ignite waterloo 4 was awesome: pt. 1
by Phil on Nov.19, 2010, under events
This post also could have been titled “why you should come to ignite waterloo 5″. I’m hoping that I will convince you to do so by retelling a few of the presentations I saw at Ignite Waterloo.
First of all, you may be asking what is Ignite? Ignite conferences are a series of 5 minute talks on anything, accompanied by slide shows that auto advance every 15 seconds. Their mantra is “enlighten us but make it quick”. Sound interesting? Keep reading.
There have been three Ignite Events in Waterloo (aptly labelled Ignite Waterloo 1-3). I had tickets to the last one, but I ended up bailing the day of due to illness. I now wish I’d just sucked it up and gone anyways.
I showed up around 6 o’clock when doors opened, and got a chance to chat with Mark Connolly who is one of two the co-creators of uxWaterloo. About an hour later I grabbed some seats for my good friends Jon and Tyler, and started snapping pictures of the crowd. At 7:30 my friends had arrived and the presentations started! I’m not going to highlight them all (the full list is available here), but once the videos get uploaded to YouTube by Philip Bast (the volunteer videographer for the event), I’ll update this post with links!
Mike Shanks: Combining Passions
Mike (twitter: @mikepgww) gave a talk on comining passions. In his case, he wanted to combine his passion for running, with his passion for drinking beer. Apparently, there are like minded individuals who participate in something called the beer mile. This involves chugging a beer, then running a quarter-mile, chugging another beer, then running another quarter-mile, a beer, a quarter-mile, abeeraquartermile and you’re done. Mike walked us through this process, including such descriptive phrases as “Shit! Beer is carbonated”, “burpin’ around the corner”, and “Shit! Beer is still carbonated!”
Sean Puckett: The Smart Camera
Sean (web: http://photi.ca) presented us with the evolution of the camera from a dumb instrument – one that does only what its user asks of it – to a device combined with the power of 1/10th of a super computer, and a connection to the internet. Turns out 1/10th of a super computer is a whole hell of a lot, and a connection to the internet affords you “the whole of human knowledge”, allowing you to do crazy things like live translation of text written in one alphabet to another, or take a picture of someone and find out who they are, or overlay information about whatever you’re looking (folks in the biz call this augmented reality, I’m told).
Cari Howard: Garbage In, Nothing Out: It Doesn’t Go Away!
Cari (twitter: @ariesamazon) informed us of the fact that the Waterloo region’s land fills have about 20 years left. 20 years. Thats not a lot of time. After that, where are we going to put our garbage? She implored us to reduce and reuse before recycling. Turns out that even though recycling is a good thing, its not nearly as efficient as reducing or reusing your goods. Also interesting, was some details she shared on future technologies to deal with waste disposal. The short version is they use something called a plasma torch to shoot a bolt of lightning into the garbage. This apparently produces no harmful waste except some gases, which can fortunately be collected and used to charge your next bolt of lightning! Very cool.
Linda Carson: Art: WTF?
Linda Carson (twitter: @lccarson) went to art school so we didn’t have to. This amazingly titled presentation began with a picture of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. This, as Linda told us is a type of art called a vanitas. A vanitas is, as I understand it, a piece of art meant to remind us of our mortality. It started out with depictions of skulls, then depiction of skulls in ways that you can only see them from a certain angle. Then partially butchered animal carcasses, then partially butchered human carcasses. Then, in 1987 (I was totally born that year!) Canadian artist Jana Sterbak created a vanitas of a woman wearing a dress made of meat. Sound familiar? Yep. Lady Gaga was not just being strange, she was referencing years of art history. At the very end of her talk, she told us what I told you at the start: Linda Carson went to art school so we didn’t have to.
Oh God There Were More?
Yes, and they were all good. In fact, the ones I’ve covered here are only a sampling from the first half of the presentations! I’ll try and get more reviews up here, but this post is long enough for now. Stay tuned for part 2!
Update [2010-11-23]: Part 2 has been posted, and is available for your reading pleasure here.
Update [2010-11-24]: The videos have been posted! Find ‘em here. Thanks again to Philip Bast!
future tech: smart(er) phones
by Phil on Nov.16, 2010, under future tech, user experience
Tonight was first of the two uxWaterloo events scheduled for November.
It was a very interesting talk – which I may get into in more detail in another blog post – but my interest was piqued on another topic before our guest speaker even took the stage. While waiting for everyone to take their seats I was socializing with a few of the other attendees. In advance, if either of the two ladies I was speaking to tonight end up reading this – I’m very sorry I forgot your names!
During some light conversation about our interests in user experience related fields – one of these ladies (we’ll call her Alice) wanted to add the other (we’ll call her Brenda) to LinkedIn. Alice asked Brenda if she was on LinkedIn, and after Brenda said yes, Alice proceeded to pull out her BlackBerry to look Brenda up.
It was at this point that I asked them “won’t it be interesting when your phone will have opened up LinkedIn and already searched for Brenda because it heard our conversation?”. We all kind of laughed, and commented on how that technology was not quite ready for that yet with big smiles. Phones reacting to your conversations? Sorcery I say!
However ridiculous this concept sounds, we might not be that far off.
Technologies such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect have (as I’ve heard) very intelligent voice detection – to the point where it knows the difference between the voices of the users in the room. It’s not a stretch to imagine Microsoft putting similar technology into their newly launched Windows Phone 7 to enable this very sort of thing. It would be a very interesting shift in user experience design for applications to know what you want to do before you’ve decided to do it.
ChompSMS for android goes om nom nom
by Dana on Oct.14, 2010, under tech
This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.
Hi, all! You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil. My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in Information Systems for a large insurance company. I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him. This is my third guest post for audiophonik.
This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform: the shiny and efficient ChompSMS, now running on (yay!) Android 2.1 as my carrier – Rogers – has finally pushed out this update to my HTC Magic+ hardware.
ChompSMS: Sounds tasty
ChompSMS is an Android-only (and decidedly rather handy) replacement to the built-in ‘Messages’ application used for sending and receiving MMS / SMS / pretty much any other kind of MS / on the Android platform. To give you an idea of how stone-age their own messaging application is, I can’t notice any change between its current iteration – on Android 2.1 – and the one that was on my phone last week, using Android 1.5. I’m almost tempted to root my phone and slap on Froyo, just to see if there’s any difference in the stock messaging app.
Old and busted...
...new hotness.
ChompSMS is supposed to offer a lot of new features and generally ‘beef up’ the stock messaging options available on Google Android, and comes with a huge list of things it supposedly does better than Google. Among them:
- The UI has been changed to mirror that of the iOS platform – which I could really do without, but it looks better than stock
- The ability to send SMS / MMS over the ‘ChompSMS’ network with the purchase of ‘credits’, for a much cheaper rate than your provider
- A host of new notification options for you to choose how you’re notified about received (or even sent!) messages
Now, that’s certainly a lot to claim: let’s see how ChompSMS stacks up against its supposed abilities.
Finger-Chompin’ good
Now, I can honestly say that I haven’t personally purchased credits or paid for ChompSMS in any way. While it does tout itself as a ‘free program’, there is a premium version available for a few bucks that will remove the streaming advertisements from the program’s main window. In all honesty, they’re pretty out of the way, but I have accidentally tapped on one or two while attempting to select the top name on my messaging list, mostly due to my own poor motor skills. If ads are the sort of thing that really piss you off though, go for the paid version; I’m seriously considering it.
The first three things with which I immediately fell in love using ChompSMS are as follows:
1) Notification options
Seriously, this should just be available in the stock version of the Android messaging application, but apparently Google has not yet looked that far into the future and gleaned that much information from its search engine users. ChompSMS grants me the ability to use either my LED (located near the earpiece) OR the trackball (which pulses white) – or BOTH! – to notify me of texts. On top of that, I can even select what colour I want the LED to flash, and it’s much easier to select any of my usual songs as a notification sound – no silly messing about with folders on the SD card.
2) Truncated message strings
On top of the fact that it just handles message strings more beautifully – much more intuitively than the stock application – one issue I ran into several times with the stock application is the fact that, well, some of my message strings get rather unwieldy, and I don’t want to have to delete texts to use my application. For example: before erasing my phone for the big Android 2.1 update, I had over 3000 some messages with my girlfriend that I didn’t particularly want to get rid of. Trouble is, every time I opened her string in the messaging application, it would take forever to load all of those messages.
This is where ChompSMS comes in handy: it only loads the last ‘so many’ (I say this because I haven’t counted) messages immediately, with the option to ‘open older messages’ at the top of the string in button form. As it turns out, this has been a total lifesaver in that I’m now not waiting forever for my messages to come up, and the application itself actually has a smaller footprint as it’s not loading every single text in the history of mankind into memory.
3) Replies from the lock screen
This is honestly a no-brainer. The quick ability to reply as soon as a message comes in – even right from the lock screen – is just about the handiest and simplest thing they could have thought of.
The ugly
The only things I’ll complain about with ChompSMS are as follows:
1) It shouldn’t have to mirror the Apple iOS UI for texts in order to remain functional and pretty. They should really try to ramp up development of their own, better-than-Google-and-Apple UI to distinguish themselves from the rest of the garbage out there.
2) I hate ads. Honestly, you would think they make enough from people purchasing their damn ‘credits’ to send texts over their network to be able to remove ads from the free version of their program; I’m totally torn about whether or not I want to shell out a few bucks for a messaging application, or just remove it and use the stock one again. Or just toss a few Google ads on your site – nobody would even mind!
The closing statement
All in all, ChompSMS is almost a necessity for someone who texts as much as me – I almost regularly come close to my 1000-text-per-month cap on my plan with Rogers, but am usually careful not to get too close to the top because I know how much they love to bleed me for money. If you’re a more recreational, or less frequent, texter then I would imagine you can stick with the stock application and be just fine, as long as you’ve paired it with something like Swype.
Go to your Market, get ChompSMS, and be happy – you will thank me later. Here’s a handy QR code for Android users!
