Monthly Archives: April 2004

When user interfaces fail

Some people like to do “designer bashing” from time to time. I was just in the mood to do some “developer bashing” today. There are a number of reasons why user interfaces of many software packages fail. I assume (slightly unfair and inaccurate), that in many cases there is no interface designer involved with user [...]
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Educational scenarios

Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture: Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and [...]
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Tinderbox 2.2

Eastgate released Tinderbox 2.2. Many PC users don’t know about Tinderbox. There is a Windows version coming soon.
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I mix & you mix, we all mix for iMix

Today Apple released iTunes 4.5 for Mac and Windows with a number of new features: All the artist/album names and song titles in my library have a shortcut into the music store now. And there is a party shuffle mode where you can control the flow of the songs played and see which song recently [...]
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A closer look at why people blog

Here is a paper (PDF) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz about motivations for weblogging: We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no [...]
Posted in Weblog Theory | Leave a comment

John Seely Brown website

George Siemens: I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website. [via elearnspace]
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Social Computing Symposium videos online

I completely missed to blog this link from Kevin Shofield: The videos of the lectures from the Microsoft Research-sponsored Social Computing Symposium are now posted for your viewing pleasure at:http://murl.microsoft.com/ContentMapDetails.asp?SeriesID=89Enjoy!
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Apple boosts professional digital media authoring tools

Apple releases Apple Motion and DVD Studio Pro 3. Motion ($299) seems to be rivaling Adobe After Effects ($999). I have seen Final Cut (now with high definition support) shooting out Adobe Premiere long ago and even boiled Avid Media Composer with ease. DVD Studio Pro is to my knowledge a very good DVD authoring [...]
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Free culture

Lawrence Lessig convinced his editor to release the book under a creative commons licence. Now Aaron Schwartz took it and put the complete book online – as wiki, so anyone can contribute and change the content.
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3D desktop? Not again!

Ingo Hinterding pointed to the SphereXP project and Sun’s Project Looking Glass. Sphere looks quite easy to use – but doesn’t seem to be an incredible enhancement. Sure: you could have open 130 windows and see them all almost at once — if you rotate fast enough! All the 3D approaches I have seen have [...]
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Quotes about design

Here is a list of quotes about design collected from designfeast.com.
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Student blogging (contd.)

Will Richardson has done a very good job tracking the discussion about student blogging.
Posted in Weblog Theory | Leave a comment

The revenue of blogging investment

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed.com has collected the most recent posts from different locations about the “weblog in education” discussion: A number of threads about the value of blogging in the classroom have been floating here and there lately, many of them here. For context, some of the more relevant posts are Reading and Blogging here [...]
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The humanism of media ecology

Neil Postman – Media Ecology Association: “As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage. My own answer to the question concerning access to information is that, at least for now, [...]
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When Pythons Attack

Mark Lutz: In this article, I will chronicle some of the most common mistakes made by both new and veteran Python programmers, to help you avoid them in your own work. [via Zope Newbies>]
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Graphical SQL Editor for OSX

If you ever need to design a database on a Mac you should have a look at this little freeware application: SQLEditor. It offers a grpahical drag&drop way to create tables and display relations.
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Speechbot

SpeechBot (from HP/Compaq) is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites. It uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information.
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Decentralzied media

Umediated.org is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes, and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.
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Nokia Lifeblog

Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save.
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Fast rollovers without preload

This tutorial by Petr Stanicek desceribes a technique to have graphical rollovers based on CSS without the need to preload images. This is also used in the Sliding Doors Part II tutorial on alistapart.com.
Posted in Practice | Leave a comment
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