- Microsoft Research Adopts Open Access Policy for Publications — +1
- Light Table is Open Source — this matters because these experiments in semantic interactivity inform technical UIs of the future, and the more ubiquitous this code is then the more effect it can have and the sooner we can have the future.
- The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze and Astound You (New Yorker) — Berger and Milkman found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much it excited its reader. The obvious part is that we develop immunity to things that catch our attention: our brains are well-developed systems for filtering, and the only constant is that advertisers will need novelty.
- The Story of Holacracy’s Founder (Quartz) — background on the interesting flat organisation culture system that’s gaining traction in startups.
"UI" entries
Transcending UIAlertView on iOS 7
RYO small floating view containing any interface you like
Of all the new features and APIs that iOS 7 provides to developers, none, in my opinion, is as important from a user interface perspective as custom view controller transitions, the ability to insert your own animation when a view controller’s view takes over the screen. Thus:
- When a tab bar controller’s child is selected, you can now animate the change.
- When a view controller is pushed onto a navigation controller’s stack, you are no longer confined to the traditional “slide in from the right” animation.
- When a presented view controller’s view appears or is dismissed, you are no longer confined to a choice of the four
UIModalTransitionStyleanimations.
In the third case — a presented view controller — iOS 7 introduces a further innovation: You can position the presented view wherever you like, including the possibility of only partially covering the original interface.
In other words, the presented view controller’s view can float on top of, and partially reveal, the original view controller’s view; the user sees the views of both view controllers, one in front of the other.
Four short links: 23 January 2014
MSR Open Access, Light Table Open Source, Virality Unleashed, and Holacracy's Founder
Four short links: 13 January 2014
S3 Consistency, Paper Drone, Face Substitution, and Wearable Options
- s3mper (Github) — Netflix’s library to add consistency checking to S3. (via Netflix tech blog)
- Powerup Smartphone-Controlled Paper Airplane — boggle. You know the future is here when you realise you’re on the Internet of Trivial Things.
- clmtrackr (Github) — real-time face recognition, deformation, and substitution in Javascript. Boggle.
- Nine Wearables (Quartz) — a roundup of Glass-inspired wearables, including projecting onto contact lenses which wins today’s “most squicky idea” award.
Four short links: 10 January 2014
Software in 2014, Making Systems That Don't Suck, Cognition Troubles, and Usable Security Hacks
- Software in 2014 (Tim Bray) — a good state of the world, much of which I agree with. Client-side: Things are bad. You have to build everything three times: Web, iOS, Android. We’re talent-starved, this is egregious waste, and it’s really hurting us.
- Making Systems That Don’t Suck (Dominus) — every software engineer should have to read this. Every one.
- IBM Struggles to Turn Watson Into Big Business (WSJ) — cognition services harder to onboard than seemed. It smells suspiciously like expert systems from the 1980s, but with more complex analytics on the inside. Analytic skill isn’t the problem for these applications, though, it’s the pain of getting domain knowledge into the system in the first place. This is where G’s web crawl and massive structured general knowledge is going to be a key accelerant.
- Reading This May Harm Your Computer (SSRN) — Internet users face large numbers of security warnings, which they mostly ignore. To improve risk communication, warnings must be fewer but better. We report an experiment on whether compliance can be increased by using some of the social-psychological techniques the scammers themselves use, namely appeal to authority, social compliance, concrete threats and vague threats. We also investigated whether users turned off browser malware warnings (or would have, had they known how).
Four short links: 7 January 2014
Wearables Mature, Network as Filter, To The Androidmobile, and U R Pwn3d
- Pebble Gets App Store (ReadWrite Web) — as both Pebble and MetaWatch go after the high-end watch market. Wearables becoming more than a nerd novelty.
- Thinking About the Network as Filter (JP Rangaswami) — Constant re-openings of the same debate as people try and get a synchronous outcome out of an asynchronous tool without the agreements and conventions in place to do it. He says friends are your social filters. You no longer have to read every email. When you come back from vacation, whatever has passed in the stream unread can stay unread but most social tools are built as collectors, not as filters. Looking forward to the rest in his series.
- Open Auto Alliance — The OAA is a global alliance of technology and auto industry leaders committed to bringing the Android platform to cars starting in 2014. “KidGamesPack 7 requires access to your history, SMS, location, network connectivity, speed, weight, in-car audio, and ABS control systems. Install or Cancel?”
- Jacob Appelbaum’s CCC Talk — transcript of an excellent talk. One of the scariest parts about this is that for this system or these sets of systems to exist, we have been kept vulnerable. So it is the case that if the Chinese, if the Russians, if people here wish to build this system, there’s nothing that stops them. And in fact the NSA has in a literal sense retarded the process by which we would secure the internet because it establishes a hegemony of power, their power in secret to do these things.
Four short links: 1 January 2014
3D Motion Tracking, Linux of Things, Techno Panics, and Great CS Papers
- Witrack — tracks the 3D motion of a user from the radio signals reflected off her body. It works even if the person is occluded from the WiTrack device or in a different room. WiTrack does not require the user to carry any wireless device, yet its accuracy exceeds current RF localization systems, which require the user to hold a transceiver. It transmits wireless signals whose power is 100 times smaller than Wi-Fi and 1000 times smaller than cellphone transmissions.
- A Linux Christmas — Linux drives pretty much all of Amazon’s top-selling consumer electronics.
- Techno Panic Timeline — chart from Exposing the War on Fun showing the fears of technology from 1493 to the modern day.
- Best Paper Awards in CS Since 1996 (Jeff Huang) — fantastic resource for your holiday reading.
Four short links: 27 December 2013
Dinosaur Tries to Suckle, Dashboard Design, Massive Visualizations, Massive Machine Learning
- Intel XDK — If you can write code in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript*, you can use the Intel® XDK to build an HTML5 web app or a hybrid app for all of the major app stores. It’s a .exe. What more do I need to say? FFS.
- Behind the Scenes of a Dashboard Design — the design decisions that go into displaying complex info.
- Superconductor — a web framework for creating data visualizations that scale to real-time interactions with up to 1,000,000 data points. It compiles to WebCL, WebGL, and web workers. (via Ben Lorica)
- BIDMach: Large-scale Learning with Zero Memory Allocation (PDF) — GPU-accelerated machine learning. In this paper we describe a caching approach that allows code with complex matrix (graph) expressions at massive scale, i.e. multi-terabyte data, with zero memory allocation after the initial setup. (via Siah)
Four short links: 13 December 2013
China Making, Good Books, Robot Futures, and Ambient Information
- Bunnie Huang Live (YouTube) — talk given at the Make:Live Stage at Maker Faire NYC, covering his experiences and advice for getting hardware made. (via Makezine)
- Bill Gates’s Best Books of 2013 — interesting list!
- The Robots are Here (Tyler Cowan) — a bleak view of the future in which jobs that can be done by robots are done by robots, and concomitant power spiral towards the rich. I let this one sit for a while before posting, and I still think it’s wildly important.
- Philips Hue Lightbulb — awesome widely-available commercial ambient display.
Four short links: 12 December 2013
Bluetooth LE, Keyboard Design, Dataset API, and State Machines
- iBeacons — Bluetooth LE enabling tighter coupling of physical world with digital. I’m enamoured with the interaction possibilities: The latest Apple TV software brought a fantastically clever workaround. You just tap your iPhone to the Apple TV itself, and it passes your Wi-Fi and iTunes credentials over and sets everything up instantaneously.
- Better and Better Keyboards (Jesse Vincent) — It suffered from the same problem as every other 3D-printed keyboard I’d made to date – When I showed it to someone, they got really excited about the fact that I had a 3D printer. In contrast, whenever I showed someone one of the layered acrylic prototype keyboards I’d built, they got excited about the keyboard.
- Bamboo.io — open source modular web service for dataset storage and retrieval.
- state.js — Open source JavaScript state machine supporting most UML 2 features.
Four short links: 26 November 2013
Internet Cities, Defying Google Glass, Deep Learning Book, and Open Paleoanthropology
- The Death and Life of Great Internet Cities — “The sense that you were given some space on the Internet, and allowed to do anything you wanted to in that space, it’s completely gone from these new social sites,” said Scott. “Like prisoners, or livestock, or anybody locked in institution, I am sure the residents of these new places don’t even notice the walls anymore.”
- What You’re Not Supposed To Do With Google Glass (Esquire) — Maybe I can put these interruptions to good use. I once read that in ancient Rome, when a general came home victorious, they’d throw him a triumphal parade. But there was always a slave who walked behind the general, whispering in his ear to keep him humble. “You are mortal,” the slave would say. I’ve always wanted a modern nonslave version of this — a way to remind myself to keep perspective. And Glass seemed the first gadget that would allow me to do that. In the morning, I schedule a series of messages to e-mail myself throughout the day. “You are mortal.” “You are going to die someday.” “Stop being a selfish bastard and think about others.” (via BoingBoing)
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning — Chapter 1 up and free, and there’s an IndieGogo campaign to fund the rest.
- What We Know and Don’t Know — That highly controlled approach creates the misconception that fossils come out of the ground with labels attached. Or worse, that discovery comes from cloaked geniuses instead of open discussion. We’re hoping to combat these misconceptions by pursuing an open approach. This is today’s evolutionary science, not the science of fifty years ago We’re here sharing science. […] Science isn’t the answers, science is the process. Open science in paleoanthropology.