raysofrha

I just got off of the free trolley that Artchicago.com and chicagoartnews.com sponsored to kick off the gallery season. I saw some phenomenal work that spanned digital fabric art, glass, furniture design, and more.

Over the past few weeks, come to think of it, I have hit quite a few Chicago art events. In fact I’ll post those event summaries and, more importantly, artist and gallery links to work that captured my imagination from those events.

Unfortunately, I only made it to one of the three gallery drop-off sites, The Fulton Market area. In the coming months I definitely will have hit the River North and West Loop scenes. (Chicago trivia: River North has the second highest gallery concentration in the US outside of Manhatten.). The Chicago art scene seems to be pretty lively and I am looking forward to diving in this year. The question is whether or not the scene is hot enough to sustain me during the dreadful Chi winter.

-blogged from iPhone-

I tweeted this, but I also wanted to record it here for postertity. (Here is a write-up at information aesthetics with a better description of the actual vis.)

First of all, Fleshmap is a pretty cool research project.  In particular what I like is their investigation of both sides of the pleasure coin; this is how I give pleasure and this is how I receive pleasure.  The added dimension to external pleasure being the other person. So their study also incorporates the recipient’s opinion of pleasure.  They also did other studies uncovering body consciousness in our mental models and popular culture media. That’s the info part.

The vis part is equally provocative with a number of great layouts, iconography, and simple interactions that really present the body and its representation and place in our culture.

Man, how many social networking sites are there?  Maybe in real space we will all just end up being the montage of our multiple online personality [disorders].

I Google myself

In my new hood we have one of the concept ING Direct Cafes. ING Direct, but isn’t that a bank?! Yup, that’s what I thought too. And the first couple of weeks here I have been walking past ING’s cafe to frequent the more familiar Argo Tea, Starbucks (unfortunately), and…well Starbucks. (Last count I have discovered 4 Starbucks within a 3 minute walk of my front door.) Yesterday I was looking for an alternative haunt because I have been tired of Starbuck’s burnt brew for quite some time and I wanted a change of pace from Argo. Thanks to iWant ( a neat Yelp based iPhone app ) I came across some rave reviews for this ING. And, they serve Peete’s Coffee!! Easy access to the only Peete’s in Chicago is one of the only things that I miss about my old hood.

So, here I sit enjoying free wifi, good coffee, and a funky cafe space littered with mild and unobtrusive capitalist literature. I am not a revolutionary, hipster, or a counter-culturist but this seems very odd. Consumer Reports, the Financial Times, screens advertising various ING financial products, HD Olympics, my fruit bran and flax muffin. Too many cultural themes are all playing concurrently! But…I live in the Gold Coast, have no problem paying exhorbitant prices for Apple products, shop at Whole Foods, and want to spend more money than a lot of people make in their lifetime on a more fuel efficient vehicle.

To their credit most of the ING propaganda is prompting us to save more money - of course through their bank. But, there are more advertisements for savings and wealth preservation then there are for loans and buy-more-stuff-to-stimulate-the-economy-and-your-own-collection-of-crap products.

Maybe banking, good coffee, and internet access are not such a crazy concept. I know I’ll be back.

I can’t remember what version of Mame I got a few years ago, but suffice to say I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing contra and xcite bike.  My buddy Pek tweeted this a couple of days ago:

http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/fmame_arcade_emulator_done_in_flash/

Pek is a veritable fountain of cool links.  Here is one he just showed me:

http://five3d.mathieu-badimon.com/

A competitor to papervision.

Have you noticed more and more 3D visualizations on the net?  Way back when in the infant days of data visualization the third dimension was the province of the future.  And then we all realized that massaging the two dimensional flat screen for a faux third dimension produced more problems than solutions.  The largest issue begin occlusion.

I think that people are finally coming up with some pretty cool uses for that 3rd (or 2.65) dimension.  Witness sites like the BBC Metaforce. Or the fotoviewr app. Where designers are using the third dimension to add a physical realness to the interface.

So, what does this *really* give you, the user ??!!  No news here: we get better experiences!  We get an interface that begins to have either a) a behavior that we expect from our interactions in the real world or b) an interface that gives us a physical response (kind of like a virtual haptic interface) that we can learn.  Beyond the wow factor, those two points enhance the interactive texture of the interface thereby improving the UX - user experience.

I am excited to see more people bringing 3D back.  As the community continues to expand the definition of useful application features to include experience enhancements more and more intangible niceties will be included in applications.

Here it is my first mini-blog post from the iPhone. Until I get the hang of this keyboard though my entries will be severely limited. In any event it is still cool, I love the phone, and I’ve given myself another useful anti-boredom tool.

It seems that Pure MVC multicore is gaining traction. This is very similar to the solution that I am employing on a Flex Portlet project.

A co-worker asked me if I knew of any Flex windows management examples. Basically, a Flex desktop. Well, low and behold there is the Flex Active Desktop:

Very slick and cool app! But I started to think about resizing windows in RIAs. Should windows be resizable? I don’t think so. Think about CSS and liquid layouts; Designers design layouts so that content is displayed in its best visual format given the resolution of the device. That seems to be the paradigm of the web. So why change it? What about innovation you might say. Exactly! That is where RIAs come in, to me.

Don’t just throw a desktop paradigm into the web browser because Flex, Javascript, and WPF allow you to. Why not employ a ‘richer’ approach? What about having the content in the window change based on the resolution available? Presumably there is some relationship between the task the user is performing, the size of the window, and the suitable information to be displayed.

For instance, if the application is displaying a table with 6 columns of data and the user reduces the width then the application could zoom out to the next level of data. Perhaps the next level of data is a categorical summary and count for each row. At this lower level of detail perhaps a tooltip with more detail is displayed on mouseover. This is basically semantic zooming applied to component views.

We are going to be employing this approach on a current project. When a portlet is in its smallest state, the data appears one way. When it is in its maximized state more detail is displayed. We are only using two states and it is not dynamic. At some point I’d love to make the data zooming dynamically tied to resizing.

There are certainly some challenges to this approach. One that comes to mind is disorienting the user. I resize a window and my data changes?!?! Although, I think this disorientation can be mitigated with animation, fades, and other interactive tricks.

This could obliterate all ‘I haven’t updated my blog in … ‘ excuses.  On the other hand it might expose the shortcomings in the iPhone keyboard.

Random thought: If twitter is microblogging and blogging is just, well, regular blogging, then mobile blogging might be miniblogging ?