Apr 252013
 

Solid piece by Nick Bilton in the New York Times about the trend of flat UI: The Flattening of Design

Several thoughts:

1) I’m not convinced that flat UI is a good thing…in my experience it does make UIs seem simpler but often at the expense of visual priority and affordances. Many flat UIs suffer from a very real problem in which clickable elements are not obvious, and often look like non-clickable elements (because everything is flat)

2) Design as news still fascinates me. Three or four years ago you would never have seen an article about a UI design trend like this published in the New York Times. I love it.

3) I think that Heller is right when he says that flat UI is basically just a trend.

“Every so often there is a new fashion that comes about in design for any number of reasons, not the least of which is technology, and now there has been a reaction to mechanistic-looking design where you press a button and get a specific look,” Mr. Heller said. “In response, designers have started to turn to flatness.”


FYI: I’m writing a new book on how to communicate your product or service called Make them Care!. If you would like to be reminded when it comes out, sign up here. For an excerpt, check out Designing for the Next Step

The post To flat or not to flat? appeared first on Bokardo.

 Posted by on April 25, 2013
Sep 112012
 

It’s time for a new school year and another year of news and views from the Digital Campus regulars and irregulars. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan are joined by Audrey Watters and Bryan Alexander to do a post-mortem on the “summer of MOOCs” and a pre-mortem on the Twitter-esque service App.net. (With Mills finally joining Twitter over the summer it was time for the rest of us to leave.) We also make our picks for the hardware that you’ll see everywhere on campuses this fall–if we were doing the buying.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Stefan Fatsis knows a lot about team handball
Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses
Principles of Macroeconomics: The Online Version
App.net
Glenn Fleishman on what App.net could be
Only 250 users of App.net have generated half of the posts
Amazon to Apple: the game starts now
Microsoft Surface

Running time: 49:36
Download the .mp3

Aug 242012
 

WinJS is a JavaScript framework for Windows 8, and David Rousset uses it here to create a quick RSS reader. He shows how in a tutorial series. This first article shows the way to build a welcome screen that employs WinJS ListView control. Blend and CSS3 are employed. The second tutorial shows work on the detail view displayed after a click-on-item. This uses a transition animation. Time to go through the two tutorials is estimated at 30 minutes. Check out the Windows 8 HTML5 WinRT RSS reader app.

 Posted by on August 24, 2012
Apr 172012
 

This week we consider the question of whether Apple and five major publishers colluded to fix e-book prices and the prospect of a Department of Justice Anti-trust suit against them. We also argue the question of whether buy-in from Blackboard will be good or bad for open source learning management projects Moodle and Sakai and join the chorus of praise lauding the online release of the 1940 U.S. Census. On the lighter side, we check in on the ongoing saga of @FakeElsevier. Finally, we celebrate our unintentional, but surely very welcome, neglect of a certain not-evil web search and services company.

Late update: Since we recorded this episode on April 4, 2012, the DOJ showed its hand and officially filed suit against Apple and its partners in the publishing industry, announcing terms of a possible settlement with at least three publishers.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Bigger Than Agency, Bigger Than E-Books: The Case Against Apple and Publishers
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle
Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice
Big Day for Family History Hunters: 1940 U.S. Census Is Online

Running time: 45:38
Download the .mp3

Mar 222012
 

Microsoft is an incredibly diverse company. I've just celebrated 5 years here and still don't have a full appreciation of the breadth and depth of products and innovation that the corporation generates. After BlogPulse was unplugged, I felt something of a hankering to continue to follow the buzz around Microsoft, partly as a way to better follow what the company is doing and how it is perceived in the online world.

I'm a big fan of TechMeme, but it has some challenges when it comes to tracking news and trends around a specific company. Firstly, I don't know the sources that are used and the ranking mechanisms in place, so it is hard to really understand quantitatively what it represents. Secondly, with limited real estate, while a big story may be happening for a company of interest, it can be crowded out by other events. Thirdly, I can't help but think it has a strong valley culture bias. Fourthly, it hasn't evolved much in the years that I've been visiting it.

So I've put together an experimental site called track // microsoft which follows a few blogs, clusters posts that are related and uses Bitly and Twitter data to rank the articles and clusters of stories. In doing this, I observed that many posts in the blogosphere about Microsoft would contain videos (be they of Windows 8 demos or the latest research leveraging the Kinect platform).

The site has three basic columns. The first contains established stories, represented by clusters of articles. The second represents a more timely view of posts. Both of these columns use Bitly and Twitter statistics to rank, with a bias to recency. The third column shows videos which have been embedded in posts multiple times.

TrackMicrosoft

Thus far, I find the stories and videos that surface here to be very interesting. This is where I first learned about:

The nice thing about track // microsoft is that it should be easy to repurpose it to follow any topic - all you need is a list of feeds. I'm hoping to put together pages for taiko, skiing, Kauai, ...

Please take a look at track // microsoft and let me know what you think.

Mar 192012
 

ChronoZoom

Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It's the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There's a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

Feb 172012
 

Msnnow2Microsoft has just pushed out a new product under the MSN brand called msnNow. It is a combination of data mining for trends and topics and editorial content. Surfacing trends has long been a staple for the real time web / social media, but it is an area that I feel has never really been done well. Twitter trends, for example, tend to be less than informative and more of a reflection on the constraints and structure of the twittersphere. msnNow has the potential to take trending seriously, especially if there is commitment behind the product and the contribution of the editorial team.

Parts of the product remind me strongly of the recently decommissioned BlogPulse, for example this module:

  Msnnow1

Take a look!

 

Nov 092011
 

Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

 

Running time: 58:45
Download the .mp3

Nov 032011
 

In a follow-up to last year's visions of the future, Microsoft imagines interacting with data and information in 2020. It is the land of big displays, linked devices, and projections in the real world. It's mostly from a productivity standpoint, but there's crossover to the everyday.

To be honest though, all I really want are power laces, a self-drying coat, a flying car, and rehydrating pizza. I wouldn't mind a hover board either, but it's not urgent. I don't think that's too much to ask. I can deal with not being able to flick graphs in the air if it means getting the important things sooner.

[Video Link via @juiceanalytics]