This is marvelous – I love it.
iLingual from Lean Mean Fighting Machine is a new translation app for iPhone. Pick your phrase, hold it up to your mouth, and let ‘er rip. Check out this brief – and hilarious – video:
First saw it at the Edible Apple.
Check this short video (1:30 minutes) to see what a smart creative Swedish agency did to promote a new IKEA store:
Cheap, easy, fast. And very, very smart.
I recently spent a week in Japan and while there had the opportunity to visit the national gallery in Ueno park, in Tokyo.
The visit was wonderful and I had the chance to see amazing 500-year-old pottery from all over Asia, including this Ming bowl. That, of course, was one of the younger pieces as the gallery has many older pieces, including this incredible 400-year-old jar from the Manjiayoo culture of ancient China:
After touring the Asian sections of the gallery, I went to the Japanese art section, featuring paintings on huge screens or panels – where I was not allowed to take photos. This was fascinating and enjoyable, but … confusing.
I’m used to Western art. While I’m not an expert by any means whatsoever, I can “read” it to a degree … understand it … appreciate it. Japanese painting, on the other hand is very different … in many ways I cannot read it and do not understand it.
Japanese art, especially traditional Japanese art, seems to almost be more about what is not there than what is. In my limited understanding, this does not appear to be negative space in the western architectural sense, though. Rather, the landscape and objects that are not there are not omissions – they are not removed. Rather, my sense of it is that it’s more of a fading away … a merging with the background which is not background but is also foreground.
Later Japanese art from the 20th and 21st centuries seems more detailed, more western. It employs more tricks of perspective to spatially place objects and scenes in a more “realistic” way. It’s more accessible to my Western eye.
Perhaps next time I go to Japan (if I go) I’ll read up on traditional Japanese art and be able to understand it better.
I did notice, however, that other sections of Japanese art, including sculpture and carving, were far more accessible – though I’m certain that I’m missing many things when viewing these as well.
FourSquare is an up-and-coming social web app that provides context to place and people, allowing you to:
To all those who are endlessly plugging it – many people in the web2.0, social media sphere – I have a few questions:
If the answer is no to all three questions, I understand your passion for FourSquare. Your life probably revolves around your circle of friends, what you’re doing tonight, where you’re going to eat, and who is going to be with you. You’re probably also in your 20s or early 30s. You are a grown-up teenager.
But for many more people, the answer to those three questions is yes. And for those, I think FourSquare is just not that interesting. The first (and probably most important) use of FourSquare – finding where your friends are – is just not as relevant. For these people, they’re busy, they’re eating at home with spouses and kids, they’re taking kids to lessons and practices, etc.
As for the second use – points and badges – umm … are we in grade school again? Get real, buy yourself a used Tamagotchi.
The most realistic use I can see is the discovery feature: what people have done that is cool and interesting and unique … and you want to do it on the weekend.
Am I wrong? Go ahead, flame me.
WestJet is having HUGE issues right now with a reservations system conversion … which means that it has been extremely hard to book a flight with them for at least 3 days.
I just posted this to their customer feedback form:
- I cannot book online because I’m doing a round-trip to Calgary on the same day, and the site does not give me options to leave from Abbotsford in the AM and return from CGY in the PM.
- I had to make separate 1-way reservations to do the above.
- I have to re-login every other page.
- The site said it would cancel my reservation if I did not call in within 1 hour – I guess you’re having some issues. I spent over an hour on hold yesterday trying to call in. No answer!
- This morning I’m calling – on hold now for 15 minutes. No telling me how many are on hold, how many agents, what order I’m in, or anything like that. Horrible user experience!
- And, on your site, my reservations now say “canceled.”
To put it mildly, I am not a happy camper. This is a textbook lesson in how NOT to serve clients.
For the flights I’m trying to book, WestJet is the most convenient. But too much more of this and the convenience of the flights will be vastly outweighed by the inconvenience of doing business with a company that can’t book business!
Everything is sales.
When you’re telling your boss what you think should be done, you’re selling. When you’re explaining to your spouse what big-ticket item you want to buy, you’re selling. And when you’re talking to a client and negotiating new features, you’re selling.
So, don’t you want to be good at it? I do, and this article is good enough and a big enough help that I wanted to remember it by posting the key points here:
8 Sales Questions You Can’t Live (and Sell) Without!
There’s a lot here, and some of it I’m not sure how I’ll use. But I love (and use) the “make sense” question a lot, especially since I’m often working with people whose native language is not English. And many of the others are great tips.
If you have five minutes, I highly recommend checking out the entire article.
The dogs are barking and the birds are singing. First light hasn’t yet hit Porto, Portugal today, but I’m awake, a victim of jet lag and an inability to sleep in spite of being dead tired.
Ah well … gives me a chance to catch up on my blogging!
I flew into Lisbon, Portugal yesterday, planning to take the train up the coast to Porto, where I’m attending an Intel eLearning conference. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed, causing me to miss the last train … so I had to rent a car, with interesting challenges:
At about 3AM local time I was finally 300 km farther north and in my Porto hotel room – ready to sleep about 4 hours and then get down to the conference, which is being held in the Alfandega, a converted riverside warehouse. Getting there in my rented car was a little enjoyable, too:
In any case, I’m here, the conference is great, and Porto is an amazing city. Here are just a few photos of things that caught my eye – hopefully there will be many more over the next few days:
This is all speculation, but here is an interesting analysis of where short-cycle news publishing might be going in the Apple ecosystem:
It’s always neat to see your software pop up in places you didn’t seed it …
Here’s a great use: our touch-friendly Blue Dolphin user interface on a MID (mobile internet device) called a Viliv:
FYI, when I say “our,” I mean EasyBits Software.
From Brian Cray’s excellent recent post:
- Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study
An in-depth comparison of three form designs—Google mail signup, Hotmail signup, and Yahoo! Mail signup. The selection of forms are ideal because each form is long as well as unique in terms of label positioning, field grouping, and identification of required fields. Here are my major takeaways from the study:
- Make the form fields vertical, not horizontal
- Left-aligned labels are clearer
- People tend to fill out all form fields regardless
- The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
This study focused on the layout of regular content and whether users scan or read. Here were my major takeaways from the study:
- Headlines draw eyes before pictures
- People scan the left side of everything
- The first few words of headlines are very important
- Single column designs produce the most eye fixations
- Scrolling is okay
- Introductory paragraphs get read
- F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
This is a classic eye-tracking study by a classic guru: Jakob Nielsen. If you don’t know who he is and you’re in web design, read his books or get out of the biz. Anyway, this particular eye tracking study reveals that users read content in a “F” pattern. Here are my major takeaways from the study:
- People read the headline and the first paragraph before scanning the left side of the content
- Headlines should start with keywords to pull the eyes from the left margin
via 3 eye tracking studies that influenced my latest redesign.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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