JasoNunes

Yahoo's not dead yet...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:59:00 +0000

Apparently they still have some activity going on in their Connected Life unit:

(from Paid Content) Intel (NSDQ: INTC), on its developer day, has previewed plans for the Widget Channel, a TV application framework to bring online apps/widgets onto TV...it has tied up with Yahoo for it, which will supply its "Yahoo Widget Engine". These will bring content, information and community features available online onto the TV and manageable through the remote control. It will allow integration of services such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) and eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). To help create new Widgets for this, Intel and Yahoo plan to make a development kit available to developers, including TV and other CE device makers, advertisers and publishers. No specific timeline of launch has been released.

See more details in the framework and demo.

Let the CONVERGENCE BEGIN! (um, or, ah, continue... um, ahhh, attempt to live up to the promise of 1999?)

iPhone GUI psd file

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:21:00 +0000

Originally from Michael... (I got it from Swiss Miss)

For all you aspiring iPhone App designers out there: an iPhone layered psd file.

Combine it with with Yahoo!'s iPhone Graffle stencil, and you're set.

This cracks me up!

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:37:00 +0000

This hits a little too close to home...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:33:00 +0000

UX in an Agile environment

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Something near and dear to my heart (is that disturbing?):
Two great articles by Jeff Patton of AgileProductDesign.com offering 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment.

12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment - Part 1
12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment - Part 2

Jeff's 12 best practices (sans explanation):

1) Drive: UX practitioners are part of the customer or product owner team
2) Research, model, and design up front - but only just enough
3) Chunk your design work
4) Use parallel track development to work ahead and follow behind
5) Buy design time with complex engineering stories
6) Cultivate a user validation group for use for continuous user validation
7) Schedule continuous user research in a separate track from development

8) Leverage user time for multiple activities

9) Use RITE to iterate UI before development
10) Prototype in low fidelity
11) Treat prototype as specification

12) Become a design facilitator

Flow as design tool...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:22:00 +0000

I've been in love with the concept of flow for quite awhile. It's something I experience quite often when I'm designing, or writing. I love losing my sense of time, and my connection to the physical.

Well, flow must be reaching its tipping point as a meme, as I've been seeing it mentioned everywhere. Mostly as a new measure of happiness, expressed very well in this Ted Talk by Martin Seligman (yeah, yeah, I'm a Ted addict... the first step is to admit you have a problem.)

But now it's blending into my life as a designer. Boxes and Arrows just published an interesting paper by Trevor van Gorp about using Flow as a goal or tool for experience design.

He's got some great points, my favorites being (of course) how user experience design that is focused on meeting specific goals or needs, can lead a user into a flow state.

1. Causes of Flow
A clear goal
Immediate feedback on the success of attempts to reach that goal
A challenge you’re confident you have the skills to handle
2. Characteristics of Flow
Total concentration and focused attention
A sense of control over interactions
Openness to new things
Increased exploratory behavior
Increased learning
Positive feelings
3. Consequences of Flow
Loss of consciousness of self
Distortions in the perception of time
Activity is perceived as intrinsically rewarding
As designers, we focus on the elements that precede or cause flow. Users visit sites with pre-existing goals (e.g., finding information about a product). These goals evolve over time as users complete tasks and their attention is drawn to other information. The main elements designers can control are:
Providing immediate feedback
Balancing the perception of challenge against users’ skills

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:05:00 +0000

OK, soooo, as soon as I ask what web 3.0 is going to be, I see a Ted Talk that sums up 90% of my thinking on the subject:

Maps as Info Design

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:00 +0000

Fantastic stuff...

From Radical Cartography:

Scale comparison of US to Europe

Urban Mass Transit Systems in North America

New York is the Center of the Universe

I've had my fill of Web 2.0 (and maybe 3.0)

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:13:00 +0000

I've often thought that one of the most important qualities of a good user experience designer is crankiness, and the ability to see how much better things could be if they'd just given us a shot at designing them. From the Design of Everyday Things' long kvetch about how most doorhandles suck, to every UX designer I know having opinions on minutiae like the proper alignment of form labels (the proper alignment of form labels, the proper alignment of... oh, you get the point...)

ANYWAY, good user experience comes from a cranky acknowledgment of really bad user experience, and the desire to FIX THAT CRAP!

So, hey, Web 2.0 (or social networking, or rich internet applications, or user generated content, or whatever you want to call it) has been just great, hasn't it? I mean, YouTube, and FaceBook, and Digg, and Twitter, and StumbleUpon, and Furl, and Mixx, and LastFM, and Plurk, and Tumblr, and... pant pant pant...

ENOUGH! I'm drowning over here.

In connections, and features, and feeds, and User Generated CRAP!

Not everything needs to be experiential. Not everything (or everybody) needs their own social network. And, do I really need to know what all my connections are doing, where they are doing it, and how they feel at the time, every second of every day?

So, listen, help me out here. We're all cranky, perfectionists deep in our hearts aren't we?

What would you do differently?
How would you run the zoo?

Comment to this post, and let me know how you'd do things differently.

To get you started, here's a suggestion from a friend/co-worker of mine from a recent conversation about what web 3.0 should be:

It's gonna be about controlled filtering - metadata awareness. I don't think the system exists yet - but it somewhere between auto-filtering and curation. Let some stuff through that matches these criteria. A big part is something like facebook - recipricated (sp) trust - I have said I know you therefore I will accept communications from you. Violate that trust and I'll stop allowing you to send communications. Its a start.

As for communication overload - curation is a huge part of it, if that makes sense - gradually having the tools to narrow down what we are interested in without losing serendipity.

What do you think?

SVÄSÖNYN NYNNES

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:49:00 +0000

My Swedish Furniture Name:
What's yours?

Too Liberal? Too Conservative? Or Just Right?

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:33:00 +0000

Fascinating info graph showing the estimated ideological positions of US voters, senators, and representatives.

And here is is broken down by Red, Blue, and Purple:

So, we're much more centrist than our politicians would have you believe. What does that mean? Do we need the push pull of opposing ideologies to keep our legislation somewhere in the center? Or is it harder to sell moderates? Or are people who are drawn to politics just naturally ideologues?

Psoriasis Cure Now Spot

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:00:00 +0000

A 15 second spot I just completed for Psoriasis Cure Now. Just for the fun of it.

Check it out:

Light or Dark, Self or Quest

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Stumbled on through Rachel Hinman's 90 Mobiles in 90 Days (a fantastic blogging experiment, check it out)

Rachel's friend Kate Rutter created an interesting framework with which to map people, and their motivations. And then Rachel came up with a concept for a mobile screen saver based on it.

Interesting concept, fascinating idea.

Kate's concept:

Rachel's screen saver:

What do you guys think?

I love you "Grawlix"

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Thank you H & FJ... this is one of my favorite things to include in IMs, text messages, and emails, and now I know what it's called...

Completely reblogged, nada from me:

A Word For That

Is that the sound of a designer waiting for Adobe Updater to complete? No, just a brief response to a question on Docs Populi, via Coudal Partners:

“What does one call the use of random non-alphabet characters to indicate cursing? It’s a universally understood device, and is applied in both graphic and textual settings. It is such a commonly accepted staple that I assumed it must already be defined and described — but apparently it’s not.”

But it is! The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.” As the author of the grawlixy compendium The F-Word, Sheidlower’s perspective is unique — and unassailable, if you’re wise, since he and his cronies have the power to immortalize naysayers as expletives themselves. (Don’t laugh: such was the fate of philistine Thomas Bowdler, miser Charles Boycott, and jingoist Nicolas Chauvin, to say nothing of famous typeface designer James W. Scumbag.)

Until its OED entry is solemnized, we’ll have to settle for this definition on Wiktionary: “grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.” I don’t think I’ll ever look at a character set quite the same way again. —JH

Where do you stand?

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:45:00 +0000

For the past few months I've been working with Nick and the team at WhereIStand.com to create a compelling user experience for this awesome concept.

In their own words, Where I Stand, let's you:

Express opinions.
Take a stand on the issues that matter to you and comment on the opinions of others. Register for a free account and let everyone see where you stand.

Find opinions.
Search the opinions of public figures, organizations, bloggers, and friends on any issue. Public figure opinions are posted and verified by the whereIstand.com community.

Compare.

See how people and organizations compare to each other and to you. Find where public figures and whereIstand members agree and disagree while making new contacts based on shared opinions.

It's a great resource, and a great way to voice your opinions on a variety of issues from politics to sports, and to see how you compare to other Where I Stand members, or, more excitingly to public figures.

Nick and the team have completely embraced an alpha culture model of development. The site is constantly being updated, with new features added, and the user experience tweaked on a weekly basis.

Take a look. I'd love to hear what you think, and to hear suggestions for how to make things better.

"Western Spaghetti"

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:22:00 +0000

An amazing stop-motion piece by Adam Pesapane (aka PES).

Such an innovative and creative use of "common" household objects. Inspiring.

How to Write a Movie...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:09:00 +0000

Frank Cottrell Boyce's golden rules of screen writing (Great stuff...) from the Guardian:

My favorite quote:

"Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together. It connects two points and sends a charge between them."

Frank's 13 rules...
1. Write a play instead
2. Do the title first
3. Read it to people
4. Forget the three-act structure
5. Set 'em up
6. Don't write excuse notes
7. Avoid the German funk trap
8. Do a favourite bit
9. Cast it in your head
10. Learn to love rewrites
11. Don't wait for inspiration
12. Celebrate your invisibility
13. Read, read, read, read, read

1. Write a play instead
Are you sure you need to write a screenplay? Almost any movie takes years. I've just done a TV film for the BBC that has taken 20 years to go from idea to execution. If you've got a great story, it might be worth writing it as a play first, or a book. To get a movie into the world, someone needs to love it enough to spend millions of pounds on it - and years of their life. A play costs a few thousand and takes a couple of months. Plus it makes you a playwright, which is way upmarket from a screenwriter. And if it's successful, people will want to make the movie.
2. Do the title first
Seems obvious, but you'd be amazed. A great title can make a big difference. The musical Oklahoma, as it was initially called, famously flopped in the provinces, but became a massive hit after they added the exclamation mark. Orson Welles said Paper Moon was such a great title they wouldn't need to make the movie, just release the title. If you want a good title, you need it before you start, when you're pumped up with hope. If you look for it afterwards, you end up thinking like a headline-writer. If Victor Hugo had waited until he'd finished Notre-Dame de Paris, he would have ended up calling it I've Got a Hunch.
3. Read it to people
It's easy to fool yourself on the page. Tell people your story and watch them. Is there a bit where they check their watch? Are there bits you unexpectedly feel you want to skip? Do they guess the ending? Get it worked up into a good anecdote. This also means that if you bump into The Money at a film festival, you can pitch the story right there. The same applies after you've written the script. Danny Boyle, director of 28 Days Later, makes you read your script out loud to him. It's horrible. It leaves you nowhere to hide. But it saves weeks of second-guessing.
4. Forget the three-act structure
All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together. It connects two points and sends a charge between them. But it doesn't have to be all action. Emotions create their own suspense. In American Splendor, the film about comic-book creator Harvey Pekar, you hope till it hurts that his relationship will work out. Secrets are good at generating tension, too. In A Knight's Tale, you fret all the way through that someone will discover that William is not really Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein.

5. Set 'em up

A delicate art. If a setup is too obvious, it can announce a payoff. I remember watching Se7en in a multiplex. When Morgan Freeman said he was going to retire in a few days, someone shouted: "Gonna die!" (For once, it wasn't true.) On the other hand, if the setup doesn't signal something, it doesn't generate any suspense. The trick is to create an expectation but fulfil it in a completely unexpected way. I'm going to give the Oscar for this to Geoffrey Chaucer for The Pardoner's Tale, where they go looking for Death but find a pile of money instead. And the twist is ... they scheme over it and kill each other.
6. Don't write excuse notes
Sympathy is like crack cocaine to industry execs. I've had at least one wonderful screenplay of mine maimed by a sympathy-skank. Yes, of course the audience have to relate to your characters, but they don't need to approve of them. If characters are going to do something bad, Hollywood wants you to build in an excuse note. If you look at Thelma and Louise, you'll see it's really just one long excuse note with 20 minutes of fun at the end. The US cop show The Wire, on the other hand, gives you characters you couldn't possibly approve of, or even like. Then, when it needs to, it gives you another glimpse of them. In one heart-scalding scene, a nasty, hard-nosed young drug-dealer from the projects finds himself in a park and says: "Is this still in Baltimore?"
7. Avoid the German funk trap
People have a tendency to set up the characters and then have the stories happen to them. I think it comes from TV, where you want the characters to survive the story unchanged, so they can have another adventure next week. It's like in detective fiction, where "characterisation" means the detective is really into 1970s German funk. And "complex characterisation" means his wife is leaving him because she doesn't understand his love of 1970s German funk. In a film, you should let the story reveal the character. What happens to Juno - getting pregnant - could happen to any teenage girl. It's how she reacts that leads you to conclude she's charming (or sickening, depending on your point of view). Do it the other way around and it's like when someone introduces you to one of their friends and says: "I know you're going to like each other." It just makes you think: "I have to go now."
8. Do a favourite bit
No one leaves the cinema saying: I loved that character arc. They come out saying: I loved the swordfight, or the bit with the bloated cow, or whatever. The manuals emphasise the flow of a narrative, but it's better to think of a film as a suite of sequences. That's where the pleasure is. I'm working on an animated feature at the moment. Traditionally, these films had no script at all. Teams built up a series of set-pieces and sequences around the story and characters. This is a great way to think. If you look at the first Godfather film, it's really an accumulation of anecdotes held together by the moral decline of Michael. Kes also works like this: the football match, the taming of the hawk, the careers officer and so on. Try breaking your script down into a series of chapters and giving them headings. If you want to see this not quite working, look at the Mission: Impossible films. Terrific action sequences marooned in quagmires of soggy exposition.
9. Cast it in your head
Characters tend to be blurry in screenplays, partly because, if you over-define things, you limit the number of actors you can cast from. But just because you can't describe their eyebrows shouldn't stop you understanding thoroughly what makes them tick. When Sam Peckinpah was rewriting scripts, he used to cross out all the characters' names and replace them with the names of people he knew, so he could get a fix on them. Sometimes an arresting stage direction works wonders. The example writers always quote is Guy de Maupassant's line: "He was an elderly gentleman with ginger whiskers who always somehow made sure he was first through the door."
10. Learn to love rewrites
In Sunset Boulevard, the screenwriter says: "Maybe you saw my last movie. It was about Okies in the dustbowl. Of course, by the time it went out, it was all set on a submarine boat." Screenwriters famously kvetch about the rewrite. I don't get this. One of the glories of being a writer is that you get so many chances to get it right. Ask Norwegian footballer John Arne Riise how he would feel if he was allowed to say: "You know that last header, where I knocked it into my own goal? That didn't really work for me. I'm going to take it out. I've decided that match would be better with a happy ending." The trick is to stay in the loop and use the process to make your script better.
11. Don't wait for inspiration
I think people see inspiration as the ignition that starts the process. In fact, real moments of inspiration often come at the last minute, when you've sweated and fretted your way through a couple of drafts. Suddenly, you start to see fresh connections, new ways of doing things. That's when you feel like you're flying. The real pleasure of any script is the detail. And a lot gets lost in the process. Put it back in at the last minute.
12. Celebrate your invisibility
Ben Hecht famously said it would be easier to get famous by riding a tricycle than by writing screenplays. This is a good thing! When you go to a film festival, you'll see directors and actors besieged by the press and having to trot out the same old stories over and over, while you get to sun yourself. Remember: invisibility is a superpower.
13. Read, read, read, read, read
Read other screenplays. Read wordplayer.com, which is full of discussion, advice and heartbreak. But above all, read Karoo, a novel by the late, great screenwriter Steve Tesich, who did The World According to Garp. It tells you everything you wanted to know - and a lot that you didn't.

Destroy Flickr

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:29:00 +0000

OK, not really, a great AIR application that--surprise surprise--also has hints of spatial navigation. It allows access to your Flickr account. The workspaces feature is my favorite interaction:

Spatial Navigation, Visual Browse, Books...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:52:00 +0000

What's not to like. (my old bosses at Schematic would eat this up with a fork...)

Me? I'm not a huge fan of the visual design--the bookshelf metaphor is taken a little too literally (get it)--but I like the interactions.

Art Imitates Life...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:52:00 +0000

From The AP:
NEW YORK - The mastermind behind a multimillion-dollar scheme to loot hundreds of corpses and sell their body parts apologized Thursday to families of the victims and thousands of tissue recipients.

One of the cases that was the inspiration for my dark comedy screenplay Resurrection Men is in the news.

The Negative Zone Found!

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:22:00 +0000

On the Manhattan Bridge?

These are a few of my favorite things...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Ted talks, and visual interfaces.

The Videos are presented in (or outside) a 3D globe with connections to related videos. A very interesting way to see how (and navigate between) one talk connects to others.

How much does making a movie cost?

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:23:00 +0000

From The Smoking Gun:

$71,682,975 was the budget for "The Village," (working title was "The Woods") Shyamalan's last movie, a 2004 thriller that recorded an opening weekend of $50 million. Here's the film's soup-to-nuts budget, from Shyamalan's writing/directing payday of $10.7 million to taxi cab fares. (79 pages)

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/hollywood/hollywoodsides/0228061woods1.html

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:05:00 +0000

Great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde.

Fight the Power! Replace ads with art...

noreply@blogger.com (monkeyprime) — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:49:00 +0000

From the Add-Art site:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

Spearheaded by Anti-Advertiser Steve Lambert, this open source project is being developed by Eyebeam. It works with AdBlockPlus, a Firefox extension that replaces online ads with blank space. This extension turns that blank space into art. Shows rotate every two weeks.