Archive for October, 2005
This year on the 3rd of November it’s celebrated the first World Usability Day and a bit every where will be events on this matter. The day is meant to spread the word about usability, spread knowledge about better user experiences.
In Portugal the recently formed APPU - Portuguese Association for the Professionals of Usability has teamed up with Humaneasy Consulting to promote the day around country:
Just in case you’re not in Lisbon, don’t let it be an excuse, here’s a map of the world usability happenings on the 3rd of november, take some time to visit one, you’re sure to learn something! 
October 31st, 2005
LIFTis finally here for the public to see! It will be held at the Geneva (as the organizers put it: “the place where the web was born”!:)), more precisely at the International Conference Center and is organized around five major topics, or tracks:
Big ideas » From co-creation to citizen journalism via the copyright-less economy, technology and communications are changing the rules. Big ideas are those that concern us all.
Design » Design is about making people’s life better. We’ve invited designers from across the spectrum of design, from strategy to pixels, from screens to devices, from business structures to experiences.
Emerging technologies » From RFID (these identification chips embedded in all objects) to nano tech, we are going to discuss technologies that are just starting to impact our world. Folks from the labs are going to take off their white coats and tell us what’s coming.
Global Solidarity » Geneva is not only the place that saw the web come to life. It is also a major humanitarian center of excellence with hundreds of organizations having their headquarters around the lake. We invited speakers representing this constantly evolving field, in which solutions to complex problems don’t merely improve lives, but save them.
Internet » Last but not least, the spine of all the above. It gave many of us our careers, our passions, and it sustains much of our daily life. We’re inviting speakers who are pushing the evolving definition of what the Internet is and can be.
Here’s some of the big names speaking at LIFT:
Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Robert Scoble (Microsoft), Euan Semple (BBC), Xavier Comtesse (Avenir Suisse), Régine Debatty (WMMNA), Jeffrey Huang (Harvard), Matt Jones (Nokia), Chris Lawer (OMC Group), Hughes Mac Leod (Gapingvoid), David Galipeau (UNAIDS), Aymeric Sallin (Nano Dimension), Paul Oberson (DIP) and Jean-Luc Raymond (Microsoft).
I met Laurent, one of the organizers at Reboot 7.0 in Copenhagen last june, so if reboot was the actual reboot for something new, LIFT might just be the operating system of what’s to come, better take a look, don’t you think?
October 30th, 2005
It’s one of those unexpected findings! Today when I arrived at work the usual television in the boss’s office had been replaced by a nice plasma screen, pretty much everybody notice the huge package left on the hall, so you couldn’t actually manage to pass it without noticing it. Anyway, later on that that, as the tribe suspected Celso connected it to his mac mini, well we thought there it goes, we had a Apple Media Center at work, but not only did he wanted that, we wanted to get the plasma to keep constantly showing off information about SAPO portal, stuff like stats, latest photos uploaded, latest queries, etc, but we search over the net for something that might do the trick, nothing!
That’s when I figured out that in my laptop I had the answer: Quartz Composer, this little application that comes with XCode (Developer/Applications/Graphic Tools) does a hell of a job and pretty much easy to get into too!
I’ve used it to build a simple screen-saver for Mac OSX that would show the latest photos uploaded to our photo-sharing site: fotos.sapo.pt, the source would have to be the site RSS feed.
In the end it was incredibly easy to make it with Quartz Composer, the user interface is simple, although the composer lacks a bunch of nice and more powerful functions that would make it simply great! For instance, the feed of the site comes with URL’s for the page photo, not for the photo itself, so I wanted to strip down the last slash, that would make the difference, you don’t have a patch (the name of the available functions in the composer) for extracting substrings, so I had to use 3 different patches (string length, math for subtracting and truncate) to do the same job.
Here’s the result, it ain’t suposed to be pretty (I still haven’t fixed the problem with large images), but it’s a proof of concept rather than an actual product!
October 28th, 2005
For the last 2 days, i’ve been using Flock (developers release) in my daily browsing. Those of you who don’t know what Flock is (or better aims to be), nothing better than reading what the authors say about it:
We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.
Well, that doesn’t say much, besides a great objective, which I find very pleasant, but as usual, words are easy, get a thing to work out it’s hard. So I’ll try to write down with a bit more detail my first impressions of this.
Flock is social Mozilla-based browser, designed to integrated itself smoothly with other tools available on the web, some of the examples of this: it’s his del.icio.us integration, allowing to easily share your bookmarks online. Flock is design as far as I can see, to easily integrate itself with any web service that provides an open interface to work with.
One of the tools that comes that it’s already working and I really appreciated was the blogging functionality, it allows you to easily and rapidly blog from the pages you’re visiting, the program automatic recognizes most common webloging platforms, relieving the user from the technical aspects of the blogging experience that when combined with a simple interface that does most of the work for us results in my opinion in a very smooth experience. It has problems, but I personally thing of it as very good beginning of something!
The general interface, might trick the experienced eye to think that it’s a simple new “skin” for the mozilla browser, but I can assure you it seems to have lot of small and clever changes, the one I notice most, was the use of a more user centered speech on the dialog boxes, an example of it was when the browser asks us to store some form information, the answers became “remember” and “don’t remember” as opposed to the common “yes”, “no” and “cancel” we get to see on applications today. Seems a small thing regarding user experience, but as with everything details might make the difference!
It’s true when Steve Rubel writes that Flock isn’t ready for prime-time, but I’m surely enjoying the effort and can’t complain about it being slow on OS X, but I guess this all comes down to the machine one’s running and the personal experience of each of us with other browsers! Nevertheless take your shoot and try it, a take a special tour for the 13 new features.
October 27th, 2005
It’s official, the new iPod plays video as well as pictures and music, can we still called it an music player? I consider mine much more than that already and it doesn’t play video! Commuting could be even greater with some lost episodes of Galatica for instance, right David?
The new iMac, comes with an isight camera integraded and a remote control! My uncle would kill to have is iMac have this little last feature, he often uses is super sized iMac to whatch DVD’s with his wife and kid, a remote is just what he’s missing! It would be nice if they sold it separeatly, right? Hum.. I might just have an idea for a christmas gift here!
Now, is it my impression or this “Front row” thing seems offelly similar to a media center? Hum.. I wonder what they might be cooking for christmas, next year!!
October 12th, 2005
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