Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-04-29
- Strange things afoot. Curiosity prevails. Glad for it. #
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-04-22
- Didn't think it was possible, but Skype for Mac is still getting worse… #
- RT @epstein: Walked past pair of Russian tourists (I think) who marveled how cheap every thing in New York City is. #
- RT @claytoncubitt: The concept of "not selling out" is inherently elitist, as it would reduce the ranks of "authentic" artists to only t … #
- RT @sdw: No big deal, just a check Hunter S. Thompson wrote out for two million dollars worth of cocaine. http://t.co/JWbUOsLH #
- I would be kinda terrified if people gave me$3.5m+ after having asked for a mere $100k… http://t.co/E1Qz9uNu #
- Tweets in iambic pentameter: http://t.co/MisPGKOQ #
- RT @rafeco: In the end it seems like all of the problems are UX problems. Except for scaling. #
Marie Connelly in response to John Brownlee’s much-noticed article about the Girls Around Me app:
I don’t believe that having a public persona online needs to be a risky enterprise, and it seems like plenty of people are able to manage that without being attacked, stalked, or otherwise targeted. If we’re saying that’s only true for one half of the population, then I don’t think this is really a conversation about internet privacy as much as it’s a conversation about whether it’s safe to be a woman and live in public.
If the answer to that is “no”, then I think we’ve got bigger problems than ‘Girls Around Me.’
Imposing is Weird
Products are born from usage patterns and not from something that imposes a paradigm upon you. Imposing is weird.
Dominique Leca in Sparrow takes flight: how a startup built the Gmail app Google couldn’t.
MapsTD
MapsTD is a Google Maps based Tower Defense game by Duncan Barclay.
SciFi Interfaces
Interaction and interface designers can learn practical lessons from the interfaces in Science Fiction films and television. Though lacking rigorous engagement with users, production designers are nonetheless allowed to develop influential “blue-sky” examples that are inspiring, humorous, prophetic, useful, and can be incorporated into “real” work to make online, mobile, and ubiquitous interfaces more interesting and more successful. This book will share lessons and examples culled from imaginative interfaces free from traditional constraints. In addition, the authors will outline their process of investigation and describe a toolkit for others to make similar explorations into other domains.
Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction
If you like this, you might also like these two articles:
- Martin Anderson discusses the tactical displays in Star Wars with Alien creator Dan O’Bannon. Not to be missed.
- BERG London recently investigated videophones in film.
Livehoods
Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it.
The 100-Year March of Technology
The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph by Derek Thomas.
And an interesting quote from a somewhat related post by Alexis Madrigal:
It’s worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media.
QArt Codes
There’s a different way to put pictures in QR codes. Instead of scribbling on redundant pieces and relying on error correction to preserve the meaning, we can engineer the encoded values to create the picture in a code with no inherent errors [...]
This post explains the math behind making codes like these, which I call QArt codes. I have published the Go programs that generated these codes at code.google.com/p/rsc and created a web site for creating these codes.
Even though nowadays everyone seems to hate QR Codes, this is just completely brilliant. Not necessarily in a useful way, but still completely brilliant.
Why I don’t wireframe much
By Cennydd Bowles.
