aza-raskin « WordPress.com Tag Feed

Neue Interviews

wolfhos — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:09:26 +0000

Nachdem ich festgestellt habe, dass mein Interview mit Irfan Skiljan über das Schreiben von Freeware (Irfan View) recht populär ist und sogar von der englischen Wikipedia verlinkt ist, habe ich mich entschlossen, mal wieder in HTML zu arbeiten und ein paar weitere Interviews von mir auf meine Webseite zu stellen. Es sind:

Dan Mills und Aza Raskin

von den Mozilla Labs über die Zukunft des Browsers.

Robert Basic

(noch zu Basic-Thinking-Zeiten) über das erfolgreiche und geldvermehrende Bloggen.

Jörg Küpperfahrenberg

Rechtsanwalt aus Essen über Internet-Abzocker und erfogreiche Gegenwehr.

Thomas Zorbach

YouTube-Filmer und Experte für virales Marketing, über Konzipieren und Verbreiten von Clips im Web 2.0.

Florian Holzhauer

vom Chaos Computer Club (CCC) über Hackerglück und Hackerethik.

Quotes from TED Global 2009 - Oxford, England

JeremyS — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:07:12 +0000

spreading ideas worth spreading

quotes from speakers at TED Global

“Globalisation will lead to a new Renaissance, a huge opportunity for innovation. But there are also two huge problems. Firstly, those who are left out and excluded. Secondly, managing growing complexity which leads to systemic shock (eg current recession, swine-fever, etc).” Ian Goldin

“Afghanstar, Poet of the Millions, the unintended consequences of Britain’s got Talent, in Asia and the Middle East, Reality TV is driving reality.” Cynthia Schneider

“Sound can be like a bowl of spaghetti, sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.” Julian Treasure

“Regret factors associated with cyber warfare threat could be equivalent to weapons of mass destruction.” Guy-Philippe Goldstein quoting US military

“It is better to be sometimes cheated, than not to trust.” Samuel Johnson quoted by Susan Kish

“Today, the information monopoly is broken, so brands need to find a place for themselves in this swirling mimetic environment.” Andy Hobsbawn

“The pain of psychological death + the pleasure of beating yourself = hunger in paradise.” Rasmus Ankersen

“The opposite of snobbery is your mother.” Alain de Bothon

“The trouble with our meritocracy is that in the 21st Century people own their own success, but they also own their own failure.” Alain de Bothon

“Obsession made my life worse and my work better.” artist quoted by Stefan Sagmeister

“Super massive black holes represent the breakdown of our understanding of the physical universe.” Andrea Ghez

“I found a dead fly and plucked a hair off its head to make a paint brush. I would never do that to a live insect.” William Wigan, micro sculptor

“Mirrors would do well to reflect a little longer before sending back images.” James Geary quoting Jean Cocteau

“In Mexico, the Indians played music to stay in touch with their ancestors, but in Africa they play to stay as far from the grave as possible.” Mark Johnson

“The internet can be characterised as random acts of kindness by geeky strangers.” Jonathan Zittrain

“Work places and institutions are preventing our efforts to use technology to create greater intimacy between ourselves.” Stefana Broadbent

“What’s wrong with placebo’s? They have very few side effects and most of those are purely imaginary.” Rory Sutherland

“As an adman, I think of saving as consumerism needlessly postponed.” Rory Sutherland

“Bio-diversity is collapsing, mass extinction is taking place in our fiels without anyone noticing. You don’t look a corn seed in the eye, as you might a panda bear, but we still need seedbanks.” Cory Fowler

“Leaving something unfinished makes it incomplete and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.” 14th Century Japanese essay on idleness quoted by Marcus Du Santoy

“Some stars have swallowed their planets.” Garik Israelian

“People could stroll and get their learn on. People could come to this sidewalk garden and chillax.” Candy Chang

“What do scientists do if paradigms fail? They carry on as nothing had happened, saying yes I know it’s wrong, but if it were right…?” Elaine Morgan

“African students study under streetlights at the aiport because they have no electricity at home.” Paul Romer

“3% of arable land is taken up by the world’s current cities inhabited by 3bn people.” Paul Romer

“80% of traded food is controlled by 5 multinational companies.” Carolyn Steel

“40 cities represent 90% of the world’s wealth.” Parag Khanna

“Dry areas cover over 1/3rd of the earth’s surface.” Magnus Larsson

“In India, 62% of all injections given are unsafe.” Mark Koska

“90% of the feature requests for features in Word – are already in Word.” Aza Raskin

“Organised crime represents 15% of global GDP.” Misha Glenny

“40bn batteries are disposed of every year.” Eric Giler

“Only 3% of GDP is invested in technology R&D annually” Geoff Mulgan

“Life is a series of things you’re not quite ready for.” Rob Hopkins

“Design is a priesthood wearing black polo neck sweaters and designer glasses. Design is too important to be left to designers.” Tim Brown

“I wanted to know what had turned my best friend into a terrorist and why she had not tried to recruit me.” Lorreta Napoleoni

“The music makes my therapy, I have no advisor, no one to talk to, music helps my imagination.” Emmanuel Jal

“To change the world, using no resources, use music.” Ross Lovegrove

“Tritium is bred from lithium, using the neutron.” Steve Cowley

“In ballooning we understand that winds, at different altitudes, blow in different directions. So in life, if we want to change direction, we need to reach different levels and to do this we have to throw things overboard, we have to get rid of a lot of ballast, certainties, dogmas, paradigms.” Bertrand Piccard

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” Winston Churchill quoted by Richard Bernstein

“Always take ‘no’ as a question not an answer.” aphorism quoted by Geoff Mulgan

“We are here on earth to help others, what on earth the other are here for I have no idea.” John Lloyd quoting W H Auden

“Ice is the canary in the global coal mine.” James Balog

“If we refuse a single story and know that there are many stories, then we regain a kind of paradise.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Roman military expeditions were just one long shopping spree really.” Carolyn Steel

“Architecture is retrofitting the world to our needs.” Bjarke Ingels

“There is a severe mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Daniel Pink

“The musical work is in your head, conductors are building the roller coaster with sound as the orchestra plays.” Itay Talgam

“We are doing nothing, because we want to see what is the inner point of all the difference.” Brother Paulus Terwitte

The (ir)relevance of the desktop

petervan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:25:07 +0000

How relevant will the desktop be in the next 5 years ? I don’t know about you, but I do more an more in online tools such as hotmail, gmail, googledocs, etc

I want to offer you 3 perspectives to this trend:

- A business to business point of view (Salesforce)

- A 2007 (!) vision by Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs

- The announcement of Google Wave and OS

I have included 3 video is this post. The first one is short (1:54), the others are longer (1 hour 20 min) and (1 hour 20 min) respectively. But i can assure you they are worth every minute.

Let’s start with Salesforce. On 9 June 2009, I attended the free Salesforce-event “CloudTour 2009” in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

This was a very, very professionally run event with very professional speakers (drilled like an army). They flew over a number of hotshots from San Francisco for this event.

Some key facts about Salesforce:

1,2 Billion $ revenue in FY 2009
59,000+ customers
1,5 Million users
100 Million API transactions per day
Average response time: 300 Milliseconds
3 releases per year, without any disruption for customers
Customers: big to small. Some examples: Solvay, VUM, Polycom, DELL, Corporate Express

All this to say this is not Mickey Mouse business: these folks exist for 10 years. This is mature business.

Their tag-line is: NO SOFTWARE.

Everything runs in the cloud.

There was a great demo on deep integration in Services Cloud of Twitter, Facebook discussions in Salesforce app, direct visibility in Google search. All in real-time.

Another demo was about “Building an app in 30 minutes”. They built in essence an expense report app like most companies have. Built and on-line in 30 minutes: With currency conversions, linked to accounts for which the expenses are incurred, with approval workflow, access management etc. All this was point and click. Not one single line of coding.

Peter Coffee, Director Platform Research had some strong messages about the economics of cloud. He stated that all of the following is commodity and does not add business value, and is ready to go to the cloud: Email, twitter, backup, security, virtualization, OS patches, running an Operating Centre, messaging. He also stated that SaaS, IaaS, PaaS are not relevant in itself. It’s about the apps and the business value add you create with that. And that cloud is NOT about IT budget cost reduction !

It is about moving from “less low level people on less value tasks” to “high value level people on high value tasks”

Your IT budget may go UP over the years, as you spent more on high value tasks

Beware of the expectation it is easy or cheap

When strolling through the exhibitor space, picked up a comment from a customer:

Now that I have this, I never want to go back to on-premise. This works. Never any probs of crashes and alike or things that do not work. Unbelievable I ever accepted doing business the old way.

Let’s have a look at what Aza Raskin had to say about the desktop.

“Had” because this is dated May 2007, more than 2 years ago.

I am a big fan of Aza. See also my post on Mash-ups and Cloud and Semantic Web.

His bio is fantastic:

Aza is currently the Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, where he works on crafting the future of the web. He’s led projects ranging from semantic language-based interfaces (Ubiquity), to redesigning the Firefox extension platform (Jetpack). Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with degrees in math and physics.

His GoogleTalk in 2007 was titled “Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop”. On the opening picture, he looks even a bit like the very young Bill Gates . Aza was born in 1984. So 25 years old now !

And it is NOT about bashing on Microsoft. He is explaining why it does not make sense anymore to follow what has been.

He is using some pretty powerful metaphors: the shovel analogy, “it’s not Microsoft’s fault”, Analog vs. Digital watch, “Start with the manual”.

If you don’t have the time to view the full video, go straight to minute 21 or so. In essence most user interfaces force the user to adhere to the program hierarchy of the developer.

He goes on with seeing natural language as a universal access to application: like you search the web, you could also search services. Basically, there are 4 “do this” commands: create, select, navigate, and transform.

Aza will this week also speak at TEDGlobal 2009 in the Connected Consequences track. I have also invited Aza to speak at SWIFT’s Sibos 2009, in the Innotribe track for which i am the overall content owner.

Enjoy Aza !

The other announcement that created a twitter & blog storm on the internet was Google Wave. Just google “Google Wave” and you will see what i mean

I don’t get all the criticasters. This is really very cool stuff and it is going to change fundamentally how we think of online communication. I strongly recommend to watch every minute of this launch event video.

On May 29, a couple of days after the announcement, i spotted a Facebook comment from a person with a quite high-level position in the Belux Microsoft organization: "Not impressed by Google Wave. More of the same in a different jacket. Ever watched conversations in Outlook 2010 ?"

As i am an ex-Microsoft employee, and still have some friendly contacts there, i wrote him an e-mail and explained that i was soon going to write something on my blog on this and the relevance of the desktop.

I asked to share some links to Outlook 2010 to be able to link my readers to what Microsoft has to offer in this area so that my readers can make up their own mind ? This is the answer i got: “Outlook 2010 is in Technical Preview – we cannot show outside. But if you look on the web you will find a couple of things about it.”

So it’s “help yourself” at http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/. Oh yeah, you probably will have to pay for Office 2010. Last week, Microsoft also announced they will offer a FREE on-line version of Office as part of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 release.

To close this post, a really good opinion on this in Hutch Carpenter’s blog “I’m actually not a geek”. One of his latest posts relate to SaaS and also relates to Google’s more recent announcement of the Chrome OS.

He positions all this in the context of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” model, and goes on:

Which brings us to the PCs of today. They are marvels, providing a slick experience for users and able to accommodate a host of new applications. But if I were a betting man, I’d say the most common activities people do with their computers are:

Surf the web, engage in social media

Email

Write documents

Build spreadsheets

Create presentations

Consume and work with media (video, music, graphics)

Use web-based business apps

Among those activities, what’s the magic of client-based computing? The media-related activities perhaps require the horsepower of a client app. But even those are getting better with web apps.

I recently decided to switch from hotmail to gmail.

Competition is good.

Cont - Ideas and Communication

Rohit Rathi — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:11:28 +0000

This is the second part of the discussion. For first part go here

Cont>>

I don’t know what he told you. But this is what I told him. Our system is going to be a mix of GUI and LUI (language user interface) Now we don’t expect user to learn the language commands, so we want to introduce a tool which will help him either learn, or present “options” to do a task. Again here, the idea of ubiquity comes to my mind. Suppose I want to stop the wireless on my device and I have not given any physical key. The command user will think is simple “Stop Wireless” Ubiquity (now on we will call this system GEN) can take inputs in the form of text. So when we type Stop on Ubiquity (GEN) it suggests you with the available options. And as soon as we type W in the box, GEN (ubiquity) will suggest options starting with W and there we go.

Now GEN has to be intelligent enough to understand that if a user is going through the same process for a task for a number of times, the way of achieving that task should be made easier. Solution? What about wireless now coming on top of the ‘W’ list. Or what about giving it a finger gesture which user can choose? Now here comes what we discussed in the earlier box. Doing experiments (Quantitative analysis) to understand what suits the user (human psychology) better.

People have done a lot of research in figuring out better ways of visualizing the information. But none of the new platform is being accepted by the general mass.. and still we are stuck with the normal page views.

There is something interesting here. Every patent has a life. We don’t own patents for long. In general all the patents which were there with big companies like MS, Adobe, Apple have been outdated. And there are better ways to implement same ideas. We patent the way of accomplishing that idea, not the ideas itself. Its like making the cure for AIDS. We cannot patent the idea that there can be a cure for AIDS. There are lot of open source application which without getting into the patent issues have come up with either same or better solution.. GIMP is a good Linux photo editing software example. Its available for windows as well now.

Open source wave is going to help us a lot. Nearly everything has (in some cases better) its clone in Linux which is completely open. But what we need to do here is focus in what should be given to user as minimal set (though rich) of features. And then force our programmers to enable them.

“bloatware???”

Bloatware is a software which is packed with excessive controls and consumes a lot of space.. Windows XP is a perfect example. You remember the ideal office I was talking about in my presentation.. that’s bloatware.. you have every control with you, but you don’t know what to do with it.

Do you really think the features which MS office or Excel provide needs special software? Think how is the text managed when you see title bars, task bars, when you get error screens, when you get notifications for updates. Everything is already built into the system. But. Not enabled. Just to sell one more software. Now if you keep doing that, you are increasing redundancy. Increased memory space (2-3 software for what is already built in OS), more time consuming (since now each software developer has to come up with never UI for his software, menus, ways of interacting with OS, etc).

What would the other system which we are designing would do? It would reduce the redundancy, reduce the memory space consumed, increase usability and reliability. Agreed?

I think we cannot do away with the menus. But for now, we can hide them. If you have downloaded and using Textflow software, they have a very cool alternative of menu bar. But yes they do have menu, its just different. Its only accessible when you need it. And that what I think is important.

The problem of adoption is the solution itself. If the solution we provide is in the end complex, and nonintuitive, people are not going to adopt. By separating ourselves from saying we are making computers, we take away the user’s expectancy of giving a windows XP as OS. Which EEE PC does. But does it really solve the problem of mobility?

What is mobility? For us mobility is being able to use it anywhere, and everywhere. For as long as we want. Our hardware gives us this feature. It can run for days, not hours. And we believe in the form-factor we are providing is a better solution for mobility clause. You cannot use laptops when you are standing. We want Adam to be used as a notepad. As a book. You can read the novel, which you might have written. We don’t want you to go out to laptops and PC to do editing of that same novel. You might be travelling in metro reading and figuring out, oops.. there is an error, you edit it right there. If you wait till you go back home, half the ideas will be lost.

Its a huge challenge for the established players to bring changes for which they need to re-adjust. Re-adjusting is risky, costly and leads to unknown futures. Quite understandable. And if you prevent these changes, that’s called monopoly. This is what is going on since long time. How many players were there in 2005 for editing documents? MS Word, that’s it. Its changing. We are not the only one who is going to change it. There are others. But we don’t know who is destined to succeed in achieving. And hence yes it’s a risk, but a risk if gets paid off, there is quite a possibility that our discussions are mentioned in history.

May be Raskin is talking about us. If you search the internet, you wont find people working on this exact concept. Cos its difficult. Even we wont apply this concept to the fullest. There will be applications in our product. Raskin’s system is monopolistic. With which I don’t agree. Windows 7 is out and so is newer Mac OS X. Have you seen any soft of integration of applications with them? No. Why not? Same reason. It will take out the profit that are making using other applications like iworks.

For us what is more important is bring in the change. Telling people that what they were using since long wasn’t exactly the way they should have been. We will tell them that the concept of OS was flawed. But in our case, intuitiveness is the main solution for adoption. Intuitiveness is just the conformity from the user’s perspective that the device has more potential than what he thought before. Other word for intuitiveness would be assumptions. If users have right assumptions about our product, we will get what we are seeking.

Ideas and Communication

Rohit Rathi — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:11:08 +0000

Features which are there in word, excel andpowerpointeditor are available everywhere.. So if you are writing me en email through safari, you can still send me rich formats.. you don’t need to open any application to write CV quality letters. And adding more features to the system is not installing application.. In other words, to add a different capability to the system, we don’t need to write a specialized application, with its specialized command structure, but rather leverage the commands that already exist and add any news ones that might be required. its just adding one more command to the system. Say for example, our computers don’t have application to keep windows on top.. either we can install some software to do that.. or what this guy is saying “OS is powerful enough to give this feature. Add this as a command and user will just press “Ctrl + Alt + T” to keep the windows on top.

Zooming will also be the inherent part of our system. The hardware and software will be capable of handling such features. What problem is highlighted in above paragraph is “understanding how can zooming be used for more than just viewing pictures! It’s a challenging question.. few solution can be making interface such that zooming takes you to certain areas which otherwise will not be accessible. But one thing we must realize.. zooming in and out is fun only for the first half and hour.. then it becomes cumbersome. So design should be such that system zooms in for more data.. not the user.

You might have seen “geek” who neverteldto use mouse.. specially those who are working withlinux.. for everything they will open theirconcoles.. and type in command there.. WhatJefis saying here is. Archy was designed to be addictive. It grows onto you. Especially when you realize that you are saving a lot of time and the system is giving you much higher degree of control.. In general Control means lot of commands, which would mean cluttered menu icons. Archy was language based. So if you remember the commands, you can take those icons away. But here comes the problem, how can I expect a normal user to remember those commands. Here we wish to solve this problem by giving the user minimal set of features through menus and icons and other set is either hidden oracceblethrough Ubiquity kind of system. To understand what I mean by Ubiquity, you need to go through this link http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ I would suggest installing latestfirefoxand have a bit of understanding how it works

Here is an example.. a research found out that we all have a reading pattern of “F” We glance through the text from left to right and then quickly move down on the left edge to see what else is interesting. So, would that mean, if I keep interesting links on the left side of the page, there is a higher chance that user might actually go through it? The study suggested yes. Now this result came from the statistical analysis of movement of eyes of people while they are reading text. This is Quantitative analysis.

One more example would be to figure out what is the minimum dimension of icon which a user can click using his fingers. This is also experiment based. And a very important study for us. So, do you really think that those people who are developing applications foriphoneare actually doing these studies and experiment before they make anything? My guess would be, they are not. And this is whatAzais saying. People who are designing application are not figuring out human psychology and information theory to design user interfaces.

I don’t know what he told you. But this is what I told him. Our system is going to be a mix of GUI andLUI(language user interface) Now we don’t expect user to learn the language commands, so we want to introduce a tool which will help him either learn, or present “options” to do a task. Again here, the idea of ubiquity comes to my mind. Suppose I want to stop the wireless on my device and I have not given any physical key. The command user will think is simple “Stop Wireless” Ubiquity (now on we will call this system GEN) can take inputs in the form of text. So when we type Stop on Ubiquity (GEN) it suggests you with the available options. And as soon as we type W in the box, GEN (ubiquity) will suggest options starting with W and there we go.

There is something interesting here. Every patent has a life. We don’t own patents for long. In general all the patents which were there with big companies like MS, Adobe, Apple have been outdated. And there are better ways to implement same ideas. We patent the way of accomplishing that idea, not the ideas itself. Its like making the cure for AIDS. We cannot patent the idea that there can be a cure for AIDS. There are lot of open source application which without getting into the patent issues have come up with either same or better solution.. GIMP is a goodlinuxphoto editing software example. Its available for windows as well now.

“bloatware???”

Bloatware is a software which is packed with excessive controls and consumes a lot of space.. WindowsXPis a perfect example. You remember the ideal office I was talking about in my presentation.. that’sbloadware.. you have every control with you, but you don’t know what to do with it.

Do you really think the features which MS office or Excel provide needs special software? Think how is the text managed when you see title bars, task bars, when you get error screens, when you get notifications for updates. Everything is already built into the system. But. Not enabled. Just to sell one more software. Now if you keep doing that, you are increasing redundancy. Increased memory space (2-3softwaresfor what is already built in OS), more time consuming (since now each software developer has to come up with neverUIfor his software, menus, ways of interacting with OS, etc).

What would the other system which we are designing would do? It would reduce the redundancy, reduce the memory space consumed, increase usability and reliability. Agreed?

I think we cannot do away with the menus. But for now, we can hide them. If you have downloaded and usingTextFlowsoftware, they have a very cool alternative of menu bar. But yes they do have menu, its just different. Its only accessible when you need it. And that what I think is important.

The problem of adoption is the solution itself. If the solution we provide is in the endcomples, andun-intuitive, people are not going to adopt. By separating ourselves from saying we are making computers, we take away the user’s expectancy of giving a windowsXPas OS. WhichEEEPC does. But does it really solve the problem of mobility?

May beRaskinis talking about us. If you search theinternet, you wont find people working on this exact concept. Cos its difficult. Even we wont apply this concept to the fullest. There will be applications on ADAM. Raskin’s system is monopolistic. With which I don’t agree. Windows 7 is out and so is newer Mac OS X. Have you seen any soft of integration of applications with them? No. Why not? Same reason. It will take out the profit that are making using other applications likeiworks.

Following is the conversation between 2 of our friends while doing some research on Interface.

It’s a conversation, and parts of it, so expect break in flow of ideas and unexpected topics being discussed.

Features which are there in word, excel and powerpoint editor are available everywhere.. So if you are writing me an email through safari, you can still send me rich formats.. you don’t need to open any application to write CV quality letters. And adding more features to the system is not installing application.. In other words, to add a different capability to the system, we don’t need to write a specialized application, with its specialized command structure, but rather leverage the commands that already exist and add any news ones that might be required. its just adding one more command to the system. Say for example, our computers don’t have application to keep windows on top.. either we can install some software to do that.. or what this guy is saying “OS is powerful enough to give this feature. Add this as a command and user will just press “Ctrl + Alt + T” to keep the windows on top.

Zooming will also be the inherent part of our system. The hardware and software will be capable of handling such features. What problem is highlighted here is “understanding how can zooming be used for more than just viewing pictures! It’s a challenging question.. few solution can be, making interface such that zooming takes you to certain areas which otherwise will not be accessible. But one thing we must realize.. zooming in and out is fun only for the first half and hour.. then it becomes cumbersome. So design should be such that system zooms in for more data.. not the user.

You might have seen “geek” who never use mouse.. specially those who are working with linux.. for everything they will open their consoles.. and type in command there.. What Jef is saying here is. Archy was designed to be addictive. It grows onto you. Especially when you realize that you are saving a lot of time and the system is giving you much higher degree of control.. In general Control means lot of commands, which would mean cluttered menu icons. Archy was language based. So if you remember the commands, you can take those icons away. But here comes the problem, how can I expect a normal user to remember those commands. Here we wish to solve this problem by giving the user minimal set of features through menus and icons and other set is either hidden or accessible through Ubiquity kind of system. To understand what I mean by Ubiquity, you need to go through this link http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ I would suggest installing latest firefoxand have a bit of understanding how it works

One more example would be to figure out what is the minimum dimension of icon which a user can click using his fingers. This is also experiment based. And a very important study for us. So, do you really think that those people who are developing applications for iPhone are actually doing these studies and experiment before they make anything? My guess would be, they are not. And this is what Aza is saying. People who are designing application are not figuring out human psychology and information theory to design user interfaces.

Cont>>

TaskFox: a Quicksilver in your browser

pedromauricio — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 13:58:19 +0000

Everyone familiarized with Quicksilver (Launchy or Do depending on your OS) knows how amazing this little something is: a simple and powerful command-line interface where you can execute incredible tasks quickly.

Ubiquity, a proof of concept based on the assumption that the browser is becoming everyday a more important application, implements a Quicksilver for your browser. Behind the scenes is the creator of Enso, Aza Raskin (take a look at the previous A change in Human Computer Interaction). This project was successful enough to make Mozilla go one step further with Taskfox.

Try out the demo for yourself an be amazed!

A release candidate of Taskfox is planned for the end of July and available with Firefox 3.6.

A change in Human Computer Interaction

pedromauricio — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:21:46 +0000

Much has been argued about the way computers are evolving and how new approaches are being explored to find new ways to interact with them.

Among the many possibilities are (multi)touch screens, voice recognition, etc. But are these fancy solutions good or useful for the next few years? It would be a great challenge to replace our everyday keyboard with more exotic solutions: the lack of sensitivity in touch screens, for instance, would make it much harder to use it although it might look like a huge breakthrough at a first glance.

The immediate future relies on the way we use our everyday devices in a more efficient way. Watch Aza Raskin’s Google Tech Talk:

Many years ago the Canon Cat tried to do all this unsuccessfully. This project introduced a variety of concepts that we still don’t use nowadays. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin is the book you should read to deeper you knowledge about this. You can as well try Archy: the prototype project that brings all these concepts to your computer.

Finally, a huge step is being given by these guys, Humanized, and their Enso. These project actually brings some of these interaction concepts to your (windows) system today! Watch the demo and try it out.

Mozilla Labs Hack Days in Berlin

jfinette — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:51:35 +0000

Yesterday, I posted some information on the Mozilla Labs guys Aza Raskin & Dan Mills coming to Europe. I wanted to pull out the Berlin bit today, as a few folks have said they can’t attend for the whole 3 days, so wont be able to make it.

Let me explain… the Labs days in Berlin next week are completely open house, you will be pleased to know. You can attend for 30 minutes or stay all day (or for all 3 days!) its up to you. There will be much going on, including the chance to sit down with the labs guys – Aza & Dan for an informal chat, and of course do some hacking if you want to. You can find out more about the many Mozilla Labs projects including Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series.

If you are a computer science or Interface Design student – this would be a great chance to meet the folks behind Mozilla. Please drop by.

Come to c-base venue on Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin between these times:

Tuesday 2:30pm-7pm, Oct 21st. Berlin. – Hack Day 1
Wednesday 10:30am-7pm, Oct 22nd. Berlin. – Hack Day 2
Thursday 10:30am-2pm, Oct 23rd. Berlin. – Hack Day 3

See you there!

Official Mozilla Labs post on their Berlin visit: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/mozilla-labs-in-berlin-hack-days/

Mozilla Labs in Europe next week (Oct 20-26)

jfinette — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:18:03 +0000

Next week, we will have the great pleasure of welcoming Aza Raskin and Dan Mills from the Mozilla Labs team to a whistle stop tour of Europe. Aza blogged about this yesterday and we’ll be posting more in the next few days.

Aza is Mozilla Lab’s Head of User Experience, and Dan is the engineering lead for the Weave project.

They will kick off their EU visit in London on Monday Oct 20th, with some press and blogger meetings, followed by a Labs night at UCL (scroll down to Oct 20th). If you would like to attend, please email UCL in advance – details all on that UCL webpage. They will be having an informal Labs meetup somewhere in Soho after the UCL meet – we’ll post here with the venue in the next few days.

Tuesday morning is an early start traveling to Berlin, where they will be based until Thursday afternoon. We’ll be holding open Mozilla Labs Hack Days at the amazing c-base venue. Its free and open to all so please stop by around these times:

Tuesday 2:30pm-7pm, Oct 21st. Berlin. – Hack Day 1
Wednesday 10:30am-7pm, Oct 22nd. Berlin. – Hack Day 2
Thursday 10:30am-2pm, Oct 23rd. Berlin. – Hack Day 3

The guys will be discussing Weave, Ubiquity, The Design Concept Series, Geode and much more. Please come along and find out what’s going and also feel free to contribute.

On Friday Oct 24th, Aza & Dan will journey on to visit two Barcelona based univerities (venues to be confirmed), they will also have an informal Labs night. We’ll share more on this in the next few days.

Lastly over the weekend, Mozilla is hosting its first Mozilla Camp Europe where Aza and Dan will be joined by Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer – Chris Beard.

We are thrilled to have Mozilla Labs visit Europe, and are hoping you have the chance to meet them in either London, Berlin or Barcelona!

We’ll post more news soon!

google chrome per mac !?

ideoo — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:32:08 +0000

faccio un aggiornamento al conciso post di qualche giorno fa..

intanto mi piaceva sottolineare come sia stata ’studiata’ l’uscita di google crome dal google lab.. nessun casino, solo qualche video semplice e esplicativo, il link ormai classico alla pagina iniziale di google (cliccando sul logo)..ma l’attesa era tale che questo è bastato per fare esplodere un tam tam tra pareri e anticipazioni..

le prime raccolte sono che è molto veloce, furbo ma non supporta (al momento) l’rrs..il che è piuttosto grave, lo so..

rimngo cmq piacevolmente stupito dell’idea di utilizzare la prima pagina di apertura riempiendola dei link ai siti più visti in stile icone..veramente bella idea..tra l’altro espressa anche da Aza Raskin (link al blog dove parla proprio negli ultimi post della somiglianza tra la sua idea e la prima pagina di google crome) su mozilla lab:

http://vimeo.com/1474467

..ma google l’ha fatto davvero..

ultimo difetto, non c’è ancora per mac..ma se come me avete mac e avete voglia di sperimentare questo nuovo browser che pare imbattibile iscrivetevi alla newsletter fatta apposta per ricevere notizie sui promessi
sviluppi per i seguaci di jobs!

Nick

Sei ovunque...

darkfender — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:36:19 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

ecco una cosa veramente utile, come sempre creata dai grandi laboratori Mozilla.

Oggi i Mozilla labs ci presentano uno strumento davvero utile che semplifica il web in una maniera davvero impressionante!!!

Non vi spiego più niente perchè mi sto divertendo troppo ad usarlo…

ancora è un’ALFA ma lo potete scaricare trnquillamente da qui

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Mozilla’s Ubiquity For Firefox Alpha 0.1 Looks Fantastic

The Death Of the Desktop

svec — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:19:49 +0000

And no, this “death of the desktop” post is not about how mobile devices or the browser is taking over the world – it’s about taking a step back and rethinking how we actually use computers (desktop, mobile or otherwise), and then trying to take a more usable step forward.

Thanks to Chris Jones for writing about a very interesting talk by Aza Raskin:

Video: Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop

You should check out Chris’s summary, and the video as well.

This is one of the few videos I’m glad I watched instead of just ripped to mp3 and listened to – a lot of visual stuff, well worth the time.

Will Firefox Mobile Make It in Time?

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:30:51 +0000

Sure it’s early days in the mobile browser wars, but early days have a tendency to fly by quickly, and by the time Firefox introduces a beta version of its upcoming mobile browser later this year, it may be too late. Last night Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, posted a demo of the forthcoming mobile browser along with some ideas and features he’s thinking about. He has some good ones. But he also has a large blind spot in that he says it’s designed for a touch phone.

Touch, and Raskin’s realization that fingers are fat and so buttons need to be big, are what makes the demo so compelling. However, even as touch spreads as a user interface, plenty of people may never have such an advanced device at all. Jay Sullivan, VP of Firefox Mobile, said the company is developing for other interfaces as well, but it’s difficult. “The non-touch devices present a super design challenge, especially those without QWERTY keyboards. No existing browsers are very usable on those devices, so there’s a lot of room for innovation there,” Sullivan said.

Still, it’s hard to hear Mozilla CEO John Lilly talk about the value of bringing an open web to mobile users, rather than a web experience filtered through carriers to cell phone subscribers, and not hope for success. But even aside from the relative dearth of touch phones out there, Firefox mobile has several barriers to overcome.

The mobile browsers using WebKit as their platform are farther along, and as Om points out, WebKit (unlike Firefox on the desktop) results in a smaller footprint when compared with other mobile browsers. There’s also the grand champion of mobile browsers in Opera Mini, which had 11.9 million users as of March, to fight off. And let’s not forget startup browsers such as Skyfire for Windows Mobile devices. I think Firefox would be well-advised to get the lead out and start wowing with innovations beyond touch.

Songza: il ricco Jukebox online

thenorba — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:43:07 +0000

Songza nasce da un idea del giovane Aza Raskin, il figlio del fondatore dell’Apple Machintosh, in cosa consiste? un search engine incentrato sui file audio, che fa le sue ricerche sui file di Youtube, una sorta di Jukebox online, dove si puo trovare davvero di tutto grazie alle potenzialità del famoso motore di ricerca video Youtube, volendo si può proseguire a guardare il video, la discografia, creare la propria playlist online o comprare i file audio su Amazon.. Davvero una trovata geniale a mio parere…

Songza, Skreemr, y Seeqpod - Googles de audio

nillo86 — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:50:32 +0000

Una actividad que siempre me acompaña, cuando estoy frente al ordenador, es surfear buscando nueva música, ya sea via last.fm, iLike, nvivo, youtube o, simplemente blogs.

En una ocasión hice una reseña acerca de Foxytunes, un buscador cuya página de resultados, es un mashup de la presencia online del artista en Youtube, last.fm, blogs, flickr, wikilyrics, y otros tantos. Además, te puedes instalar Foxytunes for Firefox e Internet Explorer, controlar tu player desde el explorador de internet, y compartir tu música en twitter u otros websites.

Ahora quisiera listar otros pocos buscadores musicales. Los listo por orden de preferencia:
Songza.com – Puesto en marcha por Aza Raskin, niño prodigio en el área de experiencia de usuario, hijo de uno de los creadores de Macintosh, Jef Raskin, y que lo manifiesta, tanto en el interfaz de Songza.com, como en el nombre de su proyecto personal Humanized. Entrar en esta página es una experiencia única, en la que el usuario sólo percibe que puede buscar lo que desee, y escucharlo, independientemente de ser formato vídeo, flash, mp3, o streaming. Es un paso más allá, la experiencia es tan buena que uno cae enamorado ante esta pantalla. Además, como en Foxytunes, puedes descargarte el Songza Firefox Search Plugin, y ejecutar las búsquedas directamente desde tu caja de búsqueda del navegador.

SkreemR – lo coloco en segunda posición, tan sencillo de usar como Songza, pero no tan sexy. He realizado una búsqueda de un saxofonista de referencia, Michael Brecker, y la cantidad y calidad de resultados es muy buena, permitiendo escuchar temas desde la misma previsualización, o enlazar a conciertos del artista publicados en grüvr, politonos para móviles, etc.

Seeqpod – nacido de la mano de otros enamorados de la tecnología y la música. Vaticinan que, en el futuro, todo el contenido será playable, o sea, se podrá escuchar. No lo he probado intensamente, pero a primera vista la calidad de los resultados me ha parecido cuestinable. Además que si lo comparamos con Songza.com, me parece complicadísimo de usar!