I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!
Archive for the 'design' Category
The name AJaX comes from one article written in January of 2005which was the first to use the acronym AJaX. In it is mentioned the technology (i..e the one function ‘XMLHttpRequest’) had been around for some time and is probably the only significant contribution that Microsoft has made to the internet’s development to date.
Continue reading ‘The significance of AJaX’
The Webbys were just on and Erika was a jduge and attended the ceremony. If you want win a webby award you have to try and scrore high the following:
Continue reading ‘Webby Awards judging criteria’
I find they work well if the rest of the sites design is minimal. Heres a list of wallpaper sites I like:
- The Pixel Patterns collection. User submitted patters. Bit hit and miss but more on the hit site.
- The Inspiration Gallery Wallpaper Patterns is quite an educational site on the origins of early, real wallpapers. Includes the famous Damask Wallpaper Patterns collection.
Well, thats about it so far. If you know any more, leave a comment.
Scrawled - Scrawling my thesis across the world…
Helped out Jamie the other night with his thesis project by doing what I like to call ‘Gorilla Web Development’. In the space of 2 hours I whipped up a page that takes a string of words and allows you to upload images for each word. Two pages of PHP.
Nice and easy and has fun results. Reused my FileUploader and Image class to get the files and resize them with minimum pain.
via revolution my web comrades!
Community segmentation is going to become a growing need for large online communities where some parts of the community will not want to encounter other parts for various reasons, ether for content rating issues or because there is too much information from a certain part of the community that a member might not be interested in.
Are there automatic methods for achieving this: for clustering content to a community members behaviour and then dynamically filtering content/notifications to this grouping?
BJ’s literature review discusses various nearest neighbour approaches to ‘recommendation systems’ (’collaborative filtering’ is no longer trend but sounds more impressive ;). The group is well treaded, so perhaps what I’m asking is has any site actually used this sort of system to completely adapt itself.
What are the advances on the front end?
I got a Gmail account. If you don’t know what that is, Google have decided to step into the webmail market, which is bigger than the search engine market apparently. Each account gets a 1 gigabyte of storage space and some other changes to the standard webmail interface.
Labels vs Folders
Gmail poses a radical new paradigm to emailing: Searching instead of filing. They have one of the best searching technologies around so they have replaced hierarchical folders with labels that act like metadata. The main difference is that an email can have more than one label and are not in a hierarchy.
The hierarchy is the natural method for organising information on the internet and in computers generally. URI’s are a hierarchical way of organising everything and are based on computer file systems which store everything in a directory/folder structure. Though I think hierarchies are useful for small controlled vocabularies, they are restrictive as the information set becomes large. In the context of the web, potentially all human knowledge, they can’t cut the mustard. I think this is because people store information in the brain though multiple related memories allowing more than one way to arrive at the same thing. Tags work more like the way people think I think.
There is also the philosopher Jerry Fodor’s argument against prototypes (terms in hierarchies more or less) in his paper “Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong”.
Fodor’s main argument is that, if DOG is a concept organized around the prototypical DOG, because of compositionality, so must be NON-DOG. But this is crazy, because a bagel and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and zillions of other desperately heterogeneous things, are NON-DOG. Nothing can possibly count as the prototypical NON-DOG. On top of this, you have to add the notorious problems with the conjunction of prototypes (PET FISH and MALE NURSE etc.). The case is desperate.
Not to write off hierarchies completely as they do help to narrow the scope of large amounts of information and I think this is useful from a UI point of view. As Rajiv points out:
Organizing content is a means to the end goal of finding information. Since organizing content is not a goal by itself, it should be as simple and less work as possible required to meet the goal of finding information… To organize content well in folders requires deep levels of sub-folders. These can be a challenge to browse.
Tags are the new Labels
In an article on the “new social networking phenomenon called ‘tagging’” del.icio.us was cited as an example of an online community sharing bookmarks and their tags. What I found even more exciting was a comment that mentioned a site that’s whole focus is making tags and how it is driving its community. It certainly makes for an easy and effective way to browse a group of people online, and because the information is personal it would be possible to match very similar people making it a good social networking tool.
The article also talks about searching tags as being a way of searching the present and the future as opposed to Google which is a search of the past (because searches are based on indexes that are not real time). RSS is mentioned too but I think even that is history (just possibly more recent that Google), where as iCalendar allows you to see what is coming up. But I digress.
From a data modelling point of view it means a many-to-many relationship between information and the tag/labels that are used in metadata about it. This could work for mp3 collections where songs could be marked to have more than one genre, or artist, or album or title even. How I wish my mp3 player had such a facility!
The future of content management online
Drupal is the first CMS that I have come across that lest you set-up a many-to-many relationship between a piece of content and a vocabulary and its terms. These vocabularies can be flat or hierarchical, with ether single or unlimited depth. This allows for amazing flexibility and ease of navigation (a concept I plan to put into ComPort when I get round to it).
Winamp has come along way, but since it was bought out by AOL it hasn’t really been innovating much. I got the latest version and they have this feature that lets it become transparent (which it has done for awhile) but what they have added to this is that it becomes fully opaque when you mouse over it and fades to transparent again when you move your mouse away.
This simple interaction makes the transparent feature useful (which it was really before so didn’t use it much) but is also an interesting idea for an interface design. You could have more than one thing/window transparent and layered on top of each other. As the document was further towards the back of the pile (i.e. say a group of journal entries stacked by date) they could be more/less transparent (need to experiment with opacity). Possibly flip/zoom though the layers with the mouse wheel and on the mouse over increase the opacity to full (or readable level?).
Alien Aliens Alien 3 Alien resurection. Check it out. Old skool DIY website U-G-L-Y. Ahhh, takes me back to 1996 ;)
Seems there is a bit of a hoo-har about making nice dropdown menus since most recent article on ALA which has got Zeldman started on about how he hates drop downs anyway but supports the right to rant about them. There does seem to be some empirical evidence to support the idea that dropdowns are bad UI design, but try telling that to a designer.
This is all fine and dandy since I woke up this morning and decided to solve all my CSS dropdown problems once and for all. So I’ve been researching and this is what I’ve found:
- There’s mention of some Dutch dude who has a pair but bugger me if I can read Dutch. Works in everything except IE/Mac (bain-of-my-facking-exsistence). So no good :(
- There are better suckerfish menu’s avalable now, which I originaly gave up on because of IE/Mac problems. Still no work in IE/Mac but offers a dubious solution.
- Whatever I come up with, I’d like to intergrate it with the sexy sliding menus. Pitty they don’t use CSS for positioning.
- Finaly there is the XHTML/CSS/DHTML Semantically Correct Drop-Down Menu v1.1 which I have been using thus far but have done something to the CSS that makes it wig out on Safari 1.2 and quite frankly I’m over it.