magpie's shiny things

John Maeda is one of my heroes. He’s tak­ing a new job at RISD in June. In one of his blog posts at our.risd.org he had this to say:

Also, some of the best artists and design­ers are great cooks. There is some­thing to cook­ing that is not only inher­ent­ly inven­tive, but also exem­pli­fies the very nature of unselfish giv­ing from the heart. What you could eat your­self, you choose to give to anoth­er as the most mean­ing­ful sus­te­nance for survival.

Link

Boingboing Crunch Gear report­ed this morn­ing the planned clo­sure of the last plant to man­u­fac­ture Polaroid “film”.

We had a Polaroid instant cam­era when I was a kid. Instant pic­tures being of course a big hit with the munchkin crowd and then lat­er mess­ing about the emul­sions and mak­ing “spooky” pic­tures being a hit with the larg­er kids.

One of the coolest uses of Polaroid film has been for tak­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion pho­tos for var­i­ous con­tests and races. My favorite of those being the Iron Butt Rally.

Arrival at var­i­ous bonus loca­tions was ver­i­fied by tak­ing a Polaroid pic­ture of your “ral­ly tow­el” with some named mon­u­ment at the loca­tion. For exam­ple: A pic­ture of the Lincoln Monument — the one in Laramie Wyoming. 

Polaroid pic­ture ver­i­fi­ca­tion offered the triple advan­tage of being:
1) Cheap.
2) Light weight (rel­a­tive­ly.)
3) Difficult to spoof.

So here’s the challenge: 

What tech­nol­o­gy (com­bi­na­tion) can you use to prove that a per­son was in a par­tic­u­lar place at a par­tic­u­lar time.

Remember this sys­tem has to be car­ried on a motor­cy­cle through just about every god awful envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tion you can imag­ine and oper­at­ed by a prob­a­bly dog-tired and cer­tain­ly dis­tract­ed rid­er. It has to be cheap enough to deploy a cou­ple of hun­dred units and secure enough that the con­tes­tants trust its results.

Details of the plant clo­sures and Polaroid’s search for a licensee are avail­able 0n the Boston Herald site.

I final­ly fig­ured out what it is about the behav­ior of the new (vista) ver­sion of win­dows explor­er that is odd. 

When you look at the fold­er con­tents in the right side pane, if there are more fold­ers than will fit WE extends the list to the right (with a scroll bar on the bot­tom of the win­dow) rather than down (with the scroll bar on the right side.) 

This is counter to the way extra con­tent is han­dled in every oth­er part of the com­put­er uni­verse. Users expect to scroll down, not right.

I recent­ly acquired a Blackberry Pearl. 

It’s a nice lit­tle device that does­n’t absolute­ly scream cor­po­rate whore but lets me car­ry around a lot of the essen­tials of my life in my (over­loaded) purse. It also has per­haps the small­est screen in pro­duc­tion on a device capa­ble of tru­ly access­ing the web. 

While I love hav­ing access to all the minu­tia of my life in an instant. (Third old­est niece’s mid­dle name? Coming right up.) Using it to find stuff on the web dri­ves me half nut­ty. A sim­ple look-up of store hours or a phone num­ber is a mess for any­thing I don’t already have book-marked. Google’s pre­sen­ta­tion of paid and then “yel­low pages” gen­er­at­ed search results ahead of the store’s actu­al site is beyond annoy­ing. (It’s also very dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish between the paid and not paid results — at least in the stan­dard black­ber­ry web browser.)

I’ve been think­ing that it’s about the tiny size of the screen.

Even in my plan­ning for the weath­er infor­ma­tion of our web­site I’ve been focused on the get­ting it all to work in the tiny bit of screen that the Pearl affords. But I had some hints that there was more to the mat­ter than just the form fac­tor. I decid­ed that the left hand list­ing col­umn of sin­gle data points should be moved up in the HTML file so that they would appear first when you get to the main weath­er page because exact­ly how warm/cold it is and how much rain has fall­en are the two bits of infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at home.

This morn­ing Peter Merholz at Adaptive path writes about design­ing for mobil­i­ty and hits it in one.

His key state­ments are:

“The thing that’s inter­est­ing about design­ing for mobile isn’t the form of the device. It’s that the device comes with you.”

…and…

“We don’t want to explore cyber­space when we’re out-and-about. We want to quick­ly get a key piece of infor­ma­tion, or make a key con­nec­tion. We want key func­tion­al­i­ty at our fingertips.”

The dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment in which we are using the device/web dic­tate dif­fer­ences in how we want the web to behave. It’s not about the device. It’s about the task appro­pri­ate for the context.

Even a lap­top with a mon­ster screen used in the Avis park­ing lot of the air­port should dis­play the basic infor­ma­tion such as the “store locater” or “map” nav­i­ga­tion but­tons at the top of the page. Because we don’t want to browse the selec­tion of books at Borders we want to find the near­est Borders store.

It’s clar­i­fies what has been both­er­ing me about using the web via Blackberry and why it is that I am try­ing to do with our own weath­er pages isn’t quite work­ing out. I have a sneak­ing feel­ing that I’m about to dis­cov­er that sim­ply rear­rang­ing the HTML (to sort out the load order) and mak­ing a sec­ond CSS file (to address the con­straints of the mobile device form fac­tor) is not going to be enough. Mobile implies a dif­fer­ent set of tasks and infor­ma­tion needs that can’t be addressed by rear­rang­ing the box­es on the page.

This after­noon I have been look­ing for non-business exam­ples of graph­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of data. Particularly I’ve been look­ing for good exam­ples of sports sta­tis­tics pre­sent­ed as sum­ma­ry graphs. The base­ball equiv­a­lent of a week­ly sales trend by region graph, if you will. 

I am under­whelmed. There are a cou­ple of sites out there doing his­tor­i­cal graph­ing. Including (not recent­ly updat­ed) Baseball Graphs. But the major sports sites (ESPN, and the league offi­cial sites.) Still rely on the tra­di­tion­al text and numer­i­cal “box score” that I first learned to read sit­ting with my dad at the break­fast table. There’s a nice exam­ple with expla­na­tion of a base­ball box score on wikipedia for those of you not lucky enough to have grown up with base­ball for breakfast.

Check out this ESPN report on theColorado/Boston game (21.oct.07) Other than the addi­tion the cute team logo icon next to the game high­lights, it looks pret­ty much the way it did in the morn­ing paper. Why?

My best guess… We learned to fol­low the game via text and num­bers pre­sent­ed in the box score for­mat. It serves it pur­pose well and we know how to read it. We don’t want to learn to read some oth­er (visu­al) language.