Now and again I stumble on things which are just so bad they kind of illustrate a point: proof of the uselessness of 3D: just try to a) navigate and b) read anything. Compelling, it isn’t.
Monthly Archive for December, 2006
Interesting, in an ‘art of the possible’ way, is the WebOS idea, covered elsewhere but reviewed well here. Playing with YouOS has certainly been fun. I guess Microsoft’s best answer for revenues may not be Live, but Remote Desktop, which is just great to use. Google obviously may find it more attractive, though arguably their recent strategy of consolidation of services (docs, spreadsheets, gmail, all in one place), plus an open API for gadgets for Google Desktop and one’s home page, might mean the OS metaphor just becomes irrelevant, given the prediction that the boundaries of what a developer can do in that environment will keep receding….
It has been around a while, but I thought I’d mention Grokker, being kind of interesting & having some visualization aspects too.
About time I put up a few links on design!
So here’s a podcast by design guru Alan Cooper & an accessible book on designing interfaces.
Complexification has some fascinating combination of some maths and some visualization using the increasingly popular java based processing library.
Using processing one can package the drawings in a java applet, or there are ways to keep java at the back end while using Flash at the browser end. Interesting.
This past month, the swivel phenomenon seems to be growing. The idea: people upload their spreadsheets, graph the data, and share it in a Web 2.0 kinda way.
See for example violent crime versus wine consumption.
Interesting things: no XML in sight – swivel imports .CSV files. Users search by the column headers (no semantics, etc.) See the caveats page for guidelines on importing.
See the video on this page for a more complex variant on the same theme.
If our data format was as simple could we do the same with ELP?
A couple of entity/link amazon browsers:
http://www.pmbrowser.info/amazon.html
http://www.flowser.com/jp/flowserST.html
The second one is better ‘cos it has pretty pictures. Plus I always think Japanese looks good when on ELP diagrams 
