"UI" entries

Four short links: 18 February 2015

Four short links: 18 February 2015

Sales Automation, Clone Boxes, Stats Style, and Extra Orifices

  1. Systematising Sales with Software and Processes — sweet use of Slack as UI for sales tools.
  2. Duplicate SSH Keys EverywhereIt looks like all devices with the fingerprint are Dropbear SSH instances that have been deployed by Telefonica de Espana. It appears that some of their networking equipment comes set up with SSH by default, and the manufacturer decided to reuse the same operating system image across all devices.
  3. Style.ONS — UK govt style guide covers the elements of writing about statistics. It aims to make statistical content more open and understandable, based on editorial research and best practice. (via Hadley Beeman)
  4. Warren Ellis on the Apple WatchI, personally, want to put a gold chain on my phone, pop it into a waistcoat pocket, and refer to it as my “digital fob watch” whenever I check the time on it. Just to make the point in as snotty and high-handed a way as possible: This is the decadent end of the current innovation cycle, the part where people stop having new ideas and start adding filigree and extra orifices to the stuff we’ve got and call it the future.
Four short links: 16 February 2015

Four short links: 16 February 2015

Grace Hopper, Car Dashboard UIs, DAO Governance, and Sahale.

  1. The Queen of Code — 12m documentary on Grace Hopper, produced by fivethirtyeight.com.
  2. Car Dashboard UI Collection — inspiration board for your (data) dashboards.
  3. Subjectivity-Exploitability TradeoffVoting-based DAOs, lacking an equivalent of shareholder regulation, are vulnerable to attacks where 51% of participants collude to take all of the DAO’s assets for themselves […] The example supplied here will define a new, third, hypothetical form of blockchain or DAO governance. Every day we’re closer to Stross’s Accelerando.
  4. Sahale — open source cascading workflow visualizer to help you make sense of tasks decomposed into Hadoop jobs. (via Code as Craft)
Four short links: 12 February 2015

Four short links: 12 February 2015

Finance Instrument, Retro Predictions, Trust Engineering, and Haptics

  1. Update on indie.vcWe’ve worked with the team at Cooley to create an investment instrument that has elements of both debt and equity. Debt in that we will not be purchasing equity initially, but, unlike debt, there is no maturity date, no collateralization of assets and no recourse if it’s never paid back. The equity element will only become a factor if the participating company chooses to raise a round of financing or sell out to an acquiring company. We don’t have a clever acronym or name for this instrument yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something great.
  2. How Nathan Barley Came True (Guardian) — if you haven’t already seen Nathan Barley, you should. It’s by the guy who did Black Mirror, and it’s both awful and authentic and predictive and retro and … painfully accurate about the horrors of our Internet/New Media industry. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Trust Engineers (Radio Lab) — Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. Radio show of goodness. (via Flowing Data)
  4. DARPA’S Haptix ProjectThe goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Today it’s prosthetic limbs for amputees, but within five years it’ll be augmented ad-driven realities for virtual currency ambient social recommendations.
Four short links: 9 February 2015

Four short links: 9 February 2015

iBeacon at Scale, Product Teams, Progress Bars, and Distributed Fallacies

  1. The Realities of Installing iBeacon at Scale (Brooklyn Museum) — death by a thousand mundane little real-world pains.
  2. How We Build Software (Intercom) — rare to see descriptions of how to build product teams.
  3. MProgress.js — Material Design progress bars for the web.
  4. Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing — your network is unreliable, slow, congested, insecure, changing, expensive, and inconsistent. And that’s on a good day.
Four short links: 6 February 2015

Four short links: 6 February 2015

Active Learning, Tongue Sensors, Cybernetic Management, and HTML5 Game Publishing

  1. Real World Active Learningthe point at which algorithms fail is precisely where there’s an opportunity to insert human judgment to actively improve the algorithm’s performance. An O’Reilly report with CrowdFlower.
  2. Hearing With Your Tongue (BoingBoing) — The tongue contains thousands of nerves, and the region of the brain that interprets touch sensations from the tongue is capable of decoding complicated information. “What we are trying to do is another form of sensory substitution,” Williams said.
  3. The Art of Management — cybernetics and management.
  4. kiwi.jsa mobile & desktop browser based HTML5 game framework. It uses CocoonJS for publishing to the AppStore.
Four short links: 26 January 2015

Four short links: 26 January 2015

Coding in VR, Git Workflows, Programming as Bookkeeping, and Valuing People

  1. How Might We Code in VR? — caught my eye because I’m looking for ideas on how to think about interaction design in the holoculus world.
  2. Git Workflows for Pros — non-developers don’t understand how important this is to productivity.
  3. All Programming is Bookkeeping — approach programming as a bookkeeping problem: checks and balances.
  4. Why I Am Not a Maker (Deb Chachra) — The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing — it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
Four short links: 8 December 2014

Four short links: 8 December 2014

Systemic Improvement, Chinese Trends, Deep Learning, and Technical Debt

  1. Reith Lectures — this year’s lectures are by Atul Gawande, talking about preventable failure and systemic improvement — topics of particular relevance to devops cultural devotees. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Chinese Mobile App UI Trends — interesting differences between US and China. Phone number authentication interested me: You key in your number and receive a confirmation code via SMS. Here, all apps offer this type of phone number registration/login (if not prefer it). This also applies to websites, even those without apps. (via Matt Webb)
  3. Large Scale Deep Learning (PDF) — Jeff Dean from Google. Starts easy! Starts.
  4. Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (PDF) — Google research paper on the ways in which machine learning can create problems rather than solve them.
Four short links: 5 December 2014

Four short links: 5 December 2014

Gaming Cancer, Touch Interface, Petal Lampshade, and Biology HLL

  1. Nanodocan online game that allows bioengineers and the general public to design new nanoparticle strategies toward the treatment of cancer. (via The Economist)
  2. Rendering Haptic Volumetric Shapes in Mid-Air Using Ultrasound (PDF) — SIGGRAPH paper on using ultrasound to fool your senses into feeling a 3D shape in the air. (via Slashdot)
  3. Open Up Lamp — genius lampshade that opens with the heat of the lightbulb, like petals opening. (via Matt Webb)
  4. Anthaa high-level language for biology, making it easy to rapidly compose reproducible work flows using individually testable and reusable Antha Elements. (via Mike Loukides)
Four short links: 4 December 2014

Four short links: 4 December 2014

Click to Captcha, Managing Hackers, Easy Ordering, and Inside Ad Auctions

  1. One Click Captcha (Wired) — Google’s new Captcha tech is just a checkbox: “I am not a robot”. Instead of depending upon the traditional distorted word test, Google’s “reCaptcha” examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.
  2. The Responsive Enterprise: Embracing the Hacker Way (ACM) — Letting developers wander around without clear goals in the vastness of the software universe of all computable functions is one of the major reasons why projects fail, not because of lack of process or planning. I like all of this, although at times it can be a little like what I imagine it would be like if Cory Doctorow wrote a management textbook. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Pizza Hut Tests Ordering via Eye-TrackingThe digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza, from one of 4,896 combinations, based on which toppings they looked at longest.
  4. How Browsers Get to Know You in Milliseconds (Andy Oram) — breaks down info exchange, data exchange, timing, even business relationships for ad auctions. Augment understanding of the user from third-party data (10 milliseconds). These third parties are the companies that accumulate information about our purchasing habits. The time allowed for them to return data is so short that they often can’t spare time for network transmission, and instead co-locate at the AppNexus server site. In fact, according to Magnusson, the founders of AppNexus created a cloud server before opening their exchange.
Four short links: 28 November 2014

Four short links: 28 November 2014

Material Design Inspiration, Event Processing, Launch Infrastructure, Remote Work

  1. Material Up — material design inspiration. MD is a physics engine for UI.
  2. Flafka (Cloudera) — Flume plus Kafka, offers sub-second-latency event processing without the need for dedicated infrastructure. (via Abishek Tiwari)
  3. terraform.io — open source package providing a common configuration to launch infrastructure, from physical and virtual servers to email and DNS providers.
  4. Remote Work: An Engineering Leader’s PerspectiveEven proponents of remote work seem to think that you should either have a distributed team from the get go, or stick to a traditional on-site team. Our experience shows that this is incorrect…