Cliplets: an interactive animated GIF app for Windows
"Microsoft Research Cliplets is an interactive app that gives users the power to create 'Cliplets' -- a type of imagery that sits between stills and video, including imagery such as video textures and 'cinemagraphs'. The app provides a simple, yet expressive way to mix static and dynamic elements from a video clip."
(Microsoft Corporation, 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Welcome to the Era of Design
"All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design.
Obviously, there are many different types of design: graphic, brand, packaging, product, process, interior, interaction/user experience, Web and service design, to name but a few. ...
You see, expecting great design is no longer the preserve of a picky design-obsessed urban elite - that aesthetically sensitive clique who'd never dare leave the house without their Philippe Starck eyewear and turtleneck sweaters and buy only the right kind of Scandinavian furniture. Instead, there's a new, mass expectation of good design: that products and services will be better thought through, simplified, made more intuitive, elegant and more enjoyable to use.
Design has finally become democratized, and we marketers find ourselves with new standards to meet in this new 'era of design.' To illustrate, Apple, the epitome of a design-led organization, now has a market capitalization of $570 billion, larger than the GDP of Switzerland. Its revenue is double Microsoft's, a similar type of technology organization but one not truly led by design (just compare Microsoft Windows with Apple's Lion operating system)."
(Adam Swann, 5/03/2012, Forbes)
Fig.1 "Mille Miglia" bicycle by VIVA [http://www.vivabikes.com/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Beta blockers? : proprietary data formats may be legally defensible but open standards can be a better spur for innovation
"Thomson [Thomson Reuters] makes the proprietary bibliography software EndNote, and claims that Zotero is causing its commercial business 'irreparable harm' and is wilfully and intentionally destroying Thomson's customer base. In particular, Thomson is demanding that GMU stop distributing the newer beta-version of Zotero that allegedly allows EndNote's proprietary data format for storing journal citation styles to be converted into an open-standard format readable by Zotero and other software. Thomson claims that Zotero 'reverse engineered or decompiled' not only the format, but also the EndNote software itself. ...
Litigation, which may go to a jury trial, is pending, so judging this case on its legal merits would be premature. But on a more general level, the virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating. Imagine if Microsoft Word or Excel files could be opened and saved only in these proprietary formats, for example. It would be impossible for OpenOffice and other such software to read and save these files using open standards - as they can legally do.
Competition between open-source and proprietary software is long-running, as personified by the struggle between Windows and Linux for desktop and server operating systems, but also in many branches of software used by scientists. Researchers tend to lean towards open sharing, but they will also pay for added-value features, and it's important that the playing field is level. Ultimately, the customer is king."
(Nature, p.708)
Nature Volume 455, p.708 (9 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/455708a; Published online 8 October 2008, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
An interactive system defines a virtual space
"An interactive system defines a virtual space, whether the system’s interface provides access to the inhospitable planet of Stroggos or the Microsoft Windows desktop. Users of both these systems interact with a place, one created by a computer and in which users and computational agents carry out their individual and collective activities. The intuitive and often-discussed benefit of a well-designed interface metaphor is that it allows users to carry over conventions from their 'real' experience when performing tasks within the interface world.
Another key and often unarticulated value of an interface arises from the interface’s mimetic quality. While mimesis is often discussed by narrative theorists as a contrast to diegesis, distinguishing the concepts of showing versus telling (Aristotle), my emphasis here is to distinguish between an artifact that is intended to be an imitation of something, but is not really that thing and an artifact that is intended to be mistaken as that thing. An example of the former case would be a film of a fictional account of the D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy. An example of the later might be a virtual reality system displaying photo-realistic graphical images of a physical space. D-Days stories like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan are, in some ways, imitations, and so are more mimetic than VR systems whose design is intended to '...produce synthetic images visually and measurably indistinguishable from real world images.' (Greenberg 1999)(pg. 45)."
(R. Michael Young, 1999)
Greenberg, D. P. 1999. 'A framework for realistic image synthesis'. Communications of the ACM 42(8):45-53.
1). R. Michael Young (1999). 'Notes on the Use of Plan Structures in the Creation of Interactive Plot', Papers from the 1999 Fall Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Symposium
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
WinDirStat: Windows Directory Statistics
"When in 2003 I came across the KDE program KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net), I was fascinated and enthusiastic about it, as it is probably the same with many others. I had been thinking of writing a disk usage tool before, and saw: that's it!
SequoiaView (http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/) was around, but KDirStat's concept of coupling a tree list view with a treemap was unrivaled, and I didn't find anything equivalent for MS Windows. So I wrote WinDirStat, using Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, Jarke J. vanWijk, and Huub van de Wetering's papers on squarified treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf) and cushion treemaps (http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf).
I didn't worry too much about the functionality but simply cloned KDirStat. The pacman is not my idea, the extension list is. I tried to size and position each GUI element optimally and to avoid modal dialogue boxes. The program should output much information while requiring few user input. When I thought it was complete, I gave it to my sister and watched her interaction with the software. That gave me another two weeks of work to do. This procedure, together with the testplan, secured WinDirStat's quality.
Meanwhile, a colleague of mine wrote Disc Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com/), a clone for Mac OS X.
That's the story so far. Oliver has taken responsibility for the project, many translations have been contributed. I've largely switched to Linux and observe WinDirStat's amazing download numbers. I hope we can provide some new version slowly but surely."
(Bernhard Seifert, 2010-07-28)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
