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iPad versus Kindle – a design debate

kindleiphone

iPad versus Kindle, who will be considered a 'winner' a year from now?

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iPad versus Kindle

I asked seven digital design students to take a look at the iPad and Kindle, analyze the major points both good and bad and come to a decision about the product. The specific question is what’s going to happen a year from now. Will the Kindle be overshadowed by the iPad, or will it hold it’s own? Is there a market for both kinds of products, a dedicated e-reader and a new type of device?
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Published on February 3rd, 2010 in discourse, interactive design • 2 Comments »

Classic Logo – v. 2.0

logos

I thought it would be fun to revisit a classic assignment Michael Beirut mentioned in a recent post on DesignObserver.com where he showed his student portfolio. The idea is to simplify an animal to it’s most essential elements and create a logo-like image. It occurred to me that those same skills are exactly what is needed when designing characters for game design, and with the game engine Unity now free we should introduce motion as an element.

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Published on December 8th, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , , , • No Comments »

Arduino in the Wall Street Journal

My favorite microcontroller, the Arduino, has hit the big time – a WSJ feature article! For the uninitiated, the Arduino can be hooked up to sensors to detect presence and then it can send out signals to the computer or to motors, LED lights and a bunch of other stuff. The nice thing about doing interactive design with the Arduino, is that it can be a stand-alone installation without the need for a computer to remain attached.

Published on November 28th, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with • No Comments »

RPS series

Great article chronicling the development of a game based on the Rock, Paper, Shotgun web site. This is a guy who does not know code, but is still able to develop a working game in two weeks! Shows how much fun it is to work with Unity!

Published on November 28th, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , • No Comments »

Leister.2.0 is finally live!

I’ve been working on a new site design for the last few weeks and would like to announce that it’s finally been launched! Let me know what you think!

For my design friends that are curious, the whole site is done in WordPress, which is a free content management system that you can install on most web sites. It is basically a blog setup, but it is pretty easy to customize it so that it does not look like a blog. There are a ton of cool plug-ins and built-in features that make managing a complex site very easy. For example, for my image pages I can upload all of my images at once and they are automatically formatted into a gallery. I can create a new post, and it will be added to my navigation and menu areas in the appropriate place.

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Published on November 1st, 2009 in discourse, interactive design, new work and tagged with , , , , • 2 Comments »

Unity gaming software is now free!

I was blown away to hear today that Unity is now free for small independent developers! This is the same gaming platform that I used for hypocenter, a recent installation piece. The great thing about Unity is that if you are familiar with javaScript you can easily write code for this platform. As a gaming platform, Unity has built-in physics and all of the standard features you would expect.

I think that this development will make it much more likely that alternative uses of gaming technologies are developed. Cool!

Published on October 31st, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , , • No Comments »

tag cloud: a Processing Java Applet

Production Notes

These are screenshots from a Processing application that I wrote for my web site that displays a tag cloud with the diameter of the circles determined by the number of tags and a random tag as the fulcrum point. My idea was to highlight the most frequently used terms in my site while also drawing attention to a new random tag each time a person visits the site. Hovering will freeze a tag in position, while clicking will take you to posts with that tag.

The physics is based off the Bouncy Bubbles Processing application written by Keith Peters. The data loads the most popular tags from a text file created by Wordpress. The file is a static text file called test.txt, which is created on the fly. The information is parsed into an array for use in Processing. The original tag cloud is on my tag cloud page.

Media

  • Software used: Processing, PHP

Source Code

Published on October 27th, 2009 in discourse, documentation, interactive design and tagged with , , • No Comments »

Simple Examples of Database Manipulation in Processing: Finished Example

Processing Car Database Manipulation

Finished Example

Here is the the finished example of the Database Visualization I have been explaining in the previous 2 posts. A couple of things I added were rectangles based on the engine displacement, a for loop to create a dot representing the number of cylinders for the car and finally a rollover effect so that the viewer can concentrate on the imagery before knowing which car is represented. I don’t know if it’s a useful visualization or not, but I think it is attractive and I will spend more time viewing data like this than a chart.

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Published on October 25th, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , , , • No Comments »

Simple Examples of Database Manipulation in Processing: Part 2

Continuing with where we left off in Part 1, let’s start with a bit of data from the cars.tsv file referenced in the Processing File 02 example.  BTW, if you are on a Mac, go to your Processing Preferences and check “Place File Menu inside of Navigation to avoid Mac Java bug, that way you can get to these examples very easily right from File>Examples in Processing. Or, upgrade to Processing 1.0.9.  Make a new text file and paste this data that I got from the cars.tsv file referenced in the program:

chevrolet chevelle malibu,18,8,307,130,3504,12,70,1
buick skylark 320,15,8,350,165,3693,11.5,70,1
plymouth satellite,18,8,318,150,3436,11,70,1

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Published on October 24th, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , , , • 2 Comments »

Simple Examples of Database Manipulation in Processing: Part 1

I have used Processing many times to import and manipulate database files but I tend to either forget exactly how I did something or not be able to find the kind of instructions I am looking for. I greatly appreciate all of the example’s Ben Fry and others have on Processing and they are important tools in learning to work with data. I would like to provide a one-stop tutorial, reference and explanation for exactly how to get an array of data into Processing and then how to manipulate it for data visualization purposes. And, if possible I will make an extremely simple example so that it is easy to build from here.
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Published on October 23rd, 2009 in discourse, interactive design and tagged with , , , • 2 Comments »

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