Ben Fry’s new book Visualizing Data is an introduction to applied visualization that should appeal to a wide audience. Designers, software engineers, and anyone curious about how to represent data with pictures will find it to be a good introduction to visualization techniques. Although the examples use Processing, a Java-based toolkit that Fry [...] Read More…
The engineering director at my last workplace used to hold weekly "iteration reviews" with his teams, which was really just a fancy title for a meeting to communicate what you've discovered during the past week. Building software is a lot about making discoveries but the same could really be said about any creative process, [...] Read More…
I recently came across Mike Rohde's fantastic sketchnotes from South by Southwest in Austin. Instead of typing notes on a laptop or hen-scratching on a notepad like typical conference-goers, Rohde makes brilliantly illustrated notes in his Moleskine sketchbook and conveniently makes them available on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. A pair of "visual cartographers" [...] Read More…
In my blog’s new spirit of academic openness, I’ve decided to post some details about a project I did for a human-computer interaction course last term. The work is admittedly rough and much work would need to be done to pursue it further, but I think the idea is interesting and I’d love it [...] Read More…
I'm starting to do some background preparation for my research and I've been digging around a bit for resources on information visualization. Today I came across this super excellent blog: information aesthetics. I love the "Moveable Type" installation in the lobby of the New York Times building. There are links to a [...] Read More…
OK, so I wrote my first Mac OS X GUI application last night. It was mostly a "depth-first" exploration of how easy it is to write an application for OS X. I feel like somehow I slept through the last few years and didn't notice that GUI building has become a lot more [...] Read More…
I installed Leopard on my mac last weekend. Overall I think it's just kind of OK. Read More…
Pattie Maes gave a keynote talk at OOPSLA last week and she summarized a few of the cool projects going on in the Ambient Intelligence Group at MIT. The Relational Pillow (aka Pillow Talk) is so incredibly cute that I couldn't help but write about it. Imagine being far away from your significant [...] Read More…
I ran across a poster at OOPSLA about PARSEWeb, a tool that can provide software developers with documentation about how to construct the objects they need given examples of open source code available on the web. The central idea of this tool is that developers know the types of objects that they need to [...] Read More…
A lot of OOPSLA this year focused on metaphors of software development. Peter Turchi spoke of the creative process in terms of cartography, Mark Bernstein offered an idealized vision of software development as craft, and Frederick P. Brooks revisited the age-old comparison of software development and physical engineering disciplines. Read More…