This is a wonderful video and well worth sharing, I loved the concept and the way it was presented with the robotic prototype. For technology dreamers and innovators such as Fabien Hemmert (a PhD student at the Design Research Lab, in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories) it all starts there. He shares a fascinating talk on TED about the future of Mobile phones and technology behaving more human-like and although the video is brief and this might be quite far into the future the results are mind boggling.

Fabien talks about making digital content graspable, and how to get the digital to the physical. I’ll let him explain as he does a far better job, but I really wanted to share this quote as it made alot of sense to me as we progress into the future of mobile touch and technology.

Humans should get more technical in the future, rather technology get a bit more human.

Note:
I found this video whilst browsing to one of my favorite sites, TAT. If you’re not aware of TAT The Astonishing Tribe AB, you should be. They are an extremely innovative growing group of engineers, visual artists and interaction designers who eat, sleep, and breathe user interfaces. The do lots of cool things and to describe a couple of them I wouldn’t miss (a) Astonishing and free Android wallpapers (b) The future of screen technology

A new HTML5 You Tube Player by Neo Smart has been born for those who’d like to catch a glimpse of the future of the web. Now you can watch your You Tube Videos without having to rely on Flash, which can be a serious resource hog depending on your operating system.

Most people are used to Flash on video sites and the capabilities of embedded Flash videos are far superior to this working prototype (but resource hoggy). That said its a good start and You Tube has even been testing their own HTML5 Videos on their site.

I tested on Firefox and Chrome over here on my Windows XP machine (yeah yeah i know, XP? LOL!). The player returned no video on Firefox and I believe its a Codec Issue. On Chrome the player runs without any problems, but the scrubbers can get a little buggy. Its a good start but still needs alot of work.

Go ahead and test it out for yourself at the Neo Smart You Tube HTML5 Viewer Page. Also check out the Grease Monkey User Script which adds a link to all YouTube video pages that points to the HTML5 version.

Good information is where its at. Filtering out that information can be a little time consuming lest you know where to go so I just wanted to share what I thought would be useful to designers out there.

If you check slide # 51 in Object Oriented CSS you will see that you should never specify an element first. This is a practice i didn’t know about. Sometimes learning yourself can lead into bad practices and thats why I like to learn from the pros. Thanks Stubbornella..

Though some of the slides are a little old, you can still learn a whole lot from them.

Also for more slides and interesting presentations check: http://www.slideshare.net/andhttp://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

Thanks to everyone for helping me learn….

Ok it took me long enough to upgrade myself to Adobe CS4, but I am so happy i did – Talk about an intuitive workspace!! Every time Adobe comes out with a new version of their software their interface improves a whole hell of alot!

Cs3 was great compared to Cs2 as Adobe had made many changes in the Interface. One change that i liked back then was the fact that when you dragged Photoshop (CS3) onto your other monitor all your open files dragged with the window. This was not true for CS2 at the time it was out, and you had to drag all the windows one by one or switch to your default workspace.

As for CS4 there are many great features, but the one i liked the most (i’m still tinkering with it!) was the fact that on the top-right hand side you can easily switch to the GROUP of panels you want to work with. So if you want to the analysis panel and its children to dock on the right all you have to do was click the group that you wanted. This is a time saver and really helped me with my workflow and organization.

It amazes me how the Engineers at Adobe progress their software with each new version. I mean it isnt easy to continuously outdo yourself time and time again + make vast improvements to the User Interface (thats prob why interface and usability experts are so well paid and in demand.)

I could take a gander and guess that the most of the code stays the same, but all their efforts go into UI and Usability Design. Well done Adobe and Engineers, you guys are the best and brightest!!!

User interface design or user interface engineering is the design of computers, appliances, machines, mobile communication devices, software applications, and websites with the focus on the user’s experience and interaction.

Where traditional graphic design seeks to make the object or application physically attractive, the goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

1. The Principle of User Profiling:
   You need to “Know who you users are.” Before we can answer the question “How do we make our user-interfaces better”, we must first answer the question: Better for whom? A design that is better for a technically skilled user might not be better for a non-technical businessman or an artist.
2. The Principle of Metaphor:
   Borrow behaviors from systems familiar to your users.
3. The Principle of Feature Exposure:
   Let the user see clearly what functions are available
4. The Principle of Coherence:
   The behavior of the program should be internally and externally consistent
5. The Principle of State Visualization:
   Changes in behavior should be reflected in the appearance of the program
6. The Principles of Shortcuts:
   Provide both concrete and abstract ways of getting a task done
7. ThePrinciple of Focus:
   Some aspects of the UI attract attention more than others do.
8. The Principle Grammar:
   A user interface is a kind of language, know what the rules are
9. The Principle of Help:
   Understand the different kinds of help a user needs
10. The Principle of Context: Limit user activity to one well-defined context unless there’s a good reason not to.
11. The Principle of Aesthetics:
    Create a program of beauty
12. The Principle of User Testing:
    Recruit help in spotting the inevitable defects in your design
13. The Principle of Humility:
    Listen to what ordinary people have to say

Above are the underlying principles of user design and have been around for a while now (it’s nothing new). For me its important to stick to the basic concepts and plan out your interface well in advance.

The good news is nowadays UI designers are well sought out for as many companies have realized that the data stores for any given application or website should remain consistent. The fact that your presentation layer keeps changing with different functionality for different clients thrusts UI designers into a whole new level of importance.

Whats funny here is that while I was writing this post I was called by a colleague for prospective UI Design work. Talk about ironic.

These days i am spending alot of time learning the Open Source MVC Framework:  CodeIgniter. It’s awesome using some of the classes and libraries that ship with the package.  

All you have to do is load them from your controller or use the autoload feature in the config file.  I still do love my design work, so i spent some time later on at night trying to figure out this CSS FullScreen bacground thang.

SCHEDULE OF MY DAY:  

1. 8.30 am – Woke up had some brekky and took a nice warm shower!
2. 9.00 am – Onto the CodeIgniter forums and Google Reader to check out the latest news.
3. 11.00 am – Conference call with a client
4. 12.00 pm – Getting kinda hungry so i had a snack
5. 12.30 pm – Back to some ?php development with Code Igniter.
6. 2.00 pm – Lunch:  Fish and Chips
7. 2.30 pm – Emails and general communication with present and future clients
8. 3.00 pm – Work started for a newer client.
9. 5.00 pm – Updating a site for a current client 
10. 6.00 pm – Back to Code Igniter
11. 7.00 pm – Itching to use some css techniques to design a Full Screen Splash page.
12. 8.00 pm – Done with the css homepage.  Nice and darkish look with a great background.

CCTV and Adobe have partnered up to power their viewers with a great Flex App for the coverage of the Olympics.   Boasting a rich interface, social networking, live iptv streaming, plus a barrage of video selections Adobe has once again shown their presence on the Rich Internet Application scene. The application has been awarded “App of the Week” and will expose millions of people to the Flash / Flex Environment.

[kml_flashembed movie="experiments/convolution_filter.swf" height="510" width="577" /]

Thanks to the Adobe Developer Library for the example:

Convolution Filter:Convolution filtering is typically a part of multiple visual effects in most, if not all, pixel-editing applications. This is not surprising because using the filter effectively requires at least a working knowledge of matrices. The transformation capabilities made possible by matrices calculate pixel color values by combining values from adjacent pixels to produce a wide variety of image effects. These effects include, but are not limited to, blurring, sharpening, embossing, edge detection, and
brightness.

Designing for different resolutions can be tricky if you are a novice flash user.  There are those who feel once they understand how to design a liquid stage in flash they have become masters, while others consider it just a milestone.  It’s a bit of both for me, but you should be able to design a Fluid width site which accommodates all screen resolutions.
 

BREAK
Take a look at the above example, download the file and embed it into your html page.  Change your screen resolution or maximise your window to see how the movie-clips adapt to different resolutions whilst positioning themselves through the onstage.Resize functions.  The code is well commented, however if you are a complete noob then you’ll have some tinkering to do!!

NOTES

-  No need to install tween libraries as the file uses native classes that ship with flash.
-  Aligns all elements to stage.
-  ActionScript 2 and saved in Flash CS 3 format.

Happy Flashing!!

On the 15th of May Adobe released the beta version of the Flash Player 10 code named “Astro”. I’m excited about this release as it offers many new and improved features. You can download it here.

Screenshots of some of the new features added and improvements of older features. The features i liked where the support for (a) support for ligatures (b) vertical text and (c) easy integration of 3D capabilities.

Other features to note is advanced support for text since the Flash Adobe Player team and Product manager Justin Everett-Church have built up the text engine from ground up. You can take a device font and style it while adding filters to it as well. The features i liked the best was multi column support for text fields and especially the fact that you can create custom components extending the already built in ones.

Another awesome feature is support for RTMFP and P2P.

There has been a lot of great excitement around RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), especially because of the peer to peer (P2P) communication that is enabled in Flash Player 10 beta. This is a natural time to speculate about what cool applications you will build with new technology, so I’d like to give you some more information for you to work with.

Since I have been frequently been asked about details on this, a frequently asked questions format somehow seemed appropriate . For those that want to start working with RTMFP, make sure to read to the end, there is a goody for you!

You may read more about it here on Justin’s blog, or watch some of the video demos listed below:

• Watch Justin Everett-Church, Sr. Product Manager for Flash Player, demonstrate 3D effects
• Watch Justin Everett-Church demonstrate custom filters and effects
• Watch Justin Everett-Church demonstrate advanced text layout
• Watch Justin Everett-Church talk about the enhanced Drawing API
• Watch Justin Everett-Church talk about the visual performance improvements
• Watch Lee Brimelow explain how to start creating content for Flash Player 10
• Learn how to take ordinary display objects into the third dimension
• Learn how to dynamically create sounds
• Learn how to read and write local files using File Reference runtime access
• Launch the Adobe Pixel Bender filter demo