Flux, Flex, and Other

I’ve always been interested in the user’s experience.  Ask my coworkers at Booz — sure it was cool they could make a database that tracked and manipulated all the cargo being taken up to, or returned from, the International Space Station — but if the interface wasn’t equally or more powerful that the logic behind it, I complained…

So it pleases me immensely to see richer experiences showing up all over the web recently.  (and not because I moved to a comany who is all about making that happen).

(well, not only).

I’m especially happy to see those experiences NOT target at geeky, internet savvy, uber-users.  When it reaches the general public, that’s good stuff.

Andy posted about how rich internet applications made a cameo on The Office.

And then Kellen forwarded us an email about the Sony Bravia website.  It’s very design-y and has a lot of interaction, feedback, and experience built in.  It makes you want to see what else is under the other areas.  Much MUCH more engaging than a flat website…  The cube and navigation effects are interesting, and the interface is catchy, if not intuitive.  We followed on the email with a discussion about how we get lots of requests for cubes, etc.  For serious, daily use applications, maybe not the best design… but for an occaisional, marketing, kiosk, emotional punch it works well.

Now, if you go play with the website, find the Rabbit claymation section.  Watch the commercial and then the making of.  Nothing to do with Rich Experiences… it’s just really cool.

… and my dad told me not to be an art major…

… you see how well Pre-Med worked out…

“Hallo!  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You send me mislabeled crap.  Prepare to die” …

I’m not a Microsoft fan. I think the combination of their relatively crappy product(s), assuming their non-commercial customers are criminals and/or mindless drones, and the inaccessibility of their support system (I’ve found it far easier to Google for Microsoft support issues rather than using Microsoft’s support search site… and can you find a phone number on there anywhere?) make them a good candidate for technical hatred.

But the thing that really gets me is the lack of even remotely honest labeling. There was the instance where they upgraded everyone to the new (crappy) Internet Explorer 7 via the “Critical Updates” section of Windows Update… Which then followed on with future (actual) critical updates to fix the holes in IE7…

And now, this… I needed to sign up for Windows Messenger MSN Messenger Hotmail Windows Live whatever they’re calling it now since we use the Microsoft messnger at work.  It gives you a hotmail address, so now I have a hotmail address.  Fabulous.  I never use the Hotmail address, but occaisionally my messenger pops up an alert telling me I have email in my inbox.  It’s always marketing crap from Microsoft, so I found my way into the preferences to turn off all communication from Microsoft, other than the required “Updates, changes to the service, or information vital to the service.

I’m okay with that…  “We have a security flaw”, “Your storage just got upgraded to X gigabytes”, “Here’s your lost password” — all relevant and useful information that I am totally willing to accept.

Then this arrived this morning…

Now, I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt that getting Spooky haloween packs, Getting Sweet Stuff Now, and getting marketing emails for Windows Live OneCare counts as “Updates, Changes, or Information vital to the service”.

I think it’s especially telling that they REMIND you that this email is being sent under those pretenses, and that if you don’t like it, don’t let the e-door hit you on the e-butt on the e-way out.

A coworker of mine forwarded this along to me today, and it was really inspirational. I love it when technology, an idea that probably got laughed at, and a little effort can give a big middle finger to the forces of oppression…

Most people have heard that China maintains the Golden Shield, a state firewall run in order to censor unapproved websites from the Chinese people, and to survey who is trying to access them.

Picidae is trying to change all that, with a very interesting, and relatively simple idea.

• A person in China surfs to a website run off of a pici-server — a computer running Mac OS X, which is outside of the Golden Shield. The URL to the server could be found by talking to someone outside of China, by word of mouth, etc.
  • There’s a whole network of these, and the network can be grown by adding an inexpensive new computer anywhere in the world, so it would be nearly impossible and massively labor intensive to Shield them all
  • The individual servers do not know that any other servers exist, nor does the main organizer keep a list, so literally anyone, anywhere could be running one of these, and there’s no away to find it.
• That website has a simple text box and a button.
• The person enters the website they want to see, that may be censored.
• The page, locally on their computer, encrypts the URL so snooping eyes can’t see what they are requesting.
• The pici-server decrypts the data, surfs to the requested website, and generates a single image of it — one huge JPG. It also looks where links are, and maps those areas of the image to be clickable, linking back to the pici-server. It’s called an ImageMap, and has been around forever…
• The image and its maps are sent back to the person — nothing incriminating other than a JPG image that the firewall can’t read…
• The person reads the information off of the image, clicks an area of the ImageMap, and the cycle continues

Here’s a link to the main site.

Here’s how it works.

Here’s what the user in China will experience. I tried it on this blog and it looked identical - you’d never know unless you looked at the code behind the page…

Obviously content shown in Flash (Flex) or any other dynamic content (Javascript, AJAX, video, etc) will not work on this type of network, but hey, a big fat hole in censorship in a great thing.  It also looks really easy to set up your website to proxy to a server or to use your webspace as a server if you’re so inclined — you can even use your Mac to run the server over your cable or DSL connection!

Adobe Max just happened in Chicago this week. I couldn’t go and drink the Kool-Aid, but it was nice of some people to videotape the sneak peeks a the upcoming features of Flash.

I never was a Flash guy - I just couldn’t get my head around the timelines, keyframes, and setting up tweens and such. It was too scattered for me. Looks like some of the new features will help this. But…

Peter Elst posted videos to his blog showing most of the features in development. All of these are cool in some fashion or another, but the author- and runtime- inverse kinematics shown at the end of the Flash Next video is really cool, and is the foundation (that I was missing) of an idea I had a long time ago that should, if my estimates are correct, make me a multi-millionaire.

Sweet. Stay tuned for more at a much later date…

Oh, and the Seam Carving demo is still really cool. You just can’t beat stuff like that.

Just testing my ability to post to the blog via email. That way I
can send text messages from the truck during the trip…

I like to think I’m a guy in touch with technology.

I’m a programming, developing, web designing, apple using, Tivo-using, web surfing, VCR clock setting kind of a guy. New things come down the line, and I’m in like I’ve used them all my life.

Except this new service from my bank. We use USAA for our banking (Patty’s dad was in the Navy, so we can). They released a service called “Deposit@Home” that answered my only real gripe about our accounts there.

USAA has no brick and mortar banks, and no ATMs. They refund any ATM fees you incur, which is nice, but depositing checks has always been a little odd. You can mail them the checks and a deposit slip, but it takes a while for them to get there, and there’s something odd about endorsing checks and putting them in the good ol’ US Mail.

This new Deposit@Home thig is really slick, technology-wise. I log into my account on the USAA website, click a link, and it runs a little app that lets me use my scanner to scan in and crop images of the front and back of the check.

A second or two of “Please Wait” crunching and boom! Money’s in the account. PLEASE VOID AND SHRED YOUR CHECK.

Let me type that again.

PLEASE VOID AND SHRED YOUR CHECK

I understand how the system works. A check is no different than an image of a check — the little routing numbers in the weird font are there, and the endorsement signatures get compared if a problem arises. I see how it works, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to SHREDDING THE CHECK.

Have you ever put a check for $497.38 into a shredder? That little part of our brains that we share with newts and frogs chimes in and says “Um… no…”

I scanned in my checks. I saw the money in the account — no holds… no processing delays… but I still waited 3 days to shred the checks, and I went to my account every day while waiting just to make sure they didn’t say “Oops, just kidding”.

I guess its the thought of destroying money… or I’m getting too old for these newfangled whippersnapper technologies.

It’s still pretty freaking cool, tho.

Here I am on the blog world. Geek out, baby.

Hope this makes your day, shelbert.