Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Design'

Design streams

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Thought this was a great find from LifeHacker, about the 2003 keynote by the author Neal Stephenson at USENIX. When he wrote his first novel it was on a "modern" typewriter with a plastic ribbon that would start jamming in Iowa’s July heat. The only way to stop it jamming was to keep writing and [...]

Microsoft Design Expo 2008

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I’ve been really impressed by the student output from the design courses at Dundee University in Scotland. I saw work from the Innovative Product Design (IPD) course at New Designers a couple of years ago and was really struck by the fact that they encouraged visitors to their booth to play with their creations. Most [...]

Putting the craft into technology

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Radios made in Indonesia by local craftsmen from sustainable sources of wood. Really like this idea of hand-crafted technology objects

THE ECO ZOO

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I’m really blown away by the Eco Zoo as the first very compelling example of the use of 3D in a Flash website. The art style is lovely, very reminiscent of the shots I’ve seen of the forthcoming Playstation 3 game, Little Big Planet.

JasonJ's InkSanitorium

Ken Hinckley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:00:00 GMT

GottaBeMobile.com forum member JasonJ is a prolific inker. He’s been at the avant-garde of InkSeine for some time now. He’s offered us lots of great feedback and has a flair for illustrating his points. For example, he’d like us to add a sizing tab to make it easier to resize the InkSeine application window. He often uses it like this to make it easier to drag files and links into his notes:

Well, you just can’t make the point any better than this. After seeing a posting like that, how could we not do it? We’ll have to change some things to get this to work, but this kind of feedback gets the feature on the task queue for sure J

He’s also argued against using pressure or additional tablet buttons for pen functionality. As researchers, those are the kinds of additional input channels that we sometimes ponder as routes for tablet innovations, but as JasonJ argues so well, a general tablet and stylus interface can’t require those as building blocks:

I still think zany ideas in this vein are worth exploring as options or alternatives. They can make for good research papers, even if they are not suitable for deployment in InkSeine. I also agree with JasonJ that they need to be approached with caution as they can potentially detract from the pure pen and ink experience.

Another thing JasonJ desperately wants is custom pen and highlighter colors. This is something we’ve been planning to add to InkSeine since well before our initial release, but we haven’t had the opportunity to implement it yet. JasonJ offers another great illustration for how this might work:

This kind of sketch is very interesting for us because it reveals JasonJ’s vocabulary and structure thinking about the task workflow: select the nib type, then select the color. Maybe these could be done as interchangable steps. Even if we don’t follow the exact UI design he’s sketched out, that kind of feedback is really helpful when we are making decisions about how the UI should really work. We do conduct usability tests occasionally to vet our designs and test for problems that we’ve overlooked, but in my experience such tests usually aren’t very helpful to come up with a good design in the first place. But sketches like this from a person who is really using the software to do stuff out there in the really world certainly do!

Jason also has some fun with InkSeine. He experimented with the custom page backgrounds download that we posted. He thought it would be cool to take it one step further and show the pages flipping. Now wouldn’t that be cool?!?

One JasonJ sketch even made the front page of GottaBeMobile. He likes to put hyperlinks to folders and applications in his notebooks so that he can quickly launch them while sketching out his thoughts and taking notes on his ideas. I do this all the time with InkSeine myself – it’s great for things that you use frequently in the context of a project or topic in your notes that you revisit from time to time – but I have to say that JasonJ’s version just looks cooler and more fun than my own versions of these:

Putting them in the canted gold picture frame lends them a wonderful touch of class and personality. It’s certainly more fun to work this way with a tablet than to pull down some soulless drop-down menu with a monotonous list of textual favorites.

JasonJ also kindly sent me a selection of some of the cool note pages that he’s generated in the course of his daily work. This stuff is like solid gold to us – it really shows us what someone is doing with our tool on a daily basis. Even when people write to us that they like InkSeine or that they are using certain features to do fun stuff, we rarely get to see what really happens in those secret journals. This gets us excited all over again about great software for inking on a Tablet PC. It also gets us thinking about more stuff we could do to make this kind of usage more fluid and more expressive by adding new capabilities or by simplifying the program.

JasonJ’s notes are just beautiful and a lot of fun, so I’ll let this selection of pages from the highlights file he sent me speak for themselves:

The final page of this particular notebook is a sketch that JasonJ did that shows how a feature for summing lists of numbers might work in InkSeine. I’m not sure if this is a feature that we will have the cycles to implement, but I love the design he sketches for how it could work. In fact, I often do exactly this sort of ink-plus-screen-capture mashup to sketch out my own ideas for InkSeine (and other projects). It’s a great way to lay it out there and see if the idea really could work, or if it has problems that weren’t obvious at first.

Any way you add it up, JasonJ’s InkSanitorium shows how InkSeine can a fun, productive, and eye-grabbing way to hash out your ideas.

Tag Galaxy

Anonymous — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I’m a bit of a 3D UI sceptic. I just have some history in the area, and it’s left me thinking that 3D interactions are often cumbersome and rarely have a life beyond what their cool factor gives them. Case in point is this Tag Galaxy search. I really find it compelling. I’m not sure [...]

LEBBEUS WOODS on Lines

Anonymous — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Poetic entry on drawing from Lebbeus Woods. “Even though I am best known for my drawings, and have spent many years as a teacher of architects, I have never taught drawing. The reason is that each person who wants to draw should devise his or her own way. It makes no sense to teach a [...]

News visualizations

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

A couple of really nice, back to back posts on visualizing the news from Visualcomplexity.com. The first is a visualization by Dave Bowker of a week of news from the Guardian newspaper. Dave attempts to connect the dots between sets of articles. The second is a little harder to get into, since the content is in [...]

Green objects

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

There’s an irony in green product design that we may just never get passed since you need to purchase new stuff, and creatively recycle/throw out the thing you’re replacing, in order to follow your ethics. Sometimes it just feels better to keep going with what you’ve got until it “naturally” comes to the end of [...]

Design and the Elastic Mind

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:00:00 GMT

I wish I could make it to New York to see the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MOMA. It sounds like it allows you to see or experience many of the objects and interfaces that I’ve blogged about over the last few years, and many that I haven’t. The website is a little [...]