Category: design

Event In a Suitcase and Running Remote S5 Presentations

EventInaSuitcaseContinuing the tradition of the “Event in a…” meme, we came up with the notion of “Event in a Suitcase” at the most recent Mash Pit.

The idea is pretty simple: make it easy to walk into a room and make a presentation.

Well, among the five of us, we came to the conclusion that there’s nothing really that makes it easy. There are tools, both hardware and software, that make it possible, and writing them down was a good place to start from. But there really isn’t an open source or free workflow that gets us where we want to be… where everything is affordable and fits in a literal suitcase.

So anyway, we documented our work and could use more help. If you’ve got ideas, tools, solutions, workflows or whatever, add them!

·   ·   ·

So, one of the cool hacks that we brainstormed and that Kevin Marks was actually able to implement before the day was out involved Eric Meyer’s public domain slideshow format S5. Essentially he made it possible for people watching an S5 presentation, like Tantek’s excellent Building Blocks for Independent, to see the slides change as the presenter changes them.

Of course bringing this awesome hack together with a Gizmo call-in means that people can at least watch and listen remotely as presentation happens — and participate in IRC. So voila, it’s like NetMeeting, but open source! Anyway, Kevin’s code is in Twisted and now that I’ve blogged this, hopefully he’ll be incented to clean it up and publish it!

Someone tell me

Which is better? The new Google Web Toolkit or Yahoo’s UI Library?

And I don’t mean just in terms of capabilities… but how about:

  • how well they interoperate?
  • how good their licenses are?
  • how responsive their communities are?
  • how they compare with other open source alternatives

I’m not much of a developer, but come the next Mash Pit, I’d like to know which framework or toolkit I should be betting on.

OMG Flickr goes gamma!!!

flickr gamma!!

Person MenuWhoa. Whoa. Someone’s been effin’ with my Flickr…! And hmm… do I like it (maybe you care, but probably not)? But, well… I dunno.

It’s bright, ok…

It’s seemingly shinier…

It’s not quite black MacBook sexiness…

It actually seems more complicated. It seems less explorable… I mean, it’s… neat.

I guess I’m kind of dumbfounded. Maybe it will grow on me. I don’t like the two columns of photos with sets on the right… I mean, consider my uploads next to Thomas Hawk’s:

flickr gamma

flickr gamma

I dunno — it just doesn’t seem as pretty as the previous single column.

Am I wrong? Who’s with me on this? Hmm?

Pulling back the curtain on Shuttle

Shuttle LogoMatt drops a link to Khaled’s announcement about Shuttle, a long-term project to overhaul the WordPress admin UI.

Looking it over (and as someone who participated from afar some time ago) I have to say that I actually prefer Steve Smith’s WP Tiger Admin. I use it on this blog and love it. There are a few glitches here and there, but for the most part it’s a huge improvement over WordPress’ old school default.

In any case, it’s great to see such major changes coming to WordPress — I just hope that it maintains the original simplicity that makes WordPress so widely successful.

Fruity? Full-bodied?

WineLog logoNo, that’s not the title of an ad for some young guy in the Castro. Rather it’s the intro line from a site that just launched called WineLog.

I’m pretty curious about this site — I’m not sure exactly what it does because I can’t see to log in to it, but hey, that’s cool! I’m still excited to try it out when it’s ready!

…And heck, what a perfect chance to review the wines that you might enjoy at WineCamp (hint! hint!). 😉

Boxely will probably be one of the coolest UI things evar

If this and this don’t get you to cream your UI shorts, you need to put down that jar of AJAX and step away from the screen. Joe Hewitt blogged about Boxely nearly a year ago and its finally looking like it might be nearing some kind of release (if only in AIM Triton).

As for what you can expect in the design of Boxely? Corey Lucier says this:

Style rules, and the triggers that dictate what visual styles are applied when – is 100% based on the state of an element. Specifically the style rules are fully attribute and property driven (e.g when hovered == true for this element apply a procedural color transform). The current complexity of cascading style engines is all due to the need for resolving ambiguity and precedence given the layering of selectors.

With Mac hardware able to boot Windows, it’s only a matter of time before we UI people assimilate the Windows desktop with stuff that actually looks, feel and behaves like the richness we’ve come to take for granted on the Mac.

…Hmm, Boxely would actually make for a pretty good topic at DCamp. Along the lines of Justin Clift’s Flame Project…