Ever tried to draw with your mouse. Not very good is it? I know many Designers perfer to use pen tools. This short movie demonstrates the power of your fingers.
Tactadraw demosrc=Newstoday® - For a better tomorrow.
This movie [mpg] from Sony Japan shows some remarkably innovative technology at play. The user dynamically builds their interface with a number of tiles. Each tile looks to be about the size of a CD. They build their interface by selecting the tile of their choice, and placing it on a grid interface where the tile comes alive. I’m not sure this application is something I would use, but I like the idea. I’m sure there are many potential uses.
This site [ rthq.com ] has some really cool links - too bad it doesn’t have an rss feed. After setting up Sage with all the feeds I like I can go through 150 sites in 1/2 hour.
That reminds me - I have to seriously update my right hand copy. Stay tuned, there’s going to be some serious changes soon.
I suspect that other power users surf vicariously through rss feeds to get their fix. Interesting, I wonder if Jacob is doing any research on RSS or the impact of low-literacy users?
I may only regularly visit sites without a feed once or twice a week. Even sites that I used to go to multiple times a day.
Another one from Jacob et al. - this time they have some good advice on building better search interfaces
Add smooth borders to divs using CSS - I might use this one.
using css to emulate frames based layout - interesting. One more reason not to use frames - as if you need another one…
Jacob Neilson helps us Get to know the low-literacy web user.
I disagree with some things that come out of alertbox. This article opened my eyes to some interesting insights into how low-literacy web users navigate a page - what information they get and what they don’t get.
I think it can be taken one step further. Instead of thinking of a user as either a high-literate or a low-literate think of them terms relative to the content of the page. Documents heavy with jargon, difficult concepts or excessive detail makes a document more difficult to comprehend. This in turn increases the literacy level required to scan the document. If scanning becomes ineffective, then a user normally regarded as a ‘high-literacy user’ has to resort to reading word-by-word. You can turn a high-literate user into a low-literate user by increasing the vocabulary requirements of a document. It’s all relative to the document.
I haven’t done clinical tests on this theory. I do know it’s true of me whenever I attempt to comprehend something over my head.
I find that often my colleagues and I assume that they way we surf the web = the way that most people surf the web. When you think about it, it’s not true at all. It is easy to use skewed perceptions to formulate false assumptions. If not for the over-abundance of statistics to the contrary, I think that people might assume things like “that everyone I know uses Firefox, so most people must use Firefox“.
If you want to market a service or a product to as wide an audience as possible, then you should keep the literacy-level of your target audience in mind or you risk abandoning the long tail.
How many low-literacy users do you think have a blog?
Open Source News
It’s raining code (Hallelujah?) - why open source is good for CIOs.
On a related note - Sun VP of technology Jonathan Swartz recently blasted the GPL. Slashdot has a good discussion regarding Jonathan’s point of view.
New Sites of Interest
O’Reilly launched Code Zoo a neat, new code repository/search engine.
Asynchronous browser communication
Using XML and JavaScript. It’s the same technology makes Gmail so slick - AJAX + Struts online how-to tutorial < drool />
Pure Java Servlet implementation example without Struts.
Rapid Web Development/Prototyping
Lately there has been a some talk about Rapid Web App development/prototyping using Ruby and Rails - Ruby+Rails vs Java+Spring+Hibernate analysis test - the results are all red.
Web Design
Javascript events in Flash - now for Mac
Web Statistics
The problem: many web stats programs use cookies to identify returning users but a large number of people regularly delete their cookies. Want a ‘better’ way? use flash to track return visitors
Content Management
CMS interoperability - talks about the lack of standard, and a little on the direction the community is going.
One the lighter side…
Sur-real life Rocky Balboa. It’s amazing what some people will get away with because they look crazy.
Applying mathematics to sports - How to determine the true NBA MVP?
- The true MVP is the player that adds most value to their team in the category that has the most meaning - Wins.
