- Weekend Reads on Deep Learning (Alex Dong) — an article and two videos unpacking “deep learning” such as multilayer neural networks.
- The Internet of Actual Things — “I have 10 reliable activations remaining,” your bulb will report via some ridiculous light-bulbs app on your phone. “Now just nine. Remember me when I’m gone.” (via Andy Baio)
- Announcing the Mozilla Science Lab (Kaitlin Thaney) — We also want to find ways of supporting and innovating with the research community – building bridges between projects, running experiments of our own, and building community. We have an initial idea of where to start, but want to start an open dialogue to figure out together how to best do that, and where we can be of most value..
- NAND to Tetris — The site contains all the software tools and project materials necessary to build a general-purpose computer system from the ground up. We also provide a set of lectures designed to support a typical course on the subject. (via Hacker News)
ENTRIES TAGGED "ux"
Four short links: 17 June 2013
Deep Learning, Internet of ux Nightmares, Mozilla Science Lab, and Ground-Up Computing
Four short links: 20 December 2012
SQL Indexes, Instagram Effects in JS, Evil Fake Keyboard, and Preschool UX
- Use The Index, Luke — free ebook on tuning SQL database access.
- CamanJS — Instagram-like filters in Javascript, permissively-licensed open source. (via VentureBeat)
- Don’t Stick That There — USB device pretending to be a keyboard. The benefit of this is that even with USB auto-run disabled, our exploit will still work as it emulates a keyboard. No one ever blocks USB keyboards! (via David Sklar)
- Best Practices: Designing Touch Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers (Sesame Workshop) — the good people at Sesame Street Workshop tell what works and what doesn’t when you make tablet touch UIs for kids. Double Tap: Children expect immediate feedback from their touch and tend to think the app is unresponsive when a double tap is required. We suggest only using double tap to prevent a child from accidental navigation (e.g., leaving an activity, accessing parent content).
Four short links: 10 December 2012
Regular Expressions, Mobile Diversions, UX Pitfalls, and DIY Keyboarding
- RE2: A Principled Approach to Regular Expressions — a regular expression engine without backtracking, so without the potential for exponential pathological runtimes.
- Mobile is Entertainment (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% of mobile app time is spent on fun, even as desktop web use is declining.
- Five UX Research Pitfalls (Elaine Wherry) — I live this every day: Sometimes someone will propose an idea that doesn’t seem to make sense. While your initial reaction may be to be defensive or to point out the flaws in the proposed A/B study, you should consider that your buddy is responding to something outside your view and that you don’t have all of the data.
- Building a Keyboard: Part 1 (Jesse Vincent) — and Part 2 and general musings on the topic of keyboards. Jesse built his own. Yeah, he’s that badass.
Commerce Weekly: Streamlining Facebook's ads
One-click Facebook campaigns, PayPal redesigns, and a Best Buy exec identifies in-store mobile issues.
Payvment launches a one-click Facebook ad service, PayPal revamps its website with consumers and mobile in mind, and a Best Buy exec says in-store mobile use has a scale issue. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Design your website for a graceful fail
Mike Brittain on the resilient user experience.
A failure in secondary content doesn't need to take down an entire website. Here, Etsy's Mike Brittain explains how to build resilience into UIs and allow for graceful failures.
Four short links: 19 April 2012
Text Similarity, Designing Engagement, Clustering Stories, and Prince of Persia
- Superfastmatch — open source text comparison tool, used to locate plagiarism/churnalism in online news sites. You can pull out the text engine and use it for your own “find where this text is used elsewhere” applications (e.g., what’s being forwarded out in email, how much of this RFP is copy and paste, what’s NOT boilerplate in this contract, etc.). (via Pete Warden)
- Ten Design Principles for Engaging Math Tasks (Dan Meyer) — education gold, engagement gold, and some serious ideas you can use in your own apps.
- Clustering Related Stories (Jenny Finkel) — description of how to cluster related stories, talks about some of the tricks. Interesting without being too scary.
- Prince of Persia (GitHub) — I have waited to see if the novelty wore off, but I still find this cool: 1980s source code on GitHub.
Christopher Schmitt and Simon St. Laurent discuss HTML5
What to watch for in HTML5, CSS, and the open web.
HTML5 author Christopher Schmitt talks with O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent about why it's a great time to be a web developer.
Four short links: 9 March 2012
Real World User Experience, Biovis your Social Network, Analytics for Phone Sales, and Classy OpenStreetMap
- Why The Symphony Needs A Progress Bar (Elaine Wherry) — an excellent interaction designer tackles the real world.
- Biologic — view your social network as though looking at cells through a microscope. Gorgeous and different.
- The Cost of Cracking — analysis of used phone listings to see what improves and decreases price yields some really interesting results. Phones described as “decent” are typically priced 23% below the median. Who would describe something they’re selling as “decent” and price it below market value unless something fishy was going on? [...] On average, cracking your phone destroys 30-50% of its value instantly. Particularly interesting to me since Ms 10 just brought home her phone with *cough* a new starburst screensaver.
- OpenStreetMap Welcomes Apple — this is the classy way to deal with the world’s richest company quietly and badly using your work without acknowledgement.
Four short links: 31 January 2012
Entertainment Industry Booming, Exposing Data, Login Data, and QR Codes
- The Sky is Rising — TechDirt’s Mike Masnick has written (and made available for free download) an excellent report on the entertainment industry’s numbers and business models. Must read if you have an opinion on SOPA et al.
- Tennis Australia Exposes Match Analytics — Served from IBM’s US-based private cloud, the updated SlamTracker web application pulls together 39 million points of data collated from all four Grand Slam tournaments over the past seven years to provide insights into a player’s style of play and progress. The analytics application also provides a player’s likelihood of beating their opponent through each round of the two-week tournament and the ‘key to the match’ required for them to win. “We gave our data to IBM, said, ‘Here we go, that’s 10 years of scores and stats, matches and players’,” said Samir Mahir, CIO at Tennis Australia. Data as way to engage fans. (via Steve O’Grady)
- Data Monday: Logins and Passwords (Luke Wroblewski) — Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
- QR Codes: Bad Idea or Terrible Idea? (Kevin Marks) — People have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now they have 2 problems. I prefer to think of QR codes as a prototype of what Matt Jones calls “the robot-readable world”–not so much the technology we really imagine we will be deploying when we build our science fictiony future.
Mobile interfaces: Mistakes to avoid and trends to watch
"Designing Mobile Interfaces" co-author Steven Hoober on common UI mistakes.
In this interview, “Designing Mobile Interfaces” co-author Steven Hoober discusses common mobile interface mistakes, and he offers his thoughts on the latest mobile device trends — including why the addition of gestures and sensors isn’t wholly positive.
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