Tag Archives: Uncategorized

I’m sick of UI examples that do nothing

Yep I’m going to go there. There are a ton of concept UI’s that are blown up on walls and support a multitouch gestural interface. Sure they look pretty, but a vast majority of these examples don’t do anything. I mean look at this video:

Tangible Multi-touch Connectivity from nearinteraction on Vimeo.

ooh look at the roundy things linked to other roundy things that we can move around. Throw some Ratatat on top of that video and it will be slick. Don’t get me wrong I love Ratatat, but I don’t love your pointless “art.” I’ve seen this shit so many god damn times now it makes me sick. What is wrong with you people. I mean you have all this time to make this thing, but you couldn’t spend a second on any reason for it to exist? It doesn’t even have to be practical, but it should be real. I saw an example app in Flash that looked just like this, albeit worked with a mouse on my desktop, 10 years ago! So come on! Let’s take all this talent and actually make something that does something.

Oh and while I’m ranting, I want to have a word with you, marketer, who saw this video and then showed it to your client. Why did you do that. This doesn’t solve any problem of theirs. Now some PM has to explain to some poor dev that they have to build one of these for Altoids or some company to be used in a bar for one night for your “Awareness” campaign. Don’t you ever do that again! You can’t measure this and your drunk friends will say anything is cool when they are drunk.

Hey, i want to make the world a better place through sexy user interfaces that make people “squee!” with delight too. So I get it, I get why you think you had to do this. Maybe you thought it would help your portfolio, and who knows it might, but anyone who actually makes real interaction will know right away this is just noise that is getting in the way of progress.

So to all of you out there making demoware without any purpose stop, think about it and come up with better idea.

Recycled Dresses




recycled dresses

Originally uploaded by futileboy

I was at the Plant Amnesty’s Festival of Trees yesterday here in Seattle and was somewhat surprised to see some amazing fashion on display. I was able to snap a few pictures and this was one of my favorites.

On the left is a dress made up of mostly Cat5 cables and other computer wiring.

On the right is a vinyl record bodice made using two Bert Baccarat records. The skirt consists of a safety fence, rain coats and window blinds to name a few of the items.

I later leaned that the dresses were from a the local ReStore Haute Trash Fashion Show

After watching many episodes of Project Runway, my favorites were always the ones using everyday materials.

Playing around with Photosynth

I recently started playing around with Panoramic photography by stitching a series of photos together.

I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far.  I’ve mostly been using the stitching features of Windows Live Photo Gallery.  It’s been the easiest to use with the best results so far.  I still need to do a more scientific test of other applications.

Here’s the result of one such set of photos:

Lake Chelan Panoramic final

I took the source photos for this image and decided to give it a try in Microsoft’s Photosynth.  I did an earlier test when the service first became available, but I didn’t have a good enough source set of photos to try it out with.

This set actually came out to be a full 100% Synthy.  Which is their term for how well all the photos work together in to one scene.

You can play around with the results here:

I had more photos of the scene then I used for the single panoramic, so I fed them all in to Photosynth since it seems to better with more.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

My only issue with it, is that this full 360 series of photos doesn’t seem to be recognized as such. So you can’t just spin around and around.

The Alphabet Game

Here’s a list of companies I’ve worked for or with over the years in alphabet book format

A is for Ascentium & Altrec

B is for Blast Radius, Brickfan and Bowne

C is for Coinstar

D is for Decision Processes International (DPI)

E is for Enic.cc & Eddie Bauer

F is for Freerange & Flying Spot

G is for GitWit

H is for Hornall Anderson & Humongous Entertainment

I is for IndiFlix, Infinium Labs and Interactive Threshold

J is for Hmmm… I can’t think of a single J company. So J is for JavaScript you’ve always been there for me.

K is for King Love, one of my favorite clients.

L is for Loudeye

M is for Microsoft (whose internal groups could single handedly fill out this whole list) & Modo

N is for Nunhems, Nordstrom, Neverstop and NEC

O is for O’Reilly Media

P is for Paypal, also not anyone I’ve worked for, but I have worked with from building ecommerce and collecting money from clients. I <3 you paypal.

Q is for Qpass

R is for Reba McEntire, yes the musician

S is for Standard Output, Sitewerks,  Slam Media and Spry

T is for TriFilm

U is for U2 and their Popmart World tour website

V is for Visomark Law Group

W is for Wirestone, Wunderman, Wildseed and Weyerhaeuser (that’s a lot of Ws)

X is for XL Insurance

Z is for Zaaz