"Bret Victor" entries

Progressive reduction, Bret Victor rants, and Elon Musk is Tony Stark

A brief selection of articles highlighting UI/UX innovation.

Investigating emerging UI/UX tech in the design space is leading me to many interesting people, projects and innovative experiments. Here’s a brief selection of highlights I’ve come across in my research. Seen something interesting in UI/UX innovation? Please join the discussion in the comments section or reach out to me via email or on Twitter.

Getting users to interact with products in a particular way is hard. On one hand, you have experienced users who are ready for advanced features and interactions, but at the same time, you have new users who might be put off or confused by too much too soon. Think Interactive’s Alison McKenna took a look at a potential solution: Progressive Reduction — what if designers had a one-size-fits-all solution that allowed an interface to adapt to a user’s level of proficiency? She points to Allan Grinshtein’s seminal article, in which he describes how his company, LayerVault, implements Progressive Reduction and defines the concept: “The idea behind Progressive Reduction is simple: Usability is a moving target. A user’s understanding of your application improves over time and your application’s interface should adapt to your user.”
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Four short links: 31 July 2013

Four short links: 31 July 2013

Mobile Image Cache, Google on Net Neutrality, Future of Programming, and PSD Files in Ruby

  1. How to Easily Resize and Cache Images for the Mobile Web (Pete Warden) — I set up a server running the excellent ImageProxy open-source project, and then I placed a Cloudfront CDN in front of it to cache the results. (a how-to covering the tricksy bits)
  2. Google’s Position on Net Neutrality Changes? (Wired) — At issue is Google Fiber’s Terms of Service, which contains a broad prohibition against customers attaching “servers” to its ultrafast 1 Gbps network in Kansas City. Google wants to ban the use of servers because it plans to offer a business class offering in the future. […] In its response [to a complaint], Google defended its sweeping ban by citing the very ISPs it opposed through the years-long fight for rules that require broadband providers to treat all packets equally.
  3. The Future of Programming (Bret Victor) — gorgeous slides, fascinating talk, and this advice from Alan Kay: I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” — because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
  4. psd.rb — Ruby code for reading PSD files (MIT licensed).
Four short links: 4 July 2013

Four short links: 4 July 2013

Model-Driven Configuration, 1,000 RSS Readers Bloom, JSON Query Language, and Doug Engelbart's Vision

  1. ansibleModel-driven configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration, and remote task execution system. Uses SSH by default, so no special software has to be installed on the nodes you manage. Ansible can be extended in any language.
  2. The Golden Age of RSSOne of the things I expected least to see in 2013 was that this year would mark the greatest flourishing of RSS reader applications in the decade since it first came to prominence on the web.
  3. JSONiq: the JSON Query Languageexpressive and highly optimizable language to query and update NoSQL stores. It enables developers to leverage the same productive high-level language across a variety of NoSQL products. Implemented in Zorba, an Apache-licensed virtual machine for JSONiq and XQuery queries.
  4. Bret Victor on Doug EngelbartIf you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems. Poetic, articulate, and bang on the money.
Four short links: 6 June 2013

Four short links: 6 June 2013

In-Browser p2p, Thinking About The Future, Disruptive Tech, and Crowdsourcing Transcription

  1. ShareFest — peer-to-peer file sharing in the browser. Source on GitHub. (via Andy Baio)
  2. Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (Bret Victor) — “Right now, today, we can’t see the thing, at all, that’s going to be the most important 100 years from now.” We cannot see the thing. At all. But whatever that thing is — people will have to think it. And we can, right now, today, prepare powerful ways of thinking for these people. We can build the tools that make it possible to think that thing. (via Matt Jones)
  3. McKinsey Report on Disruptive Technologies (McKinsey) — the list: Mobile Internet; Automation of knowledge work; Internet of Things; Cloud technology; Advanced Robotics; Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles; Next-generation genomics; Energy storage; 3D Printing; Advanced Materials; Advanced Oil and Gas exploration and recovery; Renewable energy.
  4. The Only Public Transcript of the Bradley Manning Trial Will be Produced on a Crowd-Funded Typewriter[t]he fact that a volunteer stenographer is providing the only comprehensive source of information about such a monumental event is pretty absurd.