Entries tagged with “ui” from O'Reilly Radar

Mon

Nov 9
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 9 November 2009

Moth Mind Readers, Shiny UI Futures, Usable Newspapers, Hardware Testing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity.
  2. New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable.
  3. Adding Usability to Print -- detailed description of a failed pitch to reinvent a newspaper, to bring web sensibility to print. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of separate media, while using the strength of the paper (pictures, info graphics, nice text) to the max… Make a product that people want to buy because it is more usable that the competitor, not because it wins graphic design prizes. (via Evolving Newsroom)
  4. StressAppTest -- Google-created open source project to pound the living crap out of hardware by maximising random traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer.

tags: bio, design, google, hardware, microsoft, newspapers, sensors, ui, usability | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Fri

Oct 30
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 30 October 2009

Three Minute Theses, Google Wave RPGs, Public Metadata, and The Finitely-Zoomable Natural World

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. The3is In Three -- PhD students must explain their thesis topic in three minutes and one Powerpoint slide. Winner had written on the last words of Shakespearean characters as they met unlikely ends. No video alas, but what a great idea for an Ignite! (via sciblogs)
  2. Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) -- gamers using Wave to play RPGs. This can't be the killer app, however, because it is not pornographic. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Metadata is Public Record (ArsTechnica) -- Arizone State Supreme Court rules that metadata on the public record is itself in the public record. The test case was a cop who suspected his performance reports had been created when he asked for them and then backdated. His employer had argued the inode info wasn't part of the public record, even though his report was. Sanity prevailed. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
  4. Cell Size and Scale -- sweet zoomable interface to show the different relationships in size between everything from Times Regular 12pt to a Carbon atom (via salt, E. coli, hemoglobin, etc.). (via Tom Carden on Delicious)

tags: education, events, google wave, metadata, open data, research, science, ui | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Wed

Oct 14
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 14 October 2009

Multitouch Demo, Secrets Site Secrets, Hadoop Futures, Becoming Lucky

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. 10Gui Video -- demo of a new take on multitouch, a tablet and new GUI conventions. (via titine on Twitter)
  2. Behind the Scenes at WhatDoTheyKnow -- numbers and stories from the MySociety project, which provides a public place for Official Information Act requests and responses. The fact information is subject to copyright and restrictions on re-use does not exempt it from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (though there is a closely related exemption relating to “commercial interest”). Occasionally public bodies will offer to reply to a request, but in order to deter wider dissemination of the material they will refuse to reply via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Southampton University have released information in protected PDF documents and the House of Commons has refused to release information via WhatDoTheyKnow.com which it has said it would be prepared to send to an individual directly.
  3. The View from HadoopWorld (RedMonk) -- fascinating glimpse into the Hadoop user and developer world. Hadoop can be used with a variety of languages, from Perl to Python to Ruby, but as Doug Cutting admitted today, they’re all second class citizens relative to Java. The plan, however, is for that to change. Which can’t happen soon enough, in my view. It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Java, or its audience. The point, rather, is that there are lots and lots of dynamic language developers out there that would be far more productive working in their native tongue versus translating into Java.
  4. Be Lucky, It's an Easy Skill to Learn (Telegraph) -- this one resonated with me, as it ties into some life hacking I've been doing lately. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. (via Hacker News)

tags: gov2.0, hadoop, lifehacks, multicore, multitouch, mysociety, politics, ui, web | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Thu

Sep 17
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 17 September 2009

Involuntarily Opened Geodata, Sense Organ, Doc Vis, 3D Open Source Bodies

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. Wikileaks Now Holds UK Postcode Database -- the UK does not have open geodata in the way that we know it. A state-owned enterprise, Ordnance Survey, is responsible for maintaining all sorts of baseline data and they charge (through the nose) for that data. This is the release of 1,841,177 post codes, geographic boundaries, and more. Postcodes in the UK are far more useful than US ZIP codes--they identify a handful of houses, rather than a few thousand houses.
  2. My New Sense Organ -- a strap with buzzers and a compass, so you always have physical reminder of orientation. For people like me who can get lost putting on pants in the morning, this would be a godsend. (via Slashdot)
  3. Saving is Obsolete -- EtherPad adds a Wave-like replay feature to help you see the history of a document.
  4. Open Source 3D People -- incredible software to design realistic 3D faces and bodies. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

tags: augmented reality, geodata, hardware, maker, opensource, ui, uk, visualization | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Thu

Sep 3
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 3 September 2009

Smarter Eyes, Urinal Protocol Efficiency, Petabytes on a Budget, and LocaLondon

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

  1. Many Eyes Make All Bugs Shallow, Especially When The Eyes Get Smarter (David Eaves) -- Mozilla released bug submission data, and David realizes with some minor investment (particularly some simpler vetting screens prior to reaching bugzilla) bug submitters could learn faster. For example, a landing screen that asks you if you've ever submitted a bug before might take newbies to a different page where the bugzilla process is explained in greater detail, the fact that this is not a support site is outlined, and some models of good "submissions" are shared (along with some words of encouragement). By segmenting newbies we might ease the work burden on those who have to vet the bugs.
  2. Urinal Protocol Efficiency (xkcd blog) -- geeks are pattern-matching creatures that can count. This leads us to a question: what is the general formula for the number of guys who will fill in N urinals if they all come in one at a time and follow the urinal protocol? One could write a simple recursive program to solve it, placing one guy at a time, but there’s also a closed-form expression. If f(n) is the number of guys who can use n urinals, f(n) for n>2 is given by: [...] The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts. Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing. (via Hacker News)
  3. Petabytes on a Budget: 67Tb for $7,867 -- DIY cloud hardware. (via timhaines on Twitter)
  4. LocaLondon (Chris Heathcote) -- informative, ingenious, and replicable (like all that Chris does), it's a Twitter feed of art exhibitions in London (when they open, when there's a week left, and on the last day) and a glorious horizontal touchscreen-friendly meta-reviews site so you can quickly see at a glance what's on now and what people think of it.

tags: cloud computing, design, geek culture, local, math, social software, storage, ui | comments: 1
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Mon

Aug 24
2009

Nat Torkington

Four Short Links: 24 August 2009

Distributed Version Control Systems, Ideas Tracking, OO Survey Results, New Barcodes

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

  1. Making Sense of Revision Control Systems (ACM Queue) -- good introduction to the subject from Bryan O'Sullivan, author of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial) that covers Subversion, Mercurial, and git. Under the distributed view of revision control, every commit is potentially a branch of its own. If Bob and Alice start from the exact same view of history, and each one makes a commit, they have already created a tiny anonymous fork in the history of the project. Neither will know about this until one pulls the other's changes in, at which point they will have to merge with them. These tiny branches and merges are so frequent with Mercurial and Git that users of these tools look at branching and merging in a very different way from Subversion users. The parallel and branchy nature of a project's development is clearly visible in its history, making it obvious who made which changes when, and exactly which other changes theirs were based upon.
  2. Ideas Are Awesome -- Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology memes. We are currently tracking: simplify, empower, give, inspire, connect, adapt. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
  3. OO Concepts Survey Result -- There were 3785 people who completed the survey. These charts show the proportion who gave the different possible responses for each question. If you're an OO programmer, use this to determine how aberrant your practices are (hint: most people are neither zealous nor consistent).
  4. Bokode -- a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. (via waxy)

tags: mobile, programming, sync, trends, ui | comments: 1
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Tue

Jul 28
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 28 July 2009

UI Library, 3rd Party Wave Server, Mobile Phones + Parasites, Single API to Cloud Providers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

  1. CNMAT Resource Library -- The CNMAT Resource Library is our fast growing collection of materials, sensors, gestural controllers, interface devices, tools, demos, prototypes and products - all organized and annotated to support the design of physical interaction systems, "new lutherie" and art installations. (via egoodman on Delicious)
  2. PyGoWave Server -- first third-party Google Wave server, based on Django.
  3. Mobile Phones Identify Parasites and Bacteria -- UCB Researchers developed a cell phone microscope, or CellScope, that not only takes color images of malaria parasites, but of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.. The sensor network is built out, and the computers in our pockets surprise us with their uses. (via BoingBoing)
  4. libcloud -- a unified interface to cloud providers, written in Python and open source. Covers EC2, EC2-EU, Slicehost, Rackspace, Linode, VPS.net, GoGrid, flexiscale, Eucalyptus. (via joshua on Delicious)

tags: biology, cloud, google wave, mobile, opensource, python, sensor networks, ui | comments: 2
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Fri

Jul 10
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 10 July 2009

Network File System, Internet Use, Lovelace Comic, Search User Interfaces

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. Ceph -- open source distributed filesystem from UCSC. Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write to the same directory-usage scenarios that bring typical enterprise storage systems to their knees. (via joshua on delicious)
  2. Daily Internet Activities, 2000-2009 -- Pew Charitable Trust's Internet usage survey. We've finally broken 50% of Americans using the Internet daily. Twitter is almost a rounding error. (via dhowell on Twitter)
  3. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage -- fantastic comic, with end-notes that explain how Babbage and Lovelace's lives and works are reflected in the action of the comic. (via suw on Twitter)
  4. Search User Interfaces -- full text of this book about the different (successful and un-) interfaces to search. (via sebchan on Twitter)

tags: history, scale, search, twitter, ui | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Mon

Jun 22
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 22 June 2009

Decaying Friendships, Crowdsourced Cars, Aussie Gov 2.0, Zoomable Presentations

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious)
  2. Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter)
  3. Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce -- The Aussies are getting their Gov 2.0 on. Check out Senator Kate Lundy's Public Sphere event today got a lot of Twitter action.
  4. Prezi -- sexy zoomable presentation creator. Keynote meets Ken Burns Effect on PCP. Nifty look from a Budapest-based startup.

tags: automotive, crowdsourcing, gov 2.0, social science, ui | comments: 0
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon   

 

Tue

Jun 2
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 2 June 2009

Fonts, Medicine, Healthcare, Project Natal

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

  1. TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
  2. Talking With Jamie Heywood About PatientsLikeMe (Jon Udell) -- the creator of patientslikeme, a site that provides people with serious conditions a chance to report on the efficacy of their treatment, their unique symptoms, and (if they wish) to connect with the researchers in the drug companies who made the treatments. It's a new closure for the feedback loop of medical research.
  3. The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. (New Yorker) -- the lesson is that you tolerate bad ethics, bad business, bad behaviour at your own risk because the rogue you tolerate may become the anchor tenant for a mall of villainy you'll find very hard to dismiss.
  4. Microsoft Announces Project Natal -- full-body motion capture for XBox 360, as game controller. I'm keen to see whether having nothing in your hand is as satisfying as having something to hold. Kudos to MSFT for bringing research to market as mainstream entertainment.

tags: crowdsourcing, design, economics, gaming, healthcare, medicine, psychology, startups, ui | comments: 2
submit: Reddit Digg stumbleupon