Bits and Posts and the world

To the regular visitors of this site, you might have noticed that I haven't post much in the last couple of years; now that doesn't mean that I haven't remain active getting my thoughts out 140 characters at a time and sometimes, once or twice, in a bigger sort of form. 

It just happens that during this time I was pretty much heads down on my research, and thru that, I started playing around with analyzing and sharing what I found, rather than sharing what I made - somehow when you are down with research, creating is neglected to the final act and that's what I can of did here as well.

If you were subscribed to my rss feed nothing changed, as the feeds were aggregated long ago, but if you were not, then now you can do so by getting all things samiq in one place.

Samiq's Posts is where my sharing live, and here, Samiq's Bits, is where the things I create, the things I find through experimentation and some other things worth of a bigger space will find their space.

I hope that as you join me in this journey, you'd get to learn a thing or two, smile at times and contradict at best, at the end of the day these are just some bits of samiq.

cheers and be happy!

G.

On Apple, HTML5 and the "open web"

If you are a developer - at least a web or mobile one - you probably have heard the news on Apple's latest HTML5 show case and how cool their demos are... and cool they are. But there is something that stroke me the most and that was the dialog I got when I tried to see the demos from my Google Chrome browser (see image above).

If indeed this were the future of open web then why do I need to download a proprietary browser to see how the open web looks like? or, why can't I use my browser of choice (Chrome) which also is developed on top Safari's same HTML5-friendly layout engine and which, by the way, is more actively developed than Safari itself?

As mozilla veteran Mike Shaver points out

lots of -webkit- stuff in there, from my quick view sourcing; webmonkey has the article about it.

The open web is about openness and freedom of choice, Internet Explorer has it's own showcase ( a bigger one if you care to look ) and it works just fine with other browsers, even when it was put together to showcase the goodness on the preview build of IE9.

If Apple indeed wants to fight the fight against Flash and proprietary plugins it has to do so from an stand of true openness and support for true standards, -webkit- stuff is not standard and what it creates is nothing more than the next generation Internet Explorer 6.

There is a reason why HTML5 is not finished yet and until that happens we as developers have to be careful not to bend to corporations whims if what we stand for and what we choose to support is openness.

There is a long way to go in this story but we as developers have the power to stop or support things from happening. What will be your stand?

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

Today I came along with Steve Krug's latest work on Usability, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and have to say I couldn't wait a minute before placing an order for it.

This probably is one of the best investments you can do for your team (on top of his first book) and I'm sure it will pay back enormously within moments of putting it in practice.

I'm a fan of Steve Krug and ever since I read his first book I knew I had to dig a bit more about Usability and Human Factors... hence here me in grad studies on it.

Usability is not something one should leave aside, or something you do just before shipping a product... usability should be part of the process, should be what drives product creation.

It's us as designers and technologists who are ever more responsible of the user's productivity than any other craftsmanship before... we make what they use and what they use more (hopefully) and it should be our main goal to make them feel empowered in their experience.

Stop reading this and go ahead and get the book and if you haven't started thinking about how people interact and uses your product then it's about time you start.

It ain't easy to start investing on the right stuff, but you will find out that in the minimal things can reside that feature that will make the difference in your product or website... and by doing some you will find out you make your customers happy!

So long Mossy... I still ow u a beer!

Today the news broke public that Scott is leaving Microsoft as of November 1st, so this post is to say thanks for all and good bye. Microsoft is loosing a great piece in their chess game, I hope they will keep a list of his rants and points and keep making the Interactive world a better place to be.

---

I meet Scott first because of our relationship with the Rich Internet Application world, he had recently switch to Microsoft from a long standing career in the Adobe front and who better than him to put the dots in the i's for what Microsoft needed to do in order to move the whole Silverlight wagon forward and create a community around it.

Scott doesn't get scared easily and with full commitment to his position he started pushing the boundaries to make Silverlight a better place to be among all RIA technologies out there. He was vocal and he was loud, something Microsoft was in need if they wanted to make a change in the way we build experiences.

Fast forward a year in and a lot of emails back and forward and there I was in his office in Redmond discussing the future of Silverlight, what needed to get done and how, we were even putting code together past 2am just to make our point into how some feature or other should be modeled.

Scott backed up things that in an house of engineers will otherwise will be let out unseen. He knew the business and he knew that in order for Silverlight to make it, it'd had to be something other than just pretty C# & XAML code behind.

We as a creative industry are loosing a voice inside the interactive team that fought the battles not a lot of people knew they were facing, Microsoft has done a lot of good things to improve but it's still far from finished and venturing in a field like creative, they need creative people like Scott reminding them that things are not only strings of 1 and 0s but rather a rainbow of colors.

Now, we as an industry are gaining quite a loud voice to partner with. Scott will now be able to be vocal about the industry itself and put his hands to work to help other companies succeed with great experiences. Pushing the pins from the wild and with no front other than the community and its business.

I'm sure he leaves behind a lot of battles that have resulted in things we now give for granted and I'm sure there will be more results to come. There are still people in the house that will pick up those fights.

Dude, as I told you not that long ago... you fight great for us here behind the wheel and now your job at Microsoft is done... time to move up and look forward to more awesomeness from Oz.

Cheers,

G.

Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. & the future of multi touch experiences

Even though the Microsoft Surface has been around from conference hall to conference hall showing up how cool their technology is for the last few years, I haven’t been able to see one single implementation in a large scale where this really interesting interaction medium is at the front of the experience.

Now, I know the piece only went live last October at PDC and that its near $12000 price tag ain’t a really accessible price, but… remembering the day I first lay hands on one in Schematic’s LA office back in 2007, there were a myriad of opportunities flashing thru me mind on stuff that would be possible once this toy hit mainstream; yet I’m still waiting.

What if there could be a way were we could take these experiences a little bit further? I know my friends at Identity Mine, VectorForm and my buddy of whacks Rick Barraza at Cynergy Systems, have been able to take it a little further, creating really cool demos of their own… but what if we could all make it into something engaging? Something that will make us remain interested after 10min of using it… something that transcend the feeling of “just a demo”.

We as experience designers are as responsible for engaging our audiences, as the medium we use to deliver them is. The Nintendo Wii showed us that you don’t need fancy graphics and 3D life-like experiences to entertain us for hours. The iPhone and iPod Touch brought gestures and natural  interaction to regular non-tech savvy people, lacking features even the cheapest phones had at the time.

Today I saw Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. teaser, and that’s when I saw there is a compelling future for table top experiences out there.

It might not be available today… but it serves as inspiration for the stuff we might have to ship tomorrow.

Enjoy!

G.

The Universal Desktop is Out

Today Ryan Stewart wrote his last post over at ZDNet and with that the Universal Desktop, the all-things-RIA from ZDNet, stops it’s publishing.

Sad!

I am sad of this happening, with the RIA space sparkling in its foundations, rather than loosing spaces for covering their experiences, they should be evolving and growing with the industry.

On the other hand, I know that since Ryan joined Adobe, a couple of years ago, it has been difficult for him to keep his blog up to what it used to be, even when he did his best at it - When you are traveling around the world evangelizing one of the many technologies you’d to cover, time is at its best not your friend. But buddy, you will be missed!

Heck I even started this thing blogging after reading his blog and getting all hipped from this new cool thing named RIAs and after I meet him, I found on him a really cool buddy and an awesome professional.

Now RIAs are going at its mainstream, and as Ryan says new niches have been created base on the different front empowering them. Guys like the ones at O’Reilly’s InsideRIA even when trying their best, are still kind of an Inside-Adobe, as most of what they cover are Adobe based techs. We are missing a broader view.

We are missing one person or group of persons who can help the rest of the world see the RIA space for what it is. For their players as kind competitors trying to do their best with faults and gains. At analyzing upfront for all those companies and persons looking for their next rich platform to build upon.

I remember talking about this with both softies and adobe’s in several occasions, still no one has step out to this world.

Hopefully ZDNet will be able to help close the void Ryan leaves, and rather than empowering pissing contests on what platform is better at it, we could get true insight to the world of RIA, which now more than ever before, this game is truly getting Universal.

Good luck buddy and keep up the great work at Adobe ;-)

Cheers,

G.

MIX 09 Sessions Video Podcast RSS for iPod & Zune Available Here

Even though I couldn’t assist to MIX this year - I’m stocked in South Korea pursuing my Master’s in HCI - I have been watching on-line some of the sessions that caught my attention from the conference, specially those on User Experience.

Just as previous years, Microsoft did a terrific job at making most of this year’s sessions available on the web within the first 24 hours from them happening, and for people like me, between that and twitter, it felt almost like been there in person – of course, if staying late at night in the Lab with no beers IS like been there - but you get what I mean.

Sadly, though, just as last year, there was no friendly way to get access to ALL of the session’s videos in batch (alas RSS) - and no the RSS feed from the sessions page doesn’t give access to ALL of videos – or if on the other hand, a way existed where there were an RSS feed who aggregated all, iTunes (my preferred way to Podcasts) only displays the latest 50 episodes of a show, which is nowhere convenient either.

So thanks to Mike Swanson who posted a friendly list to click and choose videos from the sessions, a few minutes with Excel, LINQ and C#. Here I give you the RSS feeds (divided in chunks of 50 items per feed) to the MIX videos that have been made available until now.

So, go get your preferred Podcast software to point to this babies, lay back, relax and wait for your videos to download.

Now, who said there were not a convenient way to get the Mix conference with you on your device?!

Enjoy!

Zune*:
RSS for the first 50, second 50, and the remained 19.


iPod*:
RSS for the first 50 and the rest 11.


*Disclaimer: As per Mike’s post there are 119 videos available in Zune format and 61 in MP4 format, so be aware of that when looking for your session of choice and you don’t find it, it might be because it’s not in the list yet. Cheers!