ScaleNine

Tony Hillerson and I did a presentation on exploring the world of data visualization while at 360|Flex San Jose. We were late getting our stuff together, so the presentation and source code wasn’t on the thumb drive handed out at the conference. Thanks for everyone who showed up, and all great feedback we got.

Tony has more information regarding the source code on his blog. We’re thinking about evolving these samples as we have the time, so you may want to continually check back (no promises).

The video is now available here or through the 360|Flex feed for AMP.

I’m excited to announce that the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge” is officially under way! If you’ve ever entertained the idea of making a skin and submitting to ScaleNine, nows your chance to win some great prizes in the process. We’re looking for entries to award a first, second and third prize to people who create an awesome theme for Flex 3.

We were able to pull together some amazing prizes and judges with help from Adobe and EffectiveUI. Prizes for first place include:

• (1) MacBook Air with SSD
• (1) Ticket to MAX North America or Europe
• (1) Copy of Adobe CS3 Master Suite
• (1) Copy of Flex Builder Professional
• And a Feature on the Adobe Developer Network

With those prizes you can picture yourself at Adobe MAX sitting at the keynote with your MacBook Air coding away while people point and ask, “Hey, isn’t that the guy featured on the Adobe Dev Net? You know, the one who won that contest?” We’ve got some great prizes for second and third place, as well as “spot prizes” for people who put forth a strong effort.

You might be thinking, “I’m no designer” or “I’m no coder”, but why not team up with someone? You can find a designer or developer to collaborate with and divvy up the prizes. It’s a great excuse to get up to speed with skinning Flex components and thanks to Andrew Shorten, Adobe Platform Evangelist, you’ve got several tutorial videos to learn from.

Get all the information about the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge”

Also, I’d like to thank Patrick Hansen, UX Designer from EffectiveUI, for making that sweet logo for the contest; Paulo Rizkalla, Developer for EffectiveUI, for helping me with some website stuff; and Mike Potter and Andrew Shorten of Adobe for their help putting this all together.

Adaptive Path put together a proof of concept for a new way of browsing the web as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Browser Series. Adaptive Path gives a description of the project, called Aurora:

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

Being able to directly manipulate content in the browser, have a seamless browsing and collaboration experience, and the methods shown for organizing user content are definitely somethings worth shooting for. Granted I’m a guy who uses key commands or gestures wherever possible to avoid the Finder, drilling down to look for files, or using the mouse to access menu items.

With a presentation I’m going to be giving on Data Visualization at 360|Flex with Tony Hillerson and the recent Edward Tufte visit to Denver, I’ve had a lot of data visualization on the brain. I’m always on the look out for good examples of visualizations that solve a problem well without going overboard.

One of the designer’s at EffectiveUI turned me on to a magazine called “SEED“. SEED focuses on “Science is Culture” and it’s a really well-designed magazine that initially caught my eye with some nice diagrams and visualizations. It has a really great sense of design all-around with details that I enjoy discovering.

The best thing is that some has taken the time to go through issues of the magazine and post them on Flickr. The photos capture the magazine in a printed state rather than it being flat artwork which also adds a nice feel. The above image was taken from that Flickr photostream.

Check out SEED Magazine on Flickr

Ethan Eismann pointed out a useful site, called Scrnshots, that allows you upload, comment and tag screenshots. I love these types of community sites that help open a discussion around design. They make it super easy for you to contribute by providing a desktop application(shown below) that allows you to make screenshots and upload them all from your toolbar. You can also share your screenshots via links or embedded widgets.

What’s interesting is I was just talking to some designer’s at EffectiveUI about creating a site very similar to this, but with some additional functionality. I’ll probably end up using this site a lot, but there’s some features I think would really make Scrnshots stand apart from something like Flickr.

I’d like the ability to post iterations and have them be connected. I’d love to be able to post a sketch, get feedback, post a refined mockup with revisions, get more feedback, refine, get feedback, etc. Then, at any point someone could review the entire process I went through from sketch to final execution. Being able to see the thinking that went into something is where most of the value lies.

Being able to have comments point to specific parts of the screenshot would be cool too, kinda like ConceptShare. Maybe even a comparison overlay view to to get down to the details.

I can really see this site used for a variety of things, like filing bugs, reviewing designs, concepting, etc. In some cases, maybe I’d like to make some things private. Then I can share designs for internal purposes.

Scrnshots is one of those site I could browse for hours, kinda like LogoPond. Now all I need is some time to find and upload a bunch of designs that never made it beyond the concept phase.

It seems everyone was a-buzz when Iron Man was released in theaters not too long ago and rightfully so. When I saw the movie I was amazed by the visual effects and details that seemed to go into every minute of the film. Being involved with UI design I couldn’t help but stare at the intricacy of the interfaces that Tony Starck interacted with, whether while he was building the suit or when he was controlling it from the inside. A lot of work went into that.

If you’re interested in some of the background of the design of the HUD and POV systems, the UI Resource Center (UIRC) has posted a great article based on an interview with Kent Seki (Pixel Liberation Front), the Visualization and HUD Supervisor on Iron Man. I actually had the opportunity to sit in on the interview and I think the dynamics of the interview carried pretty well into the article. It was great hearing the thinking that went into things like the evolution of the suit, the way the HUD was treated as a character in the film, and more.

Here’s a great quote by Seki describing part of their process, which I think can apply to a wide range of design:

When you can justify all the visual elements, then you know you’ve done your job because you don’t have to worry about anything being random. We took out all randomness and made sure we had a purpose to everything. That way, when we consciously decided to do something that is random, we knew we were doing it for a reason.

You can read the article in its entirety on the UI Resource Center website. If you haven’t checked out the UIRC before, it’s a great source for articles on a variety of topics surrounding the world of user interface technologies and design.