Our 360 Flex Presentation is online!

Here you go!  

Thanks to Ted Patrick for getting this up and posting it on his blog.  I've been watching the 360 Flex RSS feed on Adobe Media Player for weeks now and never saw it, but Ted has it posted.  Enjoy, and please give us your feedback!

I've posted the slides on SlideShare here.  Email me at rj {dot} owen at effecitveui.com if you want the originals to use for yourself.  Please feel free to use these at user groups, conferences, or to impress attractive members of the opposite sex.

Microsoft Surface in the house

I'm happy to announce today that our embargo on surface blogging has been dropped, and I can announce that we upgraded our standard coffee table to a Microsoft Surface about two months ago and have started developing some basic applications for it.

The surface comes loaded with some pretty basic applications to start - a small keyboard, some applications to demo its ability to display, resize, and manipulate photos, four-way pong, a few basic test apps showing the types of information it can process, and a water simulation that ripples when touched.

My reactions thus far have been pretty mixed.  On the one hand, nothing about the surface feels sleek, elegant, or in any way portable - it's huge and heavy - but it's alpha technology at this point and meant to be a table, so all of that should be forgiven.  It uses a camera to detect multi-touch (as opposed to pressure or heat in other devices), which has some real benefits: it's able to detect and react to many objects other than the human hand.  While the test applications aren't anything very impressive, they're fun and so intuitive that the technology is invisible, and that's what good user experience is all about.

Another thing that's worth mentioning is how helpful Microsoft has been in learning to program for the Surface.  We identified a few employees really interested in doing R&D work on the surface, and Microsoft did a lot to bring them up to speed, including conducting a special training session for them in Redmond.  Say what you will about office or Windows - Microsoft knows how to treat developers.

I'm pretty excited to see what our team comes up with for the surface.  Interfaces like this are going to be everywhere in the not-too-distant future, and it's exciting to be working with some of that technology now.

If you're in Denver and interested, stop by our office sometime and check it out.

Apple did what?

For a company who's touted as having nailed user experience through simplicity, Apple's new set of iPod features are very confusing.  Here's a list of things we never wanted in our iPod, and the exclusion of which made the iPod so successful during it's early days:

- voice recording on the Nano

- 10 different colors to choose from

- "Shake to Shuffle"

- lots and lots of different price points

The voice recording is specifically weird.  Apple's been praised by numerous analysts specifically for NOT including that feature.  

The most recent place I read about this was in Subject to Change - Adaptive Path's book / video on building user experience design into your company's process and culture.  The iPod and iPhone are case studies in simplicity - in being late to market, and beating your competition by offering fewer features in better integrated systems.

I guess Apple's moved out of the "user experience" stage into the "repeat buyer" stage - they've come to dominate the market, and now they need a new gimmick to get all of their existing iPod customers to buy another.  I'm sorry, Steve - the new colors are cool and all, but at the end of the day the features I really care about haven't changed.  I don't need another one.

John Wilker joins EffectiveUI!

I'm happy to welcome John Wilker (of 360Flex fame) to EffectiveUI.  John made the announcement this morning on his blog and is going to be something called a "Community Evangelist."  Juan Sanchez is reportedly working on his tracts right now.

John's going to bring a lot to solidifying the community events that EffectiveUI is involved in.  A lot of us are doing a lot of independent and disorganized work to help broaden the RIA market, educate the Flex community, and promote the applications EffectiveUI builds and the brands we work with.  John's going to bring some much-needed focus to that, and I'm really excited to see what happens.

Welcome, John!

Using Photographs to Enhance Video

Really amazing video about a new video-enhancement technique using still photographs.  Thanks to Zach Pinter for sending this out:

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

What the heck, Aurora?

Ryan Stewart:

"Aurora is a new “inspire” concept by Adaptive Path and Mozilla to give people a look at what the browser looks like in the future. It’s awesome. The user interface is great, it has lots of important visual queues, and it enables real time collaboration and user generated content."

Wow, Ryan.  Awesome?  Really? I couldn't disagree with you more on this.  I'm really surprised this came from Adaptive Path - I really expect a little more from those guys. 

THE GOOD

• using the Z-axis for time
• blurring the online/offline aspects and moving online content to the desktop 

THE BAD: 

•  Holy clutter Batman! This is simply not a well organized interface. With things moving around and being hidden and lots of weird symbols to memorize (that petal-of-dots interface makes zero sense), it looks like it's set up for a very awkward and confusing user experience.  ORGANIZE my data - show me more files in a more organized way.  The last thing I want is a dock on every side of my screen and a giant cloud of content on my desktop.
• What's with that giant arm thing she's holding? There aren't any interactions she does that benefit from the huge peripheral.  I think there's huge untapped potential in new interfaces and peripherals to power them.  This simply doesn't cut it - it's a step backwards from my mouse and keyboard.
• What's with all those annoying sounds? There's a reason we stopped doing those back in 1995 - they're horribly distracting.  The last thing I want when I click something is for it to yell back, in some insanely happy voice, "HI! THANKS FOR CLICKING ME! LET'S PLAY!"  Sounds should be used quite sparingly, and when they are, they should be as short and simple as possible.  The quiet mouse "click" is about as intense as most of us can handle.
  
• Real-time collaboration is really distracting. The last thing I need is a bunch of people trying to voice chat me all day. IM and email are great because they're passive communication - we don't need to collaborate on everything all the time.  If you want to enhance the way we collaborate and communicate, try organizing and consolidating all our passive communication forms into a more centralized hub.
  
• Why the heck would you demonstrate your awesome next-gen design ideas in a video featuring farmers arguing about rainfall?
  

In conclusion, please don't make me use that thing.

Maikel Sibbald Joins EffectiveUI

This announcement is long overdue.  About a month ago, one of the most talented underground 3d Flex developers I've ever seen joined EffectiveUI.  His name is Maikel Sibbald, and he runs the popular labs.flexcoders.nl blog.  If the URL didn't give it away, Maikel lives in the Netherlands, where he has two sons and a lot of tatoos, but is currently visiting Denver.

Maikel's hiring a EffectiveUI is a funny story that speaks to the power of taking initiative.  Maikel's a proficient Away3D programmer, and after seeing some of the stuff we did for Discovery Earth Live he decided to copy it's globe.  We discovered Maikel because of the copy, started talking, and the rest is history.  The motto of Maikel's story is simple: if you want to get a cool job at a sweet RIA company, copy some of their work.

Maikel joins a few other EffectiveUI Europe team members, including his fellow degrafa-contributor Jason Hawryluk, who lives in France.  On behalf of everyone, welcome to the team, and sorry I didn't blog about you a month ago. :)