Synergy Rocks!

Today, I started using Synergy to share my desktop keyboard and mouse with my Toshiba M200. The ease of installation and use is fair and the results are outstanding!
Synergy works also across different platforms, including Unix and Mac. Meanwhile, the windows installation process seems to be the easiest one so far.
A tutorial on how to install and configure synergy can be found here.

About listening

Image courtesy of the Human Computer Interaction Lab

I was bored yesterday, so I decided to watch an episode of the apprentice that I recorded eariler. While I liked only the first season of the show, I kept watching it every season because it gave clear insights on how you can do great deal of work with brilliant people, and still fail and get sent home.
What was very interesting about this episode is the way the corporate team beat the creative team on a pure creative task. The corporate team “Primarius” recognized that they cannot beat the creative team “Matchstick” by themselves on this task, they brought the most creative team to their side: Customers. Primarius went and invited children to come and spend sometime with them and give early feedback about their prototype. (The task was to redesign a children’s book to fit nowadays urban life). The children gave their feedback and comments, and the corporate team went back and made the changes, got their product and beat the creative team.
Their task reminded me of the work done at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the university of Maryland: When the researchers at the lab decided to design and implement a Digital Library for Kids, they did not rely on their creative ability or assume they already know what the kids want. They invited the kids to come to the lab and design the library with them. The research team, led by Dr. Druin, worked closely with children for many months to ask them about how they want to read books online, and the resultsresult are impressive.
While customers may not always know what they want, they are very good at knowing what they don’t want. A product that is designed around the tasks that users perform every day has a better chance of winning than a product with many innovative features answering questions that customers never asked in the first place, or forcing them to adopt a new workflow. In HCI, this is called Task Centered Design, and it was the first lesson I was taught in graduate school: build your product with your audience.
Last week, Apple introducted Aperture. When I first saw it, I thought “great! Yet another image browser/editor…”. But after watching the video, I realized that it’s one of the most impressive ones to date. Apple recognized early enough one fact that is giving them slow but steady success in the consumer market: The workflow IS the interface.

PDC flashback: Sparkle Hands-On-Lab

We got the attendance/survey score yesterday: Sparkle ranked top Hands-On-Lab for PDC This is a great opportunity to thank everyone who came to the lab and had a hands on experience with the product. You guys kept us busy all three days, but it was totally worth it!
For those who did not attend PDC or missed Sparkle Interactive Designer’s HOL, Here is a summary of the lab:
The tutorial was a walkthrough to develop a simple product catalog application with real time data binding to a local XML data source. The lab adopted a workflow model that separates the content creation from the styling and finishing.

Exercise 1: Bind to the data source and create the containers:
In this exercise, you learn to use the tool to bind to a local XML file containing description of some fictitious products and links to local images.
This is how the application looks like after the first exercise is accomplished (Notice the real time data binding inside Spakrle that enables you to work with real data at design time)

Exercise 2: Styling your application
In this exercis, you learn to change the plain default look of your application to a more stylish look and feel using gradients, template editing, and layout. The screenshot below shows the results of exercise 2:

Exercise 3:Adding Visual Effects:
In this last exercise, you learn how to create simple animations, transitions and visual brush reflection effects to give your UI a more polished look.The results look similar to the figure shown below:

It took people on the average an hour to finish the tutorial. This is not bad for first time hands-on experience with Sparkle. It takes me usually less than 15 minutes to replicate the application since I know my way around the environment.
Once again, thanks to everyone who came to the lab… Feel free to post any further feedback about the lab here or email it to me: akhella at gmail dot com.

And finally, like my friend Mano always says: “It’s all vector baby!”