"UI" entries

Four short links: 26 November 2014

Four short links: 26 November 2014

Metastable Failures, Static Python Analysis, Material Desktop, and AWS Scale Numbers

  1. Metastable Failure State (Facebook) — very nice story about working together to discover the cause of one of those persistently weird problems.
  2. Bandit — static security analysis of Python code.
  3. Quantum OS — Linux desktop based on Google’s Material Design. UI guidelines fascinate me: users love consistency, designers and brands hate that everything works the same.
  4. Inside AWSEvery day, AWS installs enough server infrastructure to host the entire Amazon e-tailing business from back in 2004, when Amazon the retailer was one-tenth its current size at $7 billion in annual revenue. “What has changed in the last year,” Hamilton asked rhetorically, and then quipped: “We have done it 365 more times.” That is another way of saying that in the past year AWS has added enough capacity to support a $2.55 trillion online retailing operation, should one ever be allowed to exist.
Four short links: 13 November 2014

Four short links: 13 November 2014

Material Design, GitHub Communication, Priority Queues, and DevOps Learnings

  1. Materialize — another web implementation of Material Design.
  2. Communicating at Github — interesting take on making visible and optimising for the conversations and decisions that form culture but are otherwise invisible.
  3. MultiQueues — an approach for parallel access to priority queues.
  4. Devops LearningsWe view DevOps as the missing components of agile – the enabler for getting it out of the door and closing the loop between software engineer and customer.
Four short links: 12 November 2014

Four short links: 12 November 2014

Material Design, Inflatable Robots, Printable Awesome, and Graph Modelling

  1. CSS and React to Implement Material Design — as I said earlier, it will be interesting to see if Material Design becomes a common UI style for the web.
  2. Current State of Inflatable Robots — I’d missed the amazing steps forward in control that were made in pneumatic robots. Check out the OtherLab tentacle!
  3. Dinosaur Skull Showerhead — 3D-printable add-on to your shower. (via Archie McPhee)
  4. Data Modelling in Graph Databases — how to build the graph structure by working back from the questions you’ll ask of it.
Four short links: 5 November 2014

Four short links: 5 November 2014

Robotic Microscallops, Fluid Touch, Brackets 1.0, and Robot Bodies

  1. Swimming Robotic Microscallops (Nature) — blood, and indeed most of the internal fluids, is non-Newtonian, which works nicely with the simple reciprocating motion that basic robot actuators generate. Best headline and readable coverage in IEEE, and the best headline: Robotic Microscallops Can Swim Through Your Eyeballs.
  2. Eliminating Taps with Fluid Touch Gestures (Luke Wroblewski) — every tap powers Hitler’s war machine! Swipe and hold for Victory today!
  3. Adobe Brackets Reaches 1.0 — Brackets is Adobe’s open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
  4. Poppy — open source 3D-printed robot, built to encourage experimentation with robot morphologies (“bodies”). (via Robohub)
Four short links: 1 October 2014

Four short links: 1 October 2014

Robot Learning, Internet Confidentiality, Bootstrap Material Design, and Bitcoin Adoption

  1. Robotics Has Too Many Dreamers, Needs More Practical People (IEEE) — Grishin said that while looking for business opportunities, he saw too may entrepreneurs proposing cool new robots and concepts but with no business cases to support them. The robotics industry, he added, needs more startups to fail to allow entrepreneurs to learn from past mistakes and come up with more enduring plans. A reminder that first to found rarely correlates to biggest exit.
  2. Fixing the Internet for Confidentiality and Security (Mark Shuttleworth) — Every society, even today’s modern Western society, is prone to abusive governance. We should fear our own darknesses more than we fear others. I like the frame of “confidentiality” vs “privacy”.
  3. Bootstrap Material Design — a material design theme for Bootstrap. Material design (Google’s new design metaphor/language for interactive UIs) is important, to mobile and web what HIG was to MacOS, and it specifically tackles the noisy surprises that are app and web interfaces today.
  4. Simon Wardley on BitcoinWhy I think US will adopt bitcoin … it is currently backed by $284m in venture capital, you’re going to get it whether you like it or not.
Four short links: 18 September 2014

Four short links: 18 September 2014

Writing Testable Code, Magical UIs, High-Performance ssh, and BASIC Lessons

  1. Guide to Writing Testable Code (PDF) — Google’s testable code suggestions, though C++-centric.
  2. Enchanted Objects (YouTube) — David Rose at Google talking about the UX of magical UIs. (via Mary Treseler)
  3. hpn-sshHigh Performance SSH/SCP.
  4. Lost Lessons from an 8-bit BASICThe little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or at least disregarded as a relic from primitive times. That’s too bad, because while the language itself has serious shortcomings, the overall 8-bit BASIC experience has high points that are worth remembering.
Four short links: 26 August 2014

Four short links: 26 August 2014

Public Exploit Construction, Robot Myths, Empathy, and Social Scaling

  1. The Poisoned NUL Byte, 2014 Edition (Project Zero) — from Google’s public security efforts, this detailed public description of how an exploit was constructed from a found vulnerability. They’re helping. Kudos!
  2. Myths About the Coming Robot Economy (Eric Sofge) — the entire discussion of the so-called robot economy, with its predictions of vast, permanent employment rates and glacial productivity gains, is nothing more than a wild guess. A strong pushback on the Pew Report (PDF): Frey and Osborne’s analysis is full of logical leaps, and far-reaching conclusions drawn from cursory observations about robots that have yet to replace humans.
  3. Content for Sensitive Situations (Luke Wroblewski) — People have all kinds of feelings when interacting with your content. When someone’s needs are being met they may feel very different then when their needs are not being met. How can you meet people’s needs?
  4. Urban Villages (Senseable City at MIT) — People who live in a larger town make more calls and call a larger number of different people. The scaling of this relation is ‘superlinear,’ meaning that on average, if the size of a town doubles, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way. Surprisingly, however, group clustering (the odds that your friends mutually know one another) does not change with city size. It seems that even in large cities we tend to build tightly knit communities, or ‘villages,’ around ourselves. There is an important difference, though: if in a real village our connections might simply be defined by proximity, in a large city we can elect a community based on any number of factors, from affinity to interest to sexual preference. (via Flowing Data)
Four short links: 7 August 2014

Four short links: 7 August 2014

Material Design, Stewart's Slack, Sketching in Javascript, and Neural Networks and Deep Learning

  1. Material Design in the Google I/O App (Medium) — steps through design thinking as they put Google’s new design metaphor in place. I’ve been chewing on material design. It brings an internal consistency and logic to the Android world that Apple’s iOS and OS X visual worlds have been losing over the years. How long until web users expect this consistency too?
  2. Stewart and Slack (Wired) — profile of Foo Stewart Butterfield and his shiny Slack startup.
  3. p5js — a new Processing-inspired code-as-sketching in Javascript. Using the original metaphor of a software sketchbook, p5.js has a full set of drawing functionality. However, you’re not limited to your drawing canvas, you can think of your whole browser page as your sketch!
  4. Neural Networks and Deep Learning — a free online book to teach you … well, neural networks and deep learning.
Four short links: 30 June 2014

Four short links: 30 June 2014

Interacting with Connected Objects, Continuous Security Review, Chess AI, and Scott Hanselman is Hilarious

  1. Interacting with a World of Connected Objects (Tom Coates) — notes from one of my favourite Foo Camp sessions.
  2. Security Considerations with Continuous Deployment (IBM) — rundown of categories of security issues your org might face, and how to tackle them in the continuous deployment cycle. (via Emma Jane Westby)
  3. The Chess Master and the Computer (Garry Kasparov) — Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers. (via Alexis Madrigal)
  4. Virtual Machines, Javascript, and Assembler (YouTube) — hilarious Velocity keynote by Scott Hanselman.
Four short links: 6 June 2014

Four short links: 6 June 2014

Ethical UX, Personal Robots, Sharter URLs, and Magical Devices

  1. Ethics and UX Design (Slideshare) —We are the thieves of time. This excellent talk challenges you (via Aristotle) to understand what a good life is, and whether you’re designing to bring it about. (via Keith Bolland)
  2. Pepper Personal Robot — Japan’s lead in consumer-facing robotics is impressive. If this had been developed by an American company, it’d either have a Lua scripting interface or twin machine guns for autonomous death.
  3. shrturl — spoof, edit, rewrite, and general evil up webpages, hidden behind an URL shortening service.
  4. Lessons for Building Magical Devices (First Round Review) — The most interesting devices I’ve seen take elements of the physical world and expose them to software.[…] If you buy a Tesla Model S today, the behavior of the car six months from now could be radically different because software can reshape the capability of the hardware continuously, exceeding the speed of customer demand.