Bill Buxton exhibited at CHI 2011 in Vancouver parts of its personal input and interactive devices he has been collecting for years. A website is now available to browse the collection: Buxton Collection
MIX is a Microsoft sponsored event that brings developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals together to share the latest in innnovative and engaging content on the web. This year, the event was in Las Vegas in mid April. The good thing is that most sessions and keynotes are recorded and available online. It is naturally heavy on Microsoft’s assets and tools, but there are great speakers and topics nevertheless. Here are a few ones that tickle my synapses a bit more:
Interactive Panel: Kinect and Natural User Interfaces (NUI), Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography, Inspiring UX – UX Lightning Series, and there are a lot more.
This short talk from August de los Reyes is great. Watch it!
IxD Bauhaus Poster
…So its official now. If you’re in Seattle on that date – be sure to register -Â http://ixdbauhaus.eventbrite.com/
No, not the one that was in Boulder with bunch a IxD stars pondering about the same old things. This Interaction 2011 conference was in Japan and had some really interesting things. And now thanks to Diginfo.tv, we can see them in English. Including my favorite: the edible display!
Hi fellow UmeÃ¥ns! I dont know if some of you’ve read this so I’ll put it on here…. some thoughts I penned on Johnny Holland.
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Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher in new ways of thinking and seeing altogether. The catch is that you need to have the benefit of hindsight to truly measure their effectiveness. With this in mind, I believe that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.
I’d like to start with architecture and its recent history, and then compare it with current changes in the way interaction design is being conceived and made. Lastly I’d like to discuss the effects of such a revolution in architecture, and provoke thought on what the implications might be for the design of user experience.
Read the rest here.
…is an HTML5 in-browser WYSIWYG editor developed by IBM and Dojo Foundation. Designed specifically for User Experience designers. Open-source and all. Time to ditch your Flash and Dreamweaver, boys and girls. Maqetta.org
Maqetta features include:
- a WYSIWYG visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces;
- a drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an exact-dimension device silhouette, such as the silhouette of an iPhone;
- simultaneous editing in either design or source views;
- deep support for CSS styling (the application includes a full CSS parser/modeler);
- a mechanism for organizing a UI prototype into a series of “application states” (aka “screens” or “panels”), which allows a UI design to define interactivity without programming;
- a Web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mock-up for review by his team members;
- a “wire-framing” feature that allows UI designers to create UI proposals that have a hand-drawn look;
- a theme editor for customizing the visual styling of a collection of widgets;
- export options that allow for smooth hand-off of the UI mock-ups into leading developer tools such as Eclipse; and
- its code base has a toolkit-independent architecture that allows for plugging in arbitrary widget libraries and CSS themes.
Meet any seasoned techie, and they’ll likely spin whimsical tales of computing’s early days, and the challenge of finding a practical use for a device with seemingly limitless potential (you know, like feeding your cat while you sleep). A new product from SparkFun promises to bring this old-school awesomeness into the smartphone age: introducing IOIO (pronounced yo-yo), a breakout box that enables any Android 1.5+ device to control electronic circuits from within Android’s applications. Designed in collaboration with Google, Spark’s PCB connects to your phone over USB, working its magic through a Java library that hooks into your apps. This DIY paradise will begin shipping in a few weeks, and can be yours for $49.95 on pre-order. We’ve already witnessed some clever mods with IOIO, and when it sent a real alarm clock ringing, we couldn’t help but smile. Crack one yourself after the break.
Source: [Engadget]
Here’s Tara playing around with it. Better video next week
I put up a whiteboard that can send to Twitter whatever you write or draw on it in the UID foyer.
Draw or write on it, hit the big red button and erase the board for the next user. Please tweet comments or ideas about the system and how to make it better as well
It will send your comments or drawings to Twitter via Twitpic Flickr. Use Google Chrome, Safari or Firefox with Power Twitter extension to see the images directly on your Twitter.
The boards account is @analoguetweet
http://twitter.com/analoguetweet
The “code” or “script” part is a really nasty hack job, so it will probably fail once in a while. If you see an error message saying something about “connection error” on the screen, press the tiny button that says “debug” and hit the big red button again. Â If it fails to tweet whatever you wrote or drew, just do it again. If that doesn’t work, come and get me.
***UPDATE*** Switched image hosting to Flickr, although slower, it seems to be more robust, ie. hitting that big red button will most likely now upload the tweet. With Twitpic/Amazon S3, the success rate was about 50%, and with more complex tweets around 0%.
I also added a progress bar and some delays to the script to make it even more robust. Â The system will be up the whole day today and back on Monday. Happy Tweeting!
Continuing on Camille’s post, these April fool stuff has some cool Ideas
that can actually be used in product to make it more engaging?
Here is a list of companies that celebrated April fool
What a day, Google and other tech companies announced amazing new interfaces/products today. Great stuff coming our way for sure :-)
Apple Store Playset from PLAYMOBILâ„¢ and De-3d Cinema Glasses from ThinkGeek
Recently, I have been researching the history of the scroll-wheel, where it came from, and why we value it so much, etc. The great ninjas of online search led me to a document from Bill Buxton titled “Human Input to Computer Systems, Theories, Techniques and Technology”. I didn’t read the whole draft of that upcoming book, but I feel this content might be very valuable to interaction designers at large. It has many photos, videos and real product references to support the text.
Have a look at the draft available online. There is also another nice work-in-progress page on his site arranging some of same content in chronological order. And don’t forget to bookmark this great sources and resources page for input systems.