Floss your open source UI once a year

I’m excited to be taking part in the 3rd FLOSS Usability Sprint later this month. FLOSS stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (think Firefox, Thunderbird, ubuntu, gimp, and all the other freely downloadable open software which have making significants inways into the commercial software giants’ cash cows).

Why the sprint? Open-source software has been traditionally known for relatively poor usability. Reasons include focusing on more technically sophisticated users (and why not? if you are going to code for free, you may as well code highly-featured stuff that you would use), a lack of centralized management (contributing to feature bloat and inconsistency), and a lack of financial resources for investing in usability and design. However, the FLOSS community has recognized the problem and their is a burgeoning movement dedicated to alleviating it.

The Sprint will bring together open-source developers and user experience professionals to – over the course of one intense weekend (hence the term sprint) – brainstorm, interview, usability test, prototype and iterate improvements to a number of open-source projects. Projects signed up so far include Drupal, HyperScope, SocialSourceCommons, and SocialtextOpen.

Interested in taking part? Are you a user experience researcher or designer with a bit of time on your hands in late October who would like to do your bit for open source? Are you in an open source project and worried that your UI isn’t Mum/grandfather/non uber-geek friendly? Sign up here.

Learning to Fly (20 years late)

I was the teenage lad in Little Miss Sunshine, obsessed with the idea of being a fighter pilot (and this is even before the days of Top Gun), yet blind as a bat.

Anyway after decades of sulking, I’ve finally decided to live the dream and started some flying lessons at Advantage Aviation out of Palo Alto (PAO). OK, so a Cessna 152 isn’t the RAF Tornado of my dreams, but its a start. Here are some first impressions after my first lesson:

• Planes are small – ease off on the pizza, and choose a trainer you get on with
• Taxi’ing is like controlling a tank (left pedal – turn left, right pedal – turn right)
• Taking off is easy – get clearance, point down the runway, adjust flaps, up the throttle, speed up to 65-ish, and then pull back slightly (not too hard … loops on take off are a bad idea)
• Staying level – this seemed to be a continuous balancing act, adjusting the throttle, angle of attack (ascent), trim … I’m told it will become as easy as riding a bike … we’ll see …
• Instrument overload – talk about my brain working overdrive! Speed, height, ascent/descent indicator, heading, fuel guage, not to forget continuously scaning ahead of you (a common error of new pilots is to spend too long looking inside the cockpit).
• Landing is hard – much harder than taking off, but not as hard as you might think, thanks to the VASI lights at the side of the runway. These help you stay in the optimum glide path by changing colour depending on your height (one red, one white is optimal, two white too high, two red – too low).

Here are a couple of pics – Cessna 152 internals, and work from the air.

Personal Information Management workshop at SIGIR 2006 – papers and posters online

The organisers of the Personal Information Management workshop at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle have released the submitted position papers and posters. No less than 32 accepted submissions which is amazing for a field which was extremely quiet only a matter of years ago. You can also see the report from the previous January 2005 workshop here.

Shareslides with SlideShare (but not on hosted wordpress …)

Congrats to my pals Jon and Rashmi for the launch of their latest baby, SlideShare, which allows you to :

• Publish presentations online (be they produced in Powerpoint, Open Office, Keynote … ) by embedding in any website via a funky flash player (but see below – it does not work in hosted wordpress)
• Collaborate with readers via the ability to tag presentations and place comments on individual slides.

Its been great watching Jon and Rashmi work on this project over recent months, and for it to finally come to fruition. Its already catching a lot of attention and has been called the “Youtube of powerpoint”, “The bastard lovechild of Youtube and Powerpoint” and “Bore the world of presentations” …

Cheers guys! – and I love the Bollywood server names!

Appendix: come on wordpress.com – please support embeddable slideshare on your hosted blogs!
Slideshare allows you to embed a flash-based viewer to play your preso in any webpage with an embeddable object tag:

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” …

However, this breaks in hosted wordpress in the same way that embedded youtube code breaks. WordPress published a fix for youtube. How about the same for slideshare, guys?

High art at 24th and Mission

Its not often you have a cultural “wow” moment at 24th and Mission. Its a gritty transport interchange … sure – lots of interesting characters and stores, but somewhere to see “high art”?

Well it is, literally. For several nights this October, look up. The Live Billboard project is a set of 4 dancers piroutteing in 3D, several storeys up. Stand at the NE corner – you can’t miss ‘em.

• Dates: Preview: Wednesday, October 4, 9:30 PM,October 5-8, 12-15 at 8:00 PM and 9:30 PM
• Pics (wordpress team is having a cuppa): 1, 2, 3
• Info: official, upcoming