“screenshots”

It beats me. “My son is always checking out his Yahoo!” So what? Who’s the target audience of this ad? Angry-faced mustachioed dads? Have children become parents’ rolemodels already?

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

I don’t know exactly when or how the thought came into my mind but this morning the epiphany was there: wouldn’t it be cool to see Gmail’s half MB Javascript source¹ a la matrix code view^IY? Indeed it would, and so for the next half hour I became a man posessed. It was amazingly easy (“ya sabiendo es facil”) to hack it up in JS and it makes for an interesting screensaver.

When I finished I realized it would be really easy to make my makeshift Matrix code generic and so here’s a quick stab at it. Type whatever text you want matrixified and a new window will (hopefully) popup with it. (Though be warned, it’s pretty rough, unpolished code and it’ll surely be too slow if you don’t have a fast computer.) Anyway, enjoy.

Simile is a simple, snappy AJAX timeline from MIT. To keep with the space-time musings of late, it’s a Google Maps for time.

I just discovered Jensen Harris’s—Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office “user experience” team—wonderfully interesting Office User Interface Blog. It deals mostly with the new interface to Office 2007 and—boy—are they cooking some sweet, major stuff!

Ribbon

Ribbon & Contextual Tab

Ribbon & Gallery

(The video’s from the Nice for Mice: Menu Tabs post,
where a high quality version is available.)

There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority Report^{WP, IMDB}, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.

An exploration into interaction alternatives to the click. Jolly good interface fun. Luscious design.

Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.

Before

Now

I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.

Much Much Before

Much Before

Before

Now

Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.

(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)

I was running out of space this morning—these days, not even half a tera is enough—so I decided to finally download one of those famous programs to visualize your folder structure. They had intrigued me before, to be sure, but they were a somewhat expensive technology back then, and so I resisted. I figured there would be something free by now. I wasn’t disappointed: SequoiaView does everything I wanted it to do, its free, its simple, and its way cool. (And I wasn’t disappointed at all on the utility of such a visualization, I freed up 100 GB half an hour later after installing it!)

Here’s my favela drive a couple of hours ago:

Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.

Here they are, lest time forgets: