Multi-Touch Interface

Multi-touch (or multitouch) denotes a set of interaction techniques which allow computer users to control graphical applications with several fingers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch

Bill Buxton with Microsoft has a website that shows a great history/timeline of the touch screens here. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
Multi-touch has been around for a while, but only recently has made “headlines” with the iPhone. Multi-touch enables users to manipulate items on the screen with just finger motions. For graphic designers, we have had the use of the tablet for a while and with that came the multi-touch.

As a web designer, the multi-touch will be a huge asset. Being able to create a picture on a computer that is comparable to an actual painting!! Then later to be able to design a site that users can move items on the website with their fingers, that would be awesome!!
There is also a plan to replace keyboards & mice. Which again would help designers from carpal tunnel syndrome, and other repetitive motion injuries. Multi touch interfaces will offer many more opportunities for creative manipulation – new video games, & not to mention new digital media.

UStream

Ustream is an interactive web streaming platform, that lets users broadcast and share video’s with the world.
“Anyone with a computer, an Internet connection and a web cam can set up their own channel and broadcast live. The site launched in March 2007 and was the second live streaming site after Stickam.com.” http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ustream

While this was initially started to let soldiers contact and see their families while being overseas, it has caught on for just about any broadcast idea. While doing my research on this, the first thing that came to mind, was meeting with clients.

I know that face to face meetings are very important to a company’s success. Being able to see each other and talk can still be one of the main deal makers or breakers. If I will be designing a site for a small company in Illinois, they most likely can not afford to fly me into their office twice a month to meet with them and go over the website. Using UStream would be a great asset as we can communicate immediately in live chat, while the presentation in going on. They could also bring in a consultant who lives in NY and they can talk with them discretely while I am doing the presentation.
Video conferencing is really the best way to go right now in the troubled economic times. Most people can not afford to fly, and the gas prices never seem to stay constant for more than a few weeks. With internet access, a web cam, and a steady broadband connection you can meet, discuss & present anything you want to who ever you want!

www.oovoo.com
userve.com
www.sightspeed.com

Cloud Computing

In an article I read this morning stated that “cloud computing was a little like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it, few actually do it, and even fewer do it right!” This really got me laughing at 7am this morning!! He also stated that “According to Pew Research, anyone with a Gmail or YouTube account is participating in the cloud computing revolution. ” http://soa.sys-con.com/node/862933

This client server technology could be the best thing that has happened to the corporate world in a long time. However, the corporate world would really need to actually adopt it. I would save a tremendous amount of money on corporate licenses to Microsoft, Oracle, etc. The technology could be much more secure, a lot less information would be “leaked” out from disgruntled employees, or corporate spies – does anyone still do that??

Microsoft says that it can save corporate businesses on average $470,000 *if* companies use their virtualization software.

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization

Types of Cloud Computing

This is where I learned the most about it. I really thought that cloud computing was just the applications on the server. Not all the different types, but now that I have read it, it does make sense why they are included.

Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation at pay-as-you-go utility pricing was the breakthrough in this category, and now everyone wants to play. Developers, not end-users, are the target of this kind of cloud computing.

Platform as a Service. One step up from pure utility computing are platforms like Google AppEngine and Salesforce’s force.com, which hide machine instances behind higher-level APIs. Porting an application from one of these platforms to another is more like porting from Mac to Windows than from one Linux distribution to another.

Cloud-based end-user applications. Any web application is a cloud application in the sense that it resides in the cloud. Google, Amazon, Facebook, twitter, flickr, and virtually every other Web 2.0 application is a cloud application in this sense.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-computing.html

There are a lot of pros and of course some cons to cloud computing. I can see that the cost is a HUGE pro, and just the fact that we have people who hack into the presidents website, just for fun, is of course is a HUGE con. There are plenty of little pros and cons that deal with the need for a serious rack of redundant servers. So there can be a big cost on the providers side.

As a user, this can be a really great innovation, as you can check email, edit documents, update spreadsheets etc on the go, no matter where you are. As a web developer though, yes you can edit the code from anywhere – including in your clients office. However, doing graphics and actual art designs may not totally be available yet. I may have to do some more research on this, I beleive that Photoshop has some web applications. Ok, they do it’s called Photoshop Express, and it looks like it’s just a photo sharing site, but not a graphic design site. So, it looks like I will still need to look around for one….

Web Standards

“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call ‘web standards’, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.” http://webstandardsgroup.org/standards/
Web standards are just as important as standards for EVERYTHING. There must be a consistancy in everything! If one person designs a web page and in turn he uses some code or application that only works well with the iPhone, then people on computers, or other PDAs could not read it.
As a web designer you want your web pages to be available to be seen by as many people as possible. Without any standard, the only people that would see your site is the few that it is designed for. This is fine if you are working on a corporate INTRAnet site, but not for something you want other outside parties to see. Without the adaptability and flexability that there is now, people would not be able to learn, grow, and connect to people from all over the world!
The most important standards on the Web are not technological, they’re social. They are the standards that software and web sites need to reach before people find something useful. If you can, yes, use web standards to make your app more accessible, or to save on your bandwidth costs, or give you better visibility among your peers.
But standards can be a false idol, and praying to validation is putting technology before humans. The mere act of validation doesn’t suddenly make something accessible to all, so judging designers on validation doesn’t say much either. Don’t make standards or validation an absolute necessity if they’re going to hold you back from coming up with something like Gmail that completely changes the way we use the Web.
Time has shown, that the most successful web sites are the ones that

constantly adapt

to the needs of their audience. Today’s site is different than tomorrow’s. I can see that designers will need to be permanent design team, or perhaps hold an advisory role, simply because they need to be around to change their work over time. At the very least, they will have to create interfaces that can be easily modified by others who continue to work on the project after they leave.
That leaves designers with the problem of how to create interfaces that are adaptable to change, that can be modified when necessary, that don’t require another complete redesign to fix. That will be a big challenge going forward, and why we need to have a standard of web programming and languages.

http://www.webstandards.org/
http://webstandardsgroup.org/
http://bokardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by/

Twitter

I have to admit when Wayne asked us to blog about Twitter, I really was surprised. I always thought that Twitter was just a photo site, not a place for people to keep others up to date with each other! Of course the first place you go to is Wikipedia, which told me more.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can send and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Feedalizr. The service is free to use over the web, but using SMS may incur phone services provider fees. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
So, this tells me that I really AM a little behind on the whole social networking thing!!

This is a pretty good article for us newbies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?ex=1250139600&en=42221fa80caa017a&ei=5087&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=TE-S-E-GG-NA-S-twittering

And another for your viewing pleasure
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/5-ways-to-use-twitter-for-good.html

Community of Practice

CoP (Community of Practice) are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a team of students working on a class project, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a group of first-time managers helping each other learn how to deal management issues. Communities of practice are everywhere. We all belong to a number of them–at work, at school, at home, in our hobbies. Some have a name, some don’t. We are core members of some and we belong to others more peripherally. You may be a member of a band, or you may just come to rehearsals to hang around with the group.

This is something that has been going on (again) since the beginning of time.  People will come together to learn and grow.  They can be pulled together for various reasons, management creates a team of SMEs (subject matter experts), or students come together to get through a class assignment.

I have my own little CoPs for different things.  I have some people that I go to for assistance with networking, or different things. I’m also part of ones where I am teaching about computers and how to work in MS Office.  We have multiple CoP’s within our 4-H group, one for cattle, hogs, rabbits, shooting sports, archery, etc.

A great example that goes beyond in explaining is below:

Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. The following table provides a few typical examples:

Problem solving	“Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck.”
Requests for information	“Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”
Seeking experience	“Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?”
Reusing assets	“I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client.”
Coordination and synergy	“Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?”
Discussing developments	“What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?”
Documentation projects	“We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all.”
Visits	“Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city.”
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps	“Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?”

http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm 

These are somme great examples of the different things that we can use CoP for.  It can truly be anything, a networking meeting, a class of people wanting to learn IMD

Podcasting

Well this is definately part of social networking.  Today anyone with a computer can create a website, with a video camera can make a movie, and an opinion can create a blog or for those that want people to actually hear them – a podcast!

Podcasting can be a great learning tool, for anyone who has speakers on their computer, or any kind of mp3 player.  There are really some great podcasts for any subject, from a lot of high end schools such as MIT & Harvard.  I have several that I have downloaded from iTunes on subjects ranging from meditation, to geekcasts, to web design.  I have found that there are some that are pretty good and others that are very old and shouldn’t be there anymore!  They are great to listen to in the car, since I have a long commute to most anywhere.  There are some downsides to listening to them in the car – it’s hard to stop and take notes, or write down something that I want to check out on my own!   

 I will write some more on this after my meeting with career svcs…

 

This is a place where they teach you how to make money on podcasting.

http://www.podbean.com/start-podcast?sourceid=goog_66

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence has existed for at least as long as humans have. Tribes of hunter-gatherers, nations, and modern corporations all act collectively with varying degrees of intelligence. But this ancient phenomenon is now occurring in dramatically new forms. For example:

Google uses the knowledge millions of people have stored in the World Wide Web to provide remarkably useful answers to users’ questions

Wikipedia motivates thousands of volunteers around the world to create the world’s largest encyclopedia

Innocentive lets companies easily tap the talents of the global scientific community for innovative solutions to tough R&D problems http://cci.mit.edu/research/index.html

As you can see people have always shared and exchanged thoughts and ideas since the beginning of time, but has never been as so easily accessed and exchanged as it is now.

Today there is more of an information overload than anything.  Myself, I can get lost in doing research!  When I’m interested in a subject, and I’m doing research I will read and read and click on links and the next thing you know, it’s 3-4 hours later and I haven’t written anything!

I did find a really interesting article by Oliver Schwabe called The guru is dead, long live the network! In the article, he discusses how it used to be only a few people “knew” everything, but with the social networking that is available, we now know that not any one person can be the “GURU”, but many people can have the knowledge. He states “Maybe we are already making the move from the lighthouses – isolated beacons of knowledge – to genuine networks such as the Entovation Group (www.entovation.com) or Value Networks Consortium (www.vncluster.com), what John Maloney, founder and chief strategist of KM Cluster, calls ‘collective intelligence’.”
http://www.ikmagazine.com/display.asp?articleid=C67F3CBC-7256-4A59-9800-301B53950AA9

You can go to many different sites on one topic, and find so many different opinions, it can be hard to find out what the truth is.  You just need to do and create your own opinion and post your thoughts.  This then will lead to others reading your posts and learning for themselves and so it goes on and on and on…

Blogging

For me blogging is something that I have never really considered since I’ve never been a great writer.  However, since blogs don’t have to be in APA format, and no one will “mark it down” if I don’t put a comma in the correct place, it’s kinda nice.

Looking at Darren Rowse‘s webpage http://www.problogger.net and his suggestions on Promoting Your Blogs Homepage That Convert First Time Readers to Loyal Ones.   In the article explains that if you are going to post the URL to your blog, you should create a “landing page” which is a page that gives the readers and over view of the blogger and what types of things that you may be discussing in your blogs.

Another option is to send people to specific posts that you’ve written, instead of your home page, this is useful when you have posted something on another site rather than your homepage.  This can sometimes lead people to search for you and your posts if they find your posts interesting.  And if you’re promoting your blog in forums, in your signature include a link to your blog AND an invitation to subscribe to (using RSS) it all in the signature.

In another article – Blog Design for Beginners by Peter Flaschner http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/17/blog-design-for-beginners/, he discusses how creating a Blog is very much like setting up any other website.  you need to draw it up on paper first, as it is the best way to set up any major project. He makes a statement that I really like and will probably use from now on -

Before we get into this, I need to dispel one further myth: design is not about making things pretty. It’s about making things work to their best ability. Let me quote from dictionary.com the definition of DESIGN:

• To formulate a plan for; devise: designed a marketing strategy for the new product.
• To plan out in systematic, usually graphic form: design a building; design a computer program.
• To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect: a game designed to appeal to all ages.
• To have as a goal or purpose; intend.
• To create or execute in an artistic or highly skilled manner.

This makes much more sense to me than just jumping in and doing it.  You should always start with scribbles on paper first so you have a more stable outline to work from.

RSS’ing

RSSs are in my opinion, one of the best things that have come along in a while. 

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.  (http://www.whatisrss.com/)

The great thing about RSS is that you can get information on a regular basis to see what has changed, updated, or even “how to” on multiple websites and topics that you are interested in.  Some of my favorites come from Microsoft, these include tips and tools, online training, as well as some web design information on different software, scripting, etc.  Even my Netflix queue has an RSS feed!

RSS’s are a brief description of the latest information, or updates whereever you have subscribed to.  Because it is a brief outline, you don’t need to read through a ton of posts to find what you want, or read every email that someone sent to get the information you are looking for; ie: mailing lists.  I would waste most of my day going through a list of 30 emails to find one that actually had some information that I wanted/needed.  With the RSS I can look and see if it is something I want to check out or not.

This video explains it all!  I love it!