Anselm Bradford » News

Speaking Trees – visualizing written text

Ans — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:17:01 +0000

Several months ago I created an interactive visualization experiment that took typed input and grew tree-like forms from what was typed. The frequency of words and letters typed affected the shape. The project was installed on an interactive screen (more info) in central Auckland, New Zealand, during the month of March, 2011. I finally got around to creating a video documenting the project:

Click here to view the embedded video.

June 2011 Auckland Web Meetup

Ans — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:44:41 +0000

It’s been many months since there was a formal web meetup, but about 180 web enthusiasts gathered at the new Telecom building for three presentations yesterday evening.

John Lennard talked about Luumin, a task management software that will be opening into private beta in 6-8 weeks. John talked about the reasons that the Yahoo! YUI Library was chosen for development (it’s built for applications) and mentioned that Cassandra is used for the datastore.

Next, Darren Wood presented on frontend optimization, running through a list of tips for markup, CSS, Images and JavaScript. The presentation is available online, so I’ll just repost the list of tools mentioned:

Minification

YSlow

YUI compressor

HTML5 Boilerplate

Image Compression

PunyPNG

Smush.it

JPEGTran

OptiPNG

PNGGauntlet – Windows GUI

ImageOptim – Mac GUI

PNG8 Creation

Fireworks

pngquant

Manfred – Windows GUI

ImageAlpha – Mac GUI

Other useful bits

JSLint

CSSLint

Cross-browser CSS Gradient Generator

CSS generation from sprites

Last up was Mozilla Foundation programmer, Robert O’Callahan, who discussed the state of work happening at Mozilla on Firefox as well as the web more generally. Highlights include:

Demo of the HTML5 game Pirates Love Daisies, an almost demo of Angry Birds (network issues prevented the full demo), and the Quake 3 WebGL demo.
Rob enthusiastically spoke of a pure JavaScript MP3 audio decoder (jmad I assume)

and said Mozilla will implement MP3 support the day after the MP3 patents expire, as that’s all that’s holding them back from being implemented.

Advanced audio is a pressing issue that needs to be handled, and there is a proposal for a Web Audio API, which Chrome is currently ahead on.
Mozilla is working on a pure JavaScript PDF reader, which renders into the canvas tag (pdf.js, read more at Andreas Gal’s blog).
Also mentioned was Gordon, an open source Flash runtime.
The W3C’s Touch Events specification, which provides an API for, you guessed it, user touch (it does not cover gestures, as Apple has patents that cover these).
Mozilla’s Fullscreen API should be implemented in the next year.
In talking about in-browser realtime communication, the Opus audio codec was mentioned, which is designed for interactive speech and audio transmission over the Internet.

Barcamp Auckland 4 Recap

Ans — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:25:56 +0000

The excellent Barcamp Auckland 4 event happened today, organized by Ludwig Wendzich and team. 190 attendees came together to discuss topics around web development, design, UX, UI, mobile, and business. Here are a few notes from a selection of talks:

Nigel Parker, from Microsoft (a sponsor), showed some deep zooming examples using Silverlight (from Seadragon technology, a company MS acquired in 2006), such as the Te Papa pounamu wall and the MSN Fashion Shows 2009. Also demoed was a World Cup Pivot, a data visualization piece using MS Pivot technology. Also mentioned was the preview of IE 9, which is available to be test driven.
Ludwig Wendzich and Vicky Teinaki gave a talk about natural user interfaces (touchless gesture-based interactions). Despite some technical difficulties while attempting to demo a natural gesture interaction on the webzine he curates, WeeklyRetrospect.com (which, by the way, has an interface worth checking out!), the idea of touchless interactions was conveyed. This was followed by an engaging talk on the future of interface interactions. Mentioned were Adam Greenfield’s book Everyware, Eric Zimmerman, and the Wired magazine’s iPad app. As was often the case over the course of the event, Apple was discussed, and how the Apple model of design was “deceptively” simple, in that it is superficially simple, but (at least in the case of the computer OS) scales to become more complex the further the user digs.
Rob Coup and Glen Barnes showed a number of open data related resources in NZ, such as open.org.nz, openstreetmap.org, and the upcoming fixmystreet.org.nz.
Mike Dickison provided the link Wikiteach.info during his talk on the benefits and issues of using wikipedia in academia. Mike also humored the whole event during his reading from 24 Unplugged, about student responses to going 24 hours without being connected to digital communications.
Lastly, Phonegap – “PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript”

CHINZ 2010

Ans — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:13:46 +0000

The 11th Annual ACM SIGCHI NZ Conference on Computer-Human Interaction was held on July 8 at Massey University. This was a great opportunity to see some of the work academics outside of AUT were doing. In particular, the University of Auckland had a showing.

Two things that may be of note for a Flash developer are the Auckland Interface Model, a universal table widget, and Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii projects, which demonstrate methods of using the wiimote to achieve various types of motion tracking. Check out of the video for head tracking, for instance.

Following the conference, I attended the Northshore .Net User Group meeting that happened to be happening after the conference. Keith Patton gave a great presentation on the upcoming Windows 7 Phone platform. He presented an overview of the platform advantages and limitations and gave a live demo of an app in the phone emulator. And winning Windows 7 Ultimate at the end wasn’t bad either, thanks guys! Visit the MS Windows Phone developer site for more information and the developer tools.

Emerging Researcher Workshop 2010 – research funding, scholarships, awards

Ans — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:04:12 +0000

University of Auckland had an interesting workshop this week for PhD students and Postdocs. The workshop had sessions covering securing funding, communicating research, networking, career advice and related information. The following are some research funding, scholarships, and awards links from the event:

COS (Community of Science) Funding Opportunities – Provides a database of worldwide funding opportunities.
New Zealand Funding Information Service – includes a link to BreakOut, which is—according to their site—”New Zealand’s primary source of funding information for students, researchers, sports people, artists and those wanting professional development.”
New Zealand Vice-Chancellor’ Committee Scholarships page – Convenient portal to scholarship pages of New Zealand Universities.
Rutherford Discovery Fellowship – supports early and mid-career researchers with five-year terms of funding. Ten awards given annually.
Royal Society of New Zealand Awards page – Provides a list of awards for science or technology in New Zealand. These are for recognition of past achievements, as opposed to grants that would fund future projects. Includes a link to the The Prime Minister’s Science Prizes.

July 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:03:56 +0000

This is old news now, but as per my personal tradition I wanted to post a short recap of the Flash Platform User Group meetup that happened July 1.

First to present was Michael Andrew, who demoed FlexPMD, an auditing tool for ActionScript/Flex projects. Essentially the tool provides a set of recommendations of how your code could be improved/cleaned up. According to the Adobe Open Source page (linked above), the tool can be invoked from a number of different environments:

The command line
Maven
Ant
Automator on Mac OS X
Eclipse
TextMate
FlashDevelop

Oddly Flash is not listed, but perhaps Flash is beyond hope as a quality code IDE!

Second to present was Greg Dove, who live-coded a simple touch screen demo on a Dell SX2210T, an inexpensive touch screen display with two touch points capability. Greg also mentioned the best display he’d seen, the 3M M2256PW, which is capable of a whooping 20 simulations touch inputs (view a demo on engadget). Greg’s demo created a group of colored stars that could be resized and zoomed—both as a group and individually. The specific event Greg demoed was the recently added AS3 TransformGestureEvent

June 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:24:17 +0000

This month’s Auckland Flash Platform User Group Meetup began with a show-and-tell by the group’s usual host, VisFleet. CTO Aisha Fenton explained the business-side of VisFleet’s vWork software, a web-based task management application that allows a dispatcher to disseminate jobs to remote workers, who can log in via an iPhone app. Aisha provided an overview and demonstration of the software. Rasheed Abdul-Aziz then delved into the technology behind the application, which utilizes Robotlegs and the Flex framework. Rasheed mentioned Hudson CI for continuous integration, GitHub for source control and collaborative development, and Charles Web Proxy, a tool for analyzing HTTP data. Charles has some local fame, as it is developed by Auckland-based Cactus Labs.

After pizza Jove Lam, of TVNZ, demoed a Flash application he helped create for the Sony PS3 in-game browser to view on-demand content. Called TVNZ OnDemand the application featured an intuitive columnar layout for browsing content in different categories. On first impression it was not apparent that the application was essentially a full-screen Flash website. In his presentation, Jove mentioned the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).

Auckland Adobe CS5 Roadshow

Ans — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:09:59 +0000

Under the slogan of design without boundaries, work faster, and streamline critical processes, the CS5 Roadshow kicked off at Skycity Convention Centre in Auckland today. The hosts for the day were Michael “Stod” Stoddart, Mike McHugh, and Paul Burnett. The event covered a broad-range of tips, tricks, and new features of CS5. Questions could be asked in real-time by sending twitter questions to The Question Room”.

Some highlights:

Production Premium

Utilizing 64 bit processing, Adobe Premiere and After Effects have greatly increased performance compared to previous versions.
The rotobrush feature in After Effects looks like a great time saver when rotoscoping video elements (cutting them out from the background).

InDesign (feature tour)

Much smoother workflow when moving an object inside of its frame. There is now a “donut” area that when clicked allows the internal object to be moved. Also an “autosize” checkbox has been added to allow an object to resize to its frame when the frame is resized.
A caption text field can be created that will pull metadata out of an image when it is near to it. Great concept!
There is a new tool called the “Gap tool” that allows the gutter (gap) between elements to be easily resized and moved.
InDesign CS5 can produce simple interactive presentations that can be exported as a SWF or FLA.

Illustrator (feature tour)

There are three new tools: the Perspective Grid tool, the Perspective Selection tool, and the Width tool. The first two provide guides for creating artwork along a 3-dimensional perspective, while the last tool—the Width tool—always the manipulation of the width of a stroke along its length.
There are two new drawing modes: draw behind and draw inside. These, as might be expected, streamline drawing behind and inside shapes respectively.
The dashed line feature has been to improved to ensure a part of the dash appears on corner points. This eliminates the ugly problem, for example, of having the points on a star disappear when using a dashed stroke.
Joining two paths has been improved, allowing paths to join by their nearest points.

Photoshop (feature tour)

The much hyped Content Area Fill is present in many forms throughout the fill and brush tools in Photoshop CS5.
There is a new sharpening and noise reduction engine that can be utilized in the RAW photo dialog box.
There are new HDR features, such as a new HDR Toning menu under Adjustments.
Settings in the effects menu now have a “make default” button, allowing the setting of user-defined defaults.
The old extract filter for extracting hair has returned in the form of the Refine Edge option of a selection. This is a great time-saver for cutting out hair from a background.
The new Puppet Warp feature allows for the creation of a mesh that overlays a image that then can be distorted along a set of points.
Color mixing brush, which allows colors to be blended together (at first glance it appears similar to the Smudge tool).

Of particular interest in this release is the heavy integration of the Flash platform among the Adobe products. Brand new in CS5, Adobe Catalyst is integrated with InDesign and Illustrator, each of which can be used to create Catalyst layouts. Catalyst allows the creation of simple interfaces and interactions without the use of any code.

Not all products were shown that I’m aware of (although I missed about an hour of the event during midday) such as Flash Builder and Sound Booth.

March 2010 Auckland Flash Platform User Group Recap

Ans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:09:46 +0000

Last night I attended the March meeting of the Auckland Flash Platform UG, held in the spacious offices of VisFleet. This was a great opportunity to freshen my knowledge on what’s happening in the Flash world. There were two presentations, with a break in the middle for the traditional developers meeting pastime of pizza and beer.

First up was Rasheed Abdul-Aziz, Flex/Rails developer at VisFleet. Unfortunately I arrived a little late and missed the beginning of Rasheed’s presentation, but he covered a diversity of Rails and Flex development topics, including discussing refactoring and Domain Specific Languages (DSL). In the later half of Rasheed’s presentation the focus turned to Robotlegs, a fairly recent (as to my knowledge) dependency injection ActionScript 3.0 framework that Rasheed swears by. I’m excited to find some time to try it out! Next, Rasheed demonstrated some of the benefits of using IntelliJ IDEA for Adobe Flex development, and gave it a glowing recommendation. Robert Penner’s AS3Signals (a new approach for AS3 events) was mentioned at the end during Q&A.

Next Vinnie Vivace showed some simple 3D examples using Away3DLite, a slimmed-down version of Away3D. Vinnie also briefly showed a Unity3D example.

February 2010 Auckland Web Meetup Recap

Ans — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:31:16 +0000

A new year. A new venue. A new format. Well, not completely true, it is a new year, but the February Auckland Web Meetup has met at the Vodafone NZ headquarters before and has tried the 20×20 format before. But this was a new venue and new format for my experience with the group. Most recently held in the smaller quarters of the Media Design School, the meetup was moved this month to the spacious conference hall in the vodafone headquarters, giving it the air of a conference instead of a meetup (complete with name badges, and, of course, free pizza and beer).

The format—20×20—stood for 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. Actually, 20x20x13 would be even more descriptive, 13 being the number of presenters to grace the stage. What was covered? Here’s a brief recap by presenter:

Daniel Too kicked off the night with a quick run-through of the Gaia Framework for Flash, authored by Steven Sacks (Side note: I had the pleasure of seeing Steven present at FITC Toronto in 2009, his presentation is available on Adobe TV—view it here!)

The Gaia Framework takes care of common Flash tasks such as implementing SWFObject, page transitions, bulk preloading, deep-linking, and memory management.
Keri Henare, CTO of pixelfusion.co.nz, showed another framework from another programming realm—the Symfony framework for PHP. Keri showed that Yahoo! is using Symfony and even New Zealand’s own eventfinder runs on the framework. He then ran through the reasons he likes Symfony, such as its code generation, community, and license. He finished up with a high-level run-through of its technical features, such as its dependency injection structure.
Ben Gracewood changed the tone of the stage with a presentation sprinkled with random inspiration and RC airplanes, which culminated with the idea of taking something that’s purposeful and re-purposing it. He gave SketchPad as an example of using modern web development technology in a way that hadn’t been conceived of prior.
Vaughan Rowsell promoted his MGRD method of getting things done, which stood for Motivation, Goal, Risk, Do it! (Right to the end). He used his recent 2300km bicycle ride from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga as a case study in its efficacy. His bicycle ride is documented on nzuphill.co.nz. He also mentioned that he is founder of vendhq.com, a retail management software webapp.
Andrew Hedges, gave a noble presentation on open source software that saves lives, termed “Humanitarian Software.” He showcased Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases Disasters (InSTEDD), an organization that coordinates disaster relief through SMS technology. He pointed out that while 25% of the world’s population may be online, 60% have cell phones, making SMS a farther reaching technology. Most recently InSTEDD went to Haiti to help with disaster relief using software they had only just finished developing in December 2009. Andrew also pointed out the twitter account of Eduardo Jezierski, director of technology at InSTEDD.
Danushka Abeysuriya of Rush Digital Interactive emphasized the rapid progression of technology, evinced today by the rapid development in the capabilities and appearance of mobile phone software. He likened the time to go from the first 3D PC computer games to modern immersive games was 20 years, while the same development progression has happened in 2 years on mobile phones, due to the fact that many of the lessons learned developing PC games can be transferred over to mobile development. For 3D mobile development OpenGL ES 2.0 was mentioned. He also made many predictions for the direction of mobile phone technology, such as double-sided phones, integration with cloud computing, built-in projectors and stereoscopic displays. Lastly he showcased his own 3D engine he’s developing for iPhone and Android OS.
Rowan Wernham gave some tips for getting a social media idea off the ground. He used his own project, sna.pr as an example (some kind of mapping web app—I’m not sure?). He also gave resources for start-ups such as the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, crunchbase.com, and compete.com.
John Ballinger, meetup organizer, presenting a fast-paced presentation on “The Rule of Three,” a small guide to making better software. The points are as follows:
- Test, test, test
- If, if, if – if there are three if statements in a row, something is wrong!
- Frown upon multi-dimensional arrays, such as catz[x][y][z], they are slow and hard to update.
- Break code up and keep each chunk short; under 300 lines.
- Use one-line conditional statements, in the format of x=(i.Cat)?1:0. (Personally I think this is only good for very short conditionals, as it is arguably less readable.)
- Use guard statements
- Utilize OR booleans in conditionals (Note: I may have misunderstood this slide!)
- Debugging is twice as difficult as the code, if the debugging is too difficult, the code is too difficult.
- Write expressive function names.
- Learn regex.
- Comment your code.
- XML – not your friend, use plists or (if using Flash) AMF.
- Question everything. If something isn’t working, it may not be the code. Look at the process.
- Utilize your file system, you don’t need to store everything in a database.
- Debug by talking. By explaining a programming issue, if can often be easier to solve.
- Avoid premature optimization.
- Refactor early.
- Exercise (as in physical). Get it!
- Always code as if the guy maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Lisa Phillips presented on multi-tasking. She emphasized that web development is inherently working in an environment with lots of distractions. If procrastination becomes a problem, it’s important to figure out why you’re procrastinating. If it’s because you don’t know what’s next you’re in trouble.
She gave “Lisa’s Pick & Mix”:
- Establish priorities.
- Make lists (hand-written, and make post-its readily accessible in your environment).
- Know what you’re doing.
- Plan.
- Revise your plan.
For task management, Lisa mentioned Getting Things Done, The Pomodoro Technique, Inbox Zero, and Remember the Milk. Lastly she mentioned that the Apple App Store has a whole category on Productivity and that you should “find out what works for you.”
Walter Rumsby, who emphasized that he’s just a “guy who works at Orion Health” and does not speak for them presented all his slides as twitter tweets, creative! He introduced that he works on software for hospital records and then gave a smattering of web development tips, such as that web standards are not about making your website work with a 10 year-old browser, but making your 10 year-old website work on a browser today.
Dr. Carey Stevens, of Spark Dental Technology, showcased his company’s use and work on the FireFox add-on Zinc for online dental imagery. He then listed some tips for having a good development environment, such as using Continuous Integrated Testing, Mochitest, and Buildbot. Plone CMS was also mentioned.
Tristan Phipps presented on fear. Specifically “Fear Killing Creativity.” His tips for tackling creative decisions under fear (of failure, etc.) are:
- Break your behavioral coping mechanism patterns, and build new ones through repetition.
- Make radical changes.
- Face your fears (for a dopamine hit when you conquer them!).
- Take time out every day.
- Learn something every day and find a mentor.
Dave George, of Serato Audio Research (a firm dealing with software for DJ’s and musicians) presented the following problem when presenting a user with a selection they’ve already encountered: “we waste their time showing them the same stuff again.”
Using whitelabel.net—a website his company runs for Pro DJ’s—as an example, Dave summed his presentation up at the end with three points: We are all busy, so… Listen to their (your users) decisions and focus [them] on new decisions.