Author: rich.campoamor

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World Usability Day

Visit the World Usability Day site and take in the world-wide activities that are happening today. This one sounded entertaining (in Auckland, New Zealand)

A hiliarious remote control shootout! Eight attendees vied for the title of “Owner of the most unusable remote control”.

The winner wasn’t actually the most number of buttons, or the least amount of buttons actually used – but the one that managed to switch off all the electrical equipment in the room through the accidental push of a random button!

Another good resource is Jakob Nielson’s site useit that focuses primarily on web usability. The remarkable thing about this site is that inspite of the fact that web development has been going on for around 10 years, the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again.

If today’s activities inspire you, you might consider joining the Usability Professionals Association.

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Book: Ambient Findability

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville is an interesting sounding new book dealing with filtering and ultimately finding the data that you need in the current environment of ‘information overload’. Thus far, the book has received great reviews. Here is a snippit of book description from Amazon:

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.

The book’s central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville’s book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.

This definately a topic of interest to me and I have added this book to my to-be-read queue and Amazon wishlist.

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The State of Public Web Services

“A Snapshot of Public Web Services” (warning PDF) appeared in the March 2005 issue of the SIGMOD Record. It discusses how many of the publicly available ‘web services’ are really just data retrieval services or search services. Available services also tend to be fairly poorly documented (fewer than 10 words) and in more cases than not, contain malformed WSDL. In fact, many of the services reported on tend to be more at the ‘Hello, World’ end of the spectrum — their existence in the directory more out of experimentation than utility.

It should be noted that the services in question were trawled out of xmethods.com and the like, so they don’t represent the services or APIs that sites like Flickr, Google, Amazon or others expose.

I believe that it would be very valuable to have an inventory/registry of proper/richer services that are available on the Internet. This would certainly facilitate the growing trend of people wiring up one sites functionality with another sites services to create something altogether different. Such a site could enforce some level of validation and even provide semantic web capabilities such as OWL-S description and composition facitlities to aid the systematic discovery and usage of said services.

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Humor: The iSmack Nano

bbspot.com has a hilarious take off on the Apple Nano.

“It seems like every time we release a new version of iPod, these stories about people being mugged for them come out of the woodwork,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said onstage at a special event Tuesday. “We’re out to change that.” Jobs then held up an iPod nano with brass knuckles attached.”

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Riya Photo Recognition Site (Alpha)

Techcrunch has an article about a new startup called Riya (formerly Ojos) that has some pretty astounding facial and text recognition that you can apply to your uploaded pictures. Aside from the ‘visual’ tagging you can also apply other tags to the pictures as well (which are fully searchable). The screenshots on techcrunch are not to be missed.

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Online Web Services Programming Class

There is a free online Web Services Programming Class hosted on Yahoo Groups that is starting up today. Note that to participate, you are required to have a Yahoo Groups ID (free, but causes some heartburn to have to sign up).

A free online “Web Services Programming” course is about to
begin on Oct. 26th, 2005 for anyone who wants to learn
Web services programming. In this 13-week course, attendees learn
basic Web Services standards such as SOAP and WSDL, and Java
API’s for Web services such as JAX-WS, SAAJ, and JAXR. The
principles of SOA and relevant technologies such as JBI and
BPEL are also addressed. They also learn how to use NetBeans
IDE effectively for building and deploying Web services.

This course runs very much like a regular college course in
which the attendees are expected to do weekly homework and final
project but it is free and can be taken online. There is
also class group alias where attendees can ask/answer questions.
The complete set of course contents (StarOffice slides with
detailed speaker notes and some audio files, homework assignments,
reading materials, code samples, FAQ etc.) are available on the
website of the course.

The only thing you have to do in order to join the course is
sending an email to

webservicesprogramming-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

For detailed information about this course, please go to the
following class website.

Course website: http://www.javapassion.com/webservices
Course schedule: http://www.javapassion.com/webservices/#ClassSchedule
Course group alias:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webservicesprogramming/

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Facilitating Innovation

The FastCompany review of the new book The Ten Faces of Innovation sounds like an interesting read. I personally find dealing with people who are always trying to find a reason to say ‘no’ rather than understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a thought, idea or approach somewhat tedious and backward. They don’t seem to understand that doing the same old thing is not what positions you or your customers for a better future. Perhaps this book will give some additional insight into guiding people to thinking ‘not “no”, but “how”‘.

Innovation is all about people. It is about the roles people can play, the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt. It is not just about the luminaries of innovation like Thomas Edison, or celebrity CEOs like Steve Jobs and Jeff Immelt. It is about the unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out.

And by adopting some of these innovation personas, you’ll have a chance to put the devil’s advocate in his place. So when someone says, “Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute” and starts to smother a fragile new idea, someone else in the room may be emboldened to speak up and say, “Let me be an anthropologist for a moment, because I personally have watched our customers suffering silently with this issue for months, and this new idea just might help them.” And if that one voice gives courage to others, maybe someone else will add, “Let’s think like an experimenter for a moment. We could prototype this idea in a week and get a sense of whether we’re onto something good.” The devil’s advocate may never go away, but on a good day, the 10 personas can keep him in his place. Or tell him to go to hell.

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Sorting through the hype 2.0

The hype-laden rollout of Flock has got me thinking about all of the stuff that is being rolled up and paraded about under the umbrella of the what’s-cool-now ‘Web 2.0’ moniker. Having lived (and worked) through this the first Internet gold rush, it’s a bit puzzling as to what is at the heart of this and if it is really paying attention to other dynamics in the web-space.

There certainly have been some improvements in the end user experience through the evolution of CSS and the ramp up of AJAX interfaces, but this, in and of itself, hardly seems a revolution (sort of reminds me of when web design evolved from frames, to tables, to CSS with a brief detour through detestable flash-only site interfaces).

In addition to more dynamic interfaces, another attribute that most of these new apps share is some sort of an API which allows them to be extended, mixed and aggregated in ways that the original developers never intended or imagined (think google maps). This appears to be another expression of the growing traction of web services and it’s underlying emphasis on interoperability. Besides, once I have my information on the wire, I want to be able to selectively share it at other venues as well. Not that I make use of APIs explicitly to do so, but one of the driving reasons for creating this site was to have a place to link in all of the ‘stuff’ that I have on the web (aka my InfoCloud).

Being able to share and replicate ‘my stuff’ is one of the things that was initially attractive about Apple’s .Mac offering. I could keep bookmarks, calendars, etc in synch between various systems and have them available via the web. To do so, I also need to have my data bottled up in and dependent upon .Mac (and pay an annual fee). Now that reasonable substitutes are appearing, I can see making more use of them and becoming less reliant on the .Mac offerings.

Many of these ‘2.0’ apps seem to be simple-minded extensions of the web-based email systems that have been around for years — except now with a focus on news feeds. How many newsreader applications do we need? It seems that every week a new one is being announced. Thus far, the only newsreader that I have seen that makes a difference is searchfox. Searchfox pays attention to what I pay attention to and presents my feeds based upon what I really want to read. With close to 200 feeds, that is a big value add for me. The relevance seems to be a bit more intelligent than the amazon.com recommendations wherein you buy one CD by, say, David Sylvian and it recommends you all of his CDs rather than artists that are similar to or related to him (as if you couldn’t find all of his CDs by searching by name for them). The creator of searchfox, Esteban Kozak is also genuinely interested in feedback (and very responsive in implementing the best suggestions). I like this app enough that I am in the process of going ‘cold turkey’ with NetNewsWire lite on my Mac at home and Sharpreader at work by converging all of my feeds into searchfox.

Following in the parade after news readers are calendar, events and to-do apps. The best one of these that I have come across is rememberthemilk (which I have commented on previously). I find this app to be truly useful and elegant in its design and execution. The ability to share the lists via the web is of great value. One of the things that the site needs is an API to make it easy to integrate its functionality with other apps (as mentioned above).

Unfortunately, what most ‘web 2.0’ developers seem to miss is the ever growing mobile population in the world. Just try accessing one of the sites on a mobile phone. Prepare yourself for a ugly and frustrating experience. It seems obvious to me that one of the reasons for web-based tools is that I can have access to my information just about anywhere via a browser. The next (obvious) step is to make it available to me anywhere I have my mobile phone/device. Having the functionality of a site available through an API creates an opportunity to create a mobile version (or mashup) of the site.

Another apparent mis-step is around ignoring the aging of the population. I wonder what effect this new style of development will have on accessibility, particularly those who are blind or have low sight that might need a machine reader to be able to take advantage of the Internet at all. Is this, perhaps, where microformats and other tagging technologies take a role in providing a richer experience for those with sight impairment?

In a cynical moment, I could believe that this is just the same greed and me-to attitude ten years on, with developers trying to create something/anything and flip it for a profit. For the time being, I plan on seeing how it evolves and figure out how to apply the best of it.

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Flock Developer Release

Not really much there yet. Many of the functions only sort of work. I had trouble with the blog editor, flickr bar and delicious links (all of which are supposed to be ‘core’ function of Flock. I can still do most of the things Flock does from Firefox with a couple of bookmarklets.

Certainly not willing to give up on it yet, but this is NO where near living up to the hype (guess that is the problem with generating a bunch of hype).

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Patent on XML?

Cnet has a story about how a small company is claiming via US patents 5,842,213 and 6,393,426 filed in 1997 that they own the rights to XML and intend to ‘monetize’ it.

How did this ever get approved? Did no one in the US Patent Office know of SGML? When I was working at the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 80’s there was a fair amount of EPS-generated documentation that existed in SGML. This definately can’t stand up to the ‘prior art’ challenge.

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Semapedia

Semapedia is a very interesting idea that combines mobile devices and a physical form of ‘tagging’. The idea is that you can create a 3D bar code ‘semacode‘ that you stick on a physical place/thing (say, like a museum or historical site) — with permission of course. A person with a camera equipped mobile phone loaded with the semacode reader software could ‘scan’ the semacode which would resolve to a Wikipedia URL that would tell them more about their current tagged location.

One obvious disadvantage is that the paper printed barcodes are just too easy to destroy either intentionally or by being exposed to the elements. There is also the stigma/paranoia that some may have around having this somewhat cryptic thing attached to their building (associations with war driving abound).

I think it makes a lot of sense for more controlled environments were patrons can use their phones to get more information rather than having to carry around a brochure or the like. In any case, a very creative use of mobile technology and ‘tagging’.

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LibraryThing Import

I have commented previously about LibraryThing and mentioned how a nice import utility for data from DeliciousLibrary or other tools would be a great improvement. The developer has contacted me to let me know that just such an import utility exists under the Extras menu item in LibraryThing.

I tried it out over the weekend with my exported data from DeliciousLibrary and it works as advertised. In fact, faster than advertised; it told me that my queue of 177 ISBNs would take several hours to import. They completed importing within 10 minutes.

A great service just keeps getting better! I have added a link to my LibraryThing catalog in the right hand section of this blog, if you are at all curious.

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Online To-do List: rememberthemilk

I quite like the functionality of rememberthemilk, an online to-do manager. I find it very straightforward to add, modify, and prioritize tasks. I really like the flexibility in entering dates. For example, you can just enter ‘tomorrow’ or ‘Friday’ and it will input the proper date for you. There is additional functionality to have reminders sent via SMS and email. Calendars/Lists can be shared with other contacts and you can even subscribe to them via iCal on the Mac or via an Atom feed.

I am still exploring what rememberthemilk can do. Everything that I have seen thus far is most impressive and truly useful.

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The Art Of Camera Tossing

Join in the fun: Take your (somewhat expendable) digital camera, turn off the flash, lock the shutter open, take it out at night near some light sources and toss it up in the air, hopefully catch it and marvel at the results.

Some results can be seen in the camera toss Flickr group and in other Flickr photosets here, here, and here.

About Camera Toss
This is a “technique” group, and the technique here is regarded by some as insanity. For we are the reckless folks on flickr that enjoy the abstract, chance, generative, physical photography that results from throwing our cameras into the air (most often at night in front of varied light sources).

It is about trading risk for reward in the pursuit of art. It is not about being a photographer, it is about enabling the photography that happens naturally when you let go of the process, give up control, and add a hell of alot more variables. It is about physics, gravity, angular momentum, acceleration, direction, chaos, and timing… most of which you have tenuous control of at best!

via HipTop Nation

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A Mobile Phone That Knows You

Perhaps inspired by the James Bond sniper rifle that can only be fired by Bond, researchers in Finland have created a method for you mobile device (a phone most likely) to ‘recognize’ you by the way that you walk.

In the method, sensors measure certain features in the person’s walk and these are compared to values stored in the memory of the device. If the values differ, the device requests an access code. In trials, the method has achieved a success rate of 90%. VTT is applying for a patent for the solution.