UK Government Digital Service Design Principles
"We're not designing for a screen, we're designing for people. We need to think hard about the context in which they're using our services. Are they in a library? Are they on a phone? Are they only really familiar with Facebook? Have they never used the web before?
We're designing for a very diverse group of users with very different technologies and needs. We need to make sure we've understood the technological and practical circumstances in which our services are used. Otherwise we risk designing beautiful services that aren't relevant to people's lives."
(UK Government Digital Service, Last updated 3 April 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
OpenFrameworks: open source C++ toolkit for creative coding
"Openframeworks is a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.
The library is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly used libraries under a tidy interface: openGL for graphics, rtAudio for audio input and output, freeType for fonts,freeImage for image input and output, quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing.
The code is written to be both cross platform (PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone) and cross compiler. The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp. There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions. The code has been implemented so that within the classes there are minimal cross-referening, making it quite easy to rip out and reuse, if you need, or to extend.
Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things via code. We find it super useful, and we hope you do too.
OpenFrameworks is actively developed by Zach Lieberman, Theodore Watson, and Arturo Castro, with help from the OF community. ofxIphone, is actively developed by Mehmet Akten and Zach Gage, with development help from Lee Byron and Damian Stewart. The OF website is designed and maintained by Chris O'shea.
OpenFrameworks is indebted to two significant precursors: the Processing development environment, created by Casey Reas, Ben Fry and the Processing community; and the ACU Toolkit, a privately distributed C++ library developed by Ben Fry and others in the MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group."
(OpenFrameworks)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Semantic Web: integration through abstraction and standardisation
"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing."
(W3C)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Christchurch Quake Map: Google Maps API + GeoNet data
"After the [4 September] 2010 Canterbury Earthquake, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand, the region has been hit by hundreds of aftershocks - many of them widely felt around Christchurch, and some of which have caused further damage.
The Christchurch Quake Map on this website aims to present a time-lapse visualisation of the earthquake and its aftershocks, primarily to help those outside the affected area understand what those of us in Canterbury are experiencing. It plots earthquake data from GeoNet on a map using the Google Maps API, with the size of the circle denoting the magnitude (the higher the magnitude, the larger the circle) and the colour showing the focal depth (see the legend below the map)."
(Paul Nicholls 2010, University of Canterbury)
[While this is a great tool -it is a shame that more consideration hasn't been paid to its use e.g. enabling users to link directly to a specific earthquake or making it easy to embed the map within a host site.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Representational State Transfer (REST)
"The Representational State Transfer (REST) style is an abstraction of the architectural elements within a distributed hypermedia system. REST ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax in order to focus on the roles of components, the constraints upon their interaction with other components, and their interpretation of significant data elements. It encompasses the fundamental constraints upon components, connectors, and data that define the basis of the Web architecture, and thus the essence of its behavior as a network-based application."
(Roy Fielding, 2000)
[1] Cody Fauser, James MacAulay, Edward Ocampo-Gooding, and John Guenin 'High level overview of a RESTful Rails web service'.
[2] Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
