Flash Catalyst has facilitated a workflow of iterative design and development. However, Flash Builder remains a powerful tool and can be used to assist in prototyping. Prototyping has the advantage of giving us insight about end-users needs.
This is the topic of an article of mine published at Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine, January 2011. Download the magazine for free here: http://ffdmag.com/magazine/1582-html5-what-will-html5-mean-for-streaming
Posted in Flash, Human-Computer Interaction
On Wednesday 24th November at 14:30, we will be hosting a seminar on recent applications of crowdsourcing and social media in enterprises. Crowdsourcing has been defined as the outsourcing of tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd) through an open call.
The presenters are listed below and the venue will be Lloyd Institute room 1.07. All are welcome. [map]
1. Mikhail Timofeev (Symantec/TCD) “Identifying Leaders in Consumer Community Forums”
2. Georgia Demetriou (University of Manchester) “Benefit-Driven Participation in Open Organisational Social Media Platforms: The Case of the SAP Community Network”
3. Anna Kleszcynska (Lingotek/TCD) “Applications of Crowdsourcing in Translation: Motivations and Outcomes in Five Organisations”
For more information contact Dr. Simon McGinnes, Information Systems Discipline, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Posted in Uncategorized
Processing now has a version for Android. Processing for Android is buggy and slow. However, I love it! Why?
RTFW: http://wiki.processing.org/w/Android
I liked that Processing can use your Android installation wherever it’s located. You just browse to the folder, and that’s it! That’s in contrast with other development environments for Android, that require either the default or a particular installation folder.
Moreover, the error messages make sense. My favourite one was “Ouch. Emulator got killed, I think.” (Sometimes the Emulator crashes for no reason, you re-run the same app in a minute and everything’s ok!)
In the beggining, I was super-enthusiastic that I could port all my Processing code from the desktop to Android.
That doesn’t happen; however, the amount of code that can be ported is huge. HT to this post which shares code which allows you to access the Menu or Back buttons of your phone.
The changes are minor though, unless you need to access the webcam (would appreciate advice here–still haven’t managed). For most projects, the same code runs on the desktop and on mobile.
At the end of the day, it just works!
It’s the easiest way to make an Android app. You go to Android Mode by typing Cmd+D. You Run your programm as normal by Cmd+R. Emulator starts, your app runs (usually slowly).
You connect your phone with USB; instead of Cmd+R type Shift+Cmd+R. Guess what, your app runs on your phone.
They don’t pretend this is complete; you know what to expect (bugs and slow speed–see their Wiki). However, maybe it has less bugs than other products’ release versions.
Btw, I found it very useful to have an Android icon instead of the Processing one. I kept both installations, Processing 1.2.1 for desktop development, and Processing 0190 for Android. I renamed the latter to ProcessingDroid and I use an Android icon to distinguish it from the former.
Fun overcomes bugs! Android, here I come!
[Guess what I've been doing the last couple of evenings 
]
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
A variant of the barrel piano became very popular in Greece in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was named laterna [4] or rhombia.
Apart from a popular instrument, the laterna became popular because of its decoration: more often than not, the instrument players would decorate it flamboyantly. They were not flirting with kitsch, they were completely in love with it.
Laterna carried by player (from laterna.info)
Since, the word can be combined with anything to describe how extremely kitsch it is: a “laterna” car is one with all these lights and stickers on, etc. You get the idea.
Let’s explore our three beloved components, i.e. functionality, usability, and user experience, to see what’s the situation with many contemporary blogs and websites.
Blogs with too many widgets just don’t work: they just might load for ever. This problem is huge with popular browsers that have memory leaks (cough). Your browser may crash and you may lose your previously open tabs. There goes the old-but-good “on MY computer it works fine”, “yeah, but I don’t have YOUR computer”.
Even fairly sized newspapers have websites with a widget overload. Usually these won’t crash your browser; they were made by professional web developers. It’s not certain though that web developers are familiar with design and usability guidelines altogether. It just needs common sense though: the news story is surrounded by animated content; you can neither concentrate on the story, nor on each of the animations. Even if you’re actually interested in one of those surrounding animated ads, it’s hard to find it in this mess.
Moreover, the aesthetics of this practice is questionable. Kitsch is usually not ok. Unless, of course, there’s a particular reason why a kitsch design should be communicated to the public. However, visiting repeatedly a kitsch blog/website, makes a bad experience out of it.
Overall, too many widgets make your blog/website a “laterna” blog/website. And, yes, I know, widget X is cool. Being able to read the blog is cooler, though.
Do you really need that widget you’re just going to install? Or is it going to drive me away from your website?
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
Pagination is a method of breaking content into multiple pages. We are all familiar with search engines, that give their results paginated: 10 results in page 1, 10 more in page 2, etc. Actually, pagination became widely known because of that use. Some HTML e-book-like pages had an early version of pagination too, even since 1996 (no clue what happened before). And, of course, fora (or forums, as some would say–yikes) use pagination a lot.
However, nowadays we can see pagination everywhere. It is a feature which is easy to implement. As a result, websites use it a lot. Especially for news portals (tech, politics, everything else), it has become a must.
The functionality served by this component is to deliver content avoiding cognitive overload: if the content of a page is too much and the reader might get lost, we can make the reader’s life easier by breaking the pages into more than one.
This functionality is served very well in search results and fora/discussion groups. The content delivered there is a list of distinct items. The content of each page doesn’t depend on the previous pages. So, the content is delivered, and cognitive overload is avoided at the same time.
News portals though, are quite different. There, a news story has to be readable. That is, apart from usual writing techniques, there has to be a reasonable flow in the reading process. Let me give you an example.
Some time ago, I came across a technews portal with amazing content. Let’s call it “IWN” (not a real name). I started to visit the portal regularly and signed up for their newsletter. However, it was terribly difficult to read. Why? Pagination.
Pagination is terribly overused in IWN. See the example below, showing the last lines of one of their pages:
Overuse of Pagination example
A quite short article has 5 pages! This does not serve the functionality of pagination, for two reasons:
Some readers may have additional cognitive overload. I, for one, was feeling like I was getting robbed when I was visiting IWN. They were stealing my web traffic. This thought was persistent, and I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. Their practice of using pagination in order to increase their traffic made me never visit this technews portal again. Despite their amazing content.
Am I overreacting? They have used pagination in other cases too, so the “web traffic robbery” assumption is doublechecked:
Pagination instead of a slideshow
Guess what happens when you want to see the next image: a new webpage loads! That’s really annoying, tedious, and time-consuming. There are numerous slideshow components out there, and there’s also the best practice for such use: Flash.
Overall, overuse of pagination can make a site lose some of its traffic. I daresay, such a site would lose readers who really care about its content, which is a pitty. Maybe it’s more of a shame than a pitty, since, ironically, they do that to force increase their web traffic.
It is very easy, with little–almost no–effort, to apply good practices. In the first screenshot, if the reader click “Print” they’re linked to the full article, with no menus, etc. However, this workaround is known to a minority of web visitors.
Adding an extra link to this full version costs nothing and offers a lot. See an example of this use below:
Good use of pagination by NewScientist
Both “Read full article” and “PRINT” lead to similar pages. Or, if the reader prefers, they can stick with the pagination. Here we can see that pagination is not used simply as a feature, but its functionality is well served.
Moreover, the choice is up to the reader to decide the way the contect will be delivered to them.
Combining the use of slideshows or Flash components, we can see how pagination can be applied without being annoying. Thus it can be applied without leading to loss of web traffic in any way.
Posted in Flash, Human-Computer Interaction
Deep Informational Technologies (Deep IT) have built Transliteration for Mac OS (only). As you may have imagined already, this software does exactly what it says on the tin: it transliterates! That is, it maps strings of text from one writing system to another (e.g. from Greek alphabet to Latin).
Having used and liked this software, it was more than natural to contribute some rules for it. In particular, rules to transliterate Greek to Latin, and Ladino to Hebrew. From Transliteration 2.1.1 and on, these rules are included in the download and need not be downloaded separately.
Examples:
Greek→Latin:
Greek to Latin (results may have been improved since the screenshot was taken)
Ladino→Hebrew:
Ladino to Hebrew
The rules are built in an XML file in the PLIST format. Here you can find information about each set.
TODO: Armenian, Georgian
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