Tag Archives: video

Working with Sketch Flow

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The official release of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 was last Friday and I’m really excited about how these products have been evolving. My favorite new feature is Sketch Flow, which I’ve been playing around with for a little while now and have found it to be a great way to build dynamic prototypes.  From my previous post on Wireframe Prototype Fidelity I would have added a bit on Sketch Flow if the product had existed at the time.  I think it fits a gap in the tools of the UX professional who works on rich interactive applications.  For myself I was either building static images in OmniGraffle or Adobe Illustrator or I was mocking things up in HTML with JavaScript.  Sometimes I’ve built stuff using Flash or even modeling and rendering an animation in 3D tools like Maya to best get the concept across. I think Sketch Flow really brings it all together for a quick way to rough out the experience. My favorite part is how Sketch Flow lets you put in fake data driven content. It’s hard to explain how awesome this is, to get a good understanding check out the video below.

Check out this great video introduction to using Sketch Flow from Mix earlier this year:

To keep up to date be sure to follow the Silverlight team blog, Soma’s blog and Scott Guthrie’s blog

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Visualizing Traveling Tweets

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Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta’s Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time.

This was made using Processing, which I’m a huge fan of.

New wave of interaction

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I’m very excited about all the new forms of interaction that are emerging at E3 this year. It’s nice to see hardware that can allow the user to have a more physical and gestural experience with the screen. Obviously the Wiimote helped revolutionize the home game consoler control and much respect is due to Nintendo. That being said I think the others are taking the concept of the controller to the next level.

Here’s a demonstration video from Sony of the new PS3 Motion Controller:

Here’s a demo of the new Microsoft Xbox 360 project Natal:

I’m by far more interested in the Natal interface. Although the idea of waving my arms around without any physical device seems like it might create fatigue more quickly. With that in mind creating a steering wheel interface object could be a solid piece of plastic which would be a lot less expensive to produce.

We’re definitely heading in the right direction here. I just want to see some haptic and resistance feedback next. I’m also getting a feeling that the small rectangular screen is feeling like a limitation now too. Can’t wait to see what’s next.