New stuff on flickr is here: UI and design stuff … and interface sketches.

flickr sketches

Just found out about Political Streams.

I really do like this idea, but reinventing the pie chart with those desaturated squares is not a good start. I’ll be checking it out to see how they iterate on representing the concept, which is fascinating.

It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all on one screen, lets you see the relative popularity of any given story, whether it’s trending up or down, and tracks the number of mentions of the people and places mentioned in the story.

The graphs, by contrast are wonderful and straightforward:

oh and cf. Microsoft Blews (TM) which has similar data (and infoviz problems).

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.

But then of course he really gets to the truth of the CA design scene: “You really have to let go, you unwind into the cosmic infinity of things.”

via http://iatelevision.blogspot.com

Some of the amazing things about the Ushahidi project include:

• Participatory design. Everyone is invited to comment on these designs and hack on the psd files we created.
• Rapid prototyping. (Really rapid: the first version of the app was built in a weekend.)
• The application is completely open source.
• It’s a platform, not a web application: you can get the code and extend it for your own uses.
• Strong user-centered design principles.
• Great attention to detail in the design and insistence on top-notch interfaces (including the marketing website and the admin pages of the application).

Anyway here’s the latest mockup. Here’s the latestsource PSD. It’s v0.2 and still has a long way to go. We did the iPhone app first and will be using lessons learned from this one to port the project to other platforms.

I did most of the sketching and developed the concepts that were flying around, and then my man Joe Jones did all the real work in Photoshop. It’s been a really fun time so far and I am looking forward to implementing some of the changes being discussed on the Ushahidi blog.

Also make sure you check out some of the geniuses behind the project:

Kenyan Pundit

White African

Afromusing

Mentalacrobatics

For the type nerds: Erik Speikermann is my idea of what real men are like. The opening jingle made me shoot beer through my nose. 6 minutes. Just watch it. Check out his blog too.

For Architecture Geeks: Stewart Brand is brilliant and insane. Fun SF footage too. Feature length PBS type thingy: Part 1 of 6.

For Anyone Who Uses a Computer: Doug Engelbart is my hero. “Dealing lightning with both hands,” indeed: this is the public debut of the freaking mouse, hypertext, screensharing and the networked office. This is where it all went down, in 1968 San Francisco (think about it), to a standing ovation in a auditorium full of geeks who had their minds blown. (Bonus points if you know Stewart Brand’s connection.) Long and really boring honestly. Use this like TV Guide, but watch the video on Youtube. If you look close you can see Skype crash.

Turns out that, once you get beat badly by Google, you start to get really open. Nice.

Basically BOSS (bad name, great tool) means that, with a minimal contingency of programmers, you can get a completely custom search running, and apparently you can even manipulate the rankings algorithm. Currently Yahoo is running it without requiring ads or anything. Exciting.

What a great way for a big conservative company to innovate — just let hackers go to town on your fancy database and algorithms. I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

I’m really impressed, even though I spent most of the day grousing about some of the details of the interface they showed — my nitpicking is really just evidence of how much detail there is in the video.

Anyway, the real importance of the videos is not specific to any of the UI details — it’s about what’s happening at Mozilla, and the new inclusive approach they are taking to visual and experience design.

I couldn’t put it better than Dan Harrelson did this week:

Joining an open source software project usually requires one thing: the ability to cut code. If you live in the world of functions, methods, Git, SVN, and SQL, you’ll find many a friend in open source. If you instead work with Photoshop, wireframes, sketches, and stickies, you’ll find it is a bit of a challenge to join an open source project. The community of developers has a history of shunning anyone who is a not programmer. Plus, open source software projects are not heavily promoted in the design community.

UPDATE: My buddy Andy pointed me to the Mozilla call for participation, which does a great job of summarizing the initiative.

Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web. You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate.

1. First some of the best nonprofit advertising I’ve ever seen.
2. Second a great bike water filter pump.
3. Lastly a favorite app redesigned.

(more type video if you’re into it)

And the bike:

The wacky bike was designed by IDEO people — I’m also impressed with their recent riff on the magazine quiz (maybe think madlibs): A Rockefeller sponsored guide to creating social impact with your design firm.

And the App:

FrontlineSMS is a thoroughly wonderful idea in many ways … I mean, if you’re into international rural research with mobile phones. A tool worth watching very closely, it’s what I think is the leading platform of the mobile research “industry”. (if there is such a thing.)

They just released a major new milestone and have bunch of great new branding. Great work, Ken!

Google Charts from Sokwanele and Mobile Researcher

The charts at Mobile Researcher also caught my eye recently (also pictured, at right and bottom). Turns out they were both made with Google Charts. I hadn’t used it before, but I recognized their densely set labels and had some vague ideas that there was a Ruby wrapper. And I just thought that the Mobile Researcher charts were really beautiful. Turns out it’s super easy. There are plenty of libraries for managing the requests to the API, and, in some simple cases you can even code it by hand, since all of the code is simply passed through a query tag on an image url.

What it does do is proved fodder for organizations inside and out to make an even stronger case against this repressive regime.
- Erik Hersman @ whiteafrican.com

But in most of the cases the data is hashed somehow with javascript, since urls can only be so long. Since I was working in a Rails app, I used a great ruby library and was up and running very quickly. I wholeheartedly recommend them anytime you need simple, sharp graphics to illustrate your research. If you have a web app or with dynamic charts, it’s a no-brainer, since generating images is relatively intensive memory-wise.

All this is to say that something like this:

< img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chd=t:6,2,6,4,2,4,7,3,4,2,3,4
&chco=0077CC&chs=120x40&cht=ls" />


Turns into this:

Or you can abstract the access to make it easier with a library like this with a method like this:


#usage
google_pie('val1', 'val2', 'val3')
#method
def google_pie(*args)
size = "250x100"
url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
return < img src=\"#{Gchart.pie_3d( :background => ‘E9E7DD’, :size => ‘300×80′, :data => *args)} \” />
end


But the API of course is language neutral, and I am sure it would be just as easy in most any language. Oh, and it’s free! (Though capped at 10k charts per day … which would be a good problem to have, I suppose.)