produced by some friends of mine, won for best broadband site. That’s nice.

I still think awards are stupid, somewhat opposed to the aims of user-centered design. But I slaved over that site, so I’ll be over here basking in the ‘congratulations’ emails for a while.

Powerpoint

Speaking of Powerpoint, I think the common format sucks, but not in the usual way people say it sucks (too concise to be meaningful, or boring). I think communicating in presentation format is fine when the occasion calls for it. The problems I see are

During a presentation people are either listening to me speak or reading my slide, not both simultaneously, and
a deck doesn’t contain enough information to be meaningful on its own after the presentation.

So, I’m going to try a format that uses one big image next to a paragraph of text. The text will be at a typeface impossible to read from the audience, wherever that is, so people will be forced to either listen to me or daydream. And it will contain more information than the usual bullet points, so it’ll make sense without having to present it. And the image will serve to reinforce the words, or induce daydreaming. I will feed their ears and their eyes and they shall be satisfied.

Last year, I think, I did some work at an Ivory Tower consulting firm. They have a rich tradition of internal research; every consultant is required to pump out a certain minimum of work for internal use per year. In recent history though, instead of the old white papers, consultants have been contributing their Powerpoint slides to the pool of thought. And when searching for research internally (which they, in their elite position, prefer), the librarians there report they tend to read Powerpoint decks over other formats, as the information in that format is accessed more quickly. I have to wonder if they’ve found a more efficient way or if there’s details being lost in the shuffle in the interest of speed.

n_gen Interview

Remember n_gen (site’s down, or else I’d link there)? There’s an interview with its makers. Smart, sensible folks. My favorite bits:

By analyzing what we believe to be successful designs, is it possible to determine formulae for what is pleasing to the eye? What are the rules and principles that talented designers instinctively employ in their work and can these rules be simulated by a computer program? ….

We see a lot of software out there that is intended to streamline the production process, but it’s as if the design/conceptualizing process is a sacred cow that mustn’t be touched, as if creativity and hard work go hand in hand….

Graphic design virtuosity is not that rare or special and as much as we love beautiful design, applying a pretty skin to something structurally ordinary is not that interesting to us anymore. I suppose we’re just trying to wake people up a bit and suggest that maybe there’s more to design than throwing nice pictures on top of conventional information structures….

Designers need to realize that they’ve had a monopoly on digital visualization for some time now, and that time is coming to an end.

MacOS X Email Client?

So I recently upgraded to MacOS X and for the most part I’m loving it. But I haven’t found an email client that sings. So far

I hear the MacOS X Mail program is kinda lame
I’ve used Eudora in the past, and I’m willing to again. The interface is embarrasingly bad at times, but I’ve been using it for so long it’s second nature.
Mailsmith has all the speed and niceties you’d expect from the makers of BBEdit, but it’s optimized for keyboard shortcuts, having almost no buttons in the interface. Too clumsy for me.
I’d be willing to check out Entourage (especially to try out Six Degrees), but apparently Microsoft only sells it with Office and I don’t use Office enough to justify upgrading.
Anyone using Mulberry? It looks very strong technically but a little suspect in the interface department.
Being quite satisfied with Mozilla, I’m seriously considering using its email. I like having the ability to email, surf, and do basic HTML markup all in one place.

Your opinion?

Update: Mr. Allen, and a couple others, say Entourage is solid. Of Powermail he says, ‘…fairly stripped down, good filtering capabilities, and nicer looking than Eudora.‘

Mr. Garrett writes in that Entourage does have some nifty features but that search is ‘appallingly slow‘ and instead he’s considering Mozilla, as is Michael. I save every email ever and tend to search my folders a lot, so this is making me want Entourage less.

Herr Garrett also mentions Zoe, which we agreed was intriguing but perhaps not ready for everyday use.

And, I just found the Apple directory of email clients.

So, I’m trying the Powermail demo to see if it’s worth $49 more than Mozilla.

Also, there’s SweetMail.

Small Pieces

Seems like all the cool kids are reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I’m already in the middle of three or four books so I won’t get to this anytime soon, but there’s a couple of chapters available online.

No!

No! is a new album ‘for the whole family’ from They Might Be Giants. It’s a kid’s album. It’s fun.

Robot Parade (~500k mp3)

And sometimes it’s romantic, in that Narrow Your Eyes sort of way.

Four Of Two

And sometimes it’s scary, ’cause sometimes it’s fun to be scared.

The Edison Museum

In the end it’s very much a They Might Be Giants recording, but with a more simple, gentle approach, reminiscent of Apollo 18. They have a gift for melody that can be enchanting.

Sleepwalkers

The CD is enhanced with interactive stuff from the wizards at the Chopping Block, who also designed the packaging. I’ll be buying copies for all my nieces and nephews. You should too. Music rocks.

Macromedia and Nielson

My two cents. In short, I agree with Adam, ‘it’s a big step in the right direction, for both parties.‘

Cashless ATM

Look there, in between the Oreos and the Pringles, it’s…an automatic teller machine!

The basic idea here is great: there are a million bodegas in New York that would like to have ATMs inside their tiny spaces. But why build all the cash-dispensing mechanics into the ATM when it’s sitting right near a machine that already does this – the cash register. It works like a normal ATM but dispenses a receipt at the end which you give to the cashier who gives you cash. Supermarkets can afford to retool their registers, but small shops can’t. It’s a little unnerving trusting your ATM card to this thing (at one point the display read ‘dialing‘, implying it had an actual modem inside), but when you need cash you’re desperate.

Get Me Some dot com

Over lunch L. and I invented a new web service, soon to become part of the LazyWeb. You insert a metatag into your page that indicates whether you have a partner or not. Our service aggregates this info, along with similar info of people, say, on your subway line, in your social network, your blogspace, your blogroll, etc.

If in the unfortunate case that you separate from your partner, you check http://www.getmesome.com/ and you’ll see related people who are in the same scenario as you.

Aside: We had a good laugh over this, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about how practical it would be. On another level, the laughter is at the expense of the current social networks analysts, who are finding a lot of connections that may be devoid of any practical meaning. GetMeSome.com’s connections aren’t strong enough to be an indicator of compatibility, or even simple attraction. And yet, it does get you thinking about dating services of the future.

What’s Better

Hmmmm, I wonder if Christopher Alexander would like What’s Better? Isn’t this the sort of thing he was talking about to test something’s ‘wholeness’, simply comparing two things to see which people liked more?

I’m not kidding.

Information per Screen

I’d like to develop a finite, coherent set of attributes that determine how much information to put on a page (a virtual, scrolling page that is) and that size of that page. It seems like a small enough scope to get scientific about it.

The bookseller site analysis I did was informative (long pages seem to be OK in some contexts, density of text and links are something to look closer at). Some other relevant issues might be:

Cooper, who says navigation isn’t fun, so make fewer pages with more to do (my personal take here is that interaction design is harder than your usual layout-content-and-links design, so only use interaction design if you can nail the interaction, otherwise keep it simple
factor in page weight of course (which in turn factors in download speed)
factor in the time it takes for elements to display (since stuff loading in over time is actually what people experience)

Design By Numbers

I had heard of DBN a while ago, but didn’t realize you could download it. What’s this, the MIT Media Lab actually releasing something that will benefit the real world? Link via Andrew.