Search statistics about human trends through Google and watch it move with Gapminder. This is an interesting Flash application allowing to see changes of data over time.
[via Tim Bruysten]
There is also a video of the presentation. I especially found interesting what the presenter was saying about designers. He was showing this slides like this one:
And then he said things like this
- »There are people that know how to deal with these tools. It’s just that those guys and girls didn’t go to a statistics course, so they don’t know about data. So they don’t manage to get that data in their design tools….«
- »These things are dificult for designers to make look nice, because it’s so much data….«
- »The weather forecast every day …. nice graphics, they have data…. humidity, wind …. they don’t show these numbers… they get a lot of publicitiy with their weather forecast just by drawing nice suns, beautiful colors… so these are the guys to copy in social science!«
I wouldn’t say that drawing »nice suns« is what is the secret to good weather forecasts, but the statement reminded me of the fact that few years ago I planned to offer a seminar called »Forecast« and it was supposed to examine this topic with this intention: to learn how to deal visually with huge data sets. Unfortunatly most of the students thought it is a boring idea to design weather forecasts and so they didn’t share my excitement. So the course never came into being. Not yet.
Published on
June 16, 2006 in
Tools.
Paul Stamatiou wrote a long review of the first Beta release of the »social web browser« Flock.
I have tested the prior releases (up to 0.5.X) and decided these versions are not ready for daily use yet. The 0.7.0 release (the first Beta) seems to be much better, but it still consumes a lot of RAM.
Flock provides integrated tools for online-bookmarking (like del.icio.us), photo sharing (like Flickr), support for RSS feeds and a Weblog editor (e.g. to post to a Wordpress site).
Published on
June 6, 2006 in
Design.
GK VanPatter (co-founder of the NextDesign Leadership Institute) will be speaking at Zollverein Design School in Essen next Saturday. I can’t be in there that day, but I am sure here are others that would like to attend that event.
What was missing for the »long tail« economy was a simple way to offer your products and services online with a system that manages your billing and accounting. Shopify.com is such an application. Their slogan: »A shop in minutes, a business for life.«.
Shopify.com gets a 3%-2% share of your sales. If the seller doesn’t earn anything Shopify.com won’t either.
What I would like to know is how earnings at shopify.com (and similar services that may appear soon) will appear in tax declarations — especially here in Germany.
The CMS Alahup! seems to endorse a lot of the interaction design techniques of Web 2.0 applications (blind ups & downs, yellow flashes, spinning activity icons, etc) even though it appears to be a desktop application. The website states that the interface is based on Flash. So this application may well be an example what can happen when you pair Flash with the standard GUI and AJAX approaches.
Besides of that it also seems to be a very easy to use CMS for smaller and middle sized sites (although I suspect the UI is not very accessible). The documentation for developers seems to be very good as well. On the site there are demo movies, a list of user features and developer features – and a blog. If you like PHP and Smarty then Alahup is worth a look.
Look at these two impressions from two different Webmontag events:
Which one would you like to attend more often?