EagerEyes Shorts

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:41:30 -0400

Words cannot describe the brilliance of this photo. The shallow...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:22:00 -0400

Words cannot describe the brilliance of this photo. The shallow depth of field and the stuff around her make it look like they photographed her Barbie, not herself.

NYTimes, Snooki’s Time

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:11:01 -0400

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrenbon Fried Digger Dangle Dungle Burstein von Knacker Thrasher Apple Banger Horowitz Ticolensic Grander Knotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kürstlich Himbleeisen Bahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nürnburger Bratwustle Gerspurten mit Zweimache Luber Hundsfut Gumberaber Shönendanker Kalbsfleisch Mittler Raucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, composer.

This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently....

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:53:29 -0400

This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently. It describes a technique for interacting with parallel coordinates using the multi-touch trackpad found on laptops like Apple’s MacBook Pro.

It’s a lot better if you watch it in HD on the vimeo site.

Making a Pecha Kucha Timing Video

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:26:46 -0400

For my presentation at Pecha Kucha Night Charlotte, Volume 6, I was looking for a way to keep the timing (20 seconds per slide). I also need to see at least my current slide to know what I’m talking about. When I give talks or lecture in class, I always use the presenter view, so I can also see the next slide.

There are some iPhone timer apps for Pecha Kucha, but they’re very basic: they simply show you the number of the current slide and how much time you have left as a number. I wanted something a bit more visual than that.

So I decided to create a video from my presentation that would show me the current slide and an indication how much time I had left. I added 19 little boxes to each slide, each of which would disappear a second after the previous one. This is what that looks like on the title slide:

The boxes have a 2px white border so they are also visible on a dark background. Depending on the colors in your presentation, you might want to adapt that. But black and white work pretty much everywhere.

Exporting the video took a bit of experimentation. It seems that Keynote gets a little confused when there are automatic slide transitions and you want to create a video: it ends up adding the time for the export transition to the slide timing. So remove the slide timer and then export with a 1-second delay and 1 second for the transition (it won’t allow smaller values, and somehow that, together with the 19 timed boxes, ends up being exactly the right timing).

One issue is that exporting with the Full Quality setting creates a video that has a bit rate that is too high for the iPhone. So you can either use the CD-ROM Movie, Medium setting, which gives you only 400x300 pixels (which is workable, it’s just not very pretty). Or you can export using the higher-quality setting, which is 800x600, and then reduce the bit rate later. I used Stomp for this purpose, but there are lots of other choices. I reduced the bit rate to 125kbps and the frame rate to 10 (still way more than necessary).

This may sound tedious, but even with some experimenting, it didn’t take very long. And having my current slide and a usable timer in front of me was tremendously helpful during my presentation. The video was also useful to scrub through on the phone a few times right before the presentation, to remind me of the order and think through the things I wanted to say.

thedailywhat: Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not...

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:35:24 -0400

thedailywhat:

Sign Of The Times of the Day: Pump’s Are Not Taking Debit Card’s? Thats a Hell ov a Inconvenius.

[reddit.]

Two kids working at bloom recently asked me for help with spelling the word “inconvenience,” which they needed for a sign. Between the two of them and Word’s spellchecker, they couldn’t figure it out. They had to ask me, whose native language is not English, for help.

A New Villain For A New Millennium

Fri, 14 May 2010 14:11:00 -0400

A New Villain For A New Millennium:

We always need someone to hate. Until recently, for many of us that was Bill Gates. But now that he’s fighting Malaria and curing AIDS, that gets more difficult to do.

So we put up an ad to find someone new who would fit the bill. The ideal candidate

makes a wildly successful product we come to depend on,
does things with it we don’t like
abuses his power, and
is a recluse, sociopath, or both.

Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg has stepped up to the plate.

chartier:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

roomthily: The Insipid World of Infographics via Cool...

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:26:00 -0400

roomthily:

The Insipid World of Infographics

via Cool Infographics

Edit: this was apparently created by Will Lybrand

My Summer Reading List

Thu, 13 May 2010 23:39:53 -0400

By popular demand, here’s my list of books to read in the summer. Not sure yet about the order, but this is the rough plan:

Stephen Few, Now You See It
Fred Brooks, The Design of Design
James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Kaiser Fung, Numbers Rule Your World
Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?
Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart

Since I’m notorious for starting books an never finishing them, I am instituting the rule that I can only read one book at a time, and have to finish one book before I start the next. Let’s see how this goes.

After all the criticism of bad and pointless infographics,...

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:34:00 -0400

After all the criticism of bad and pointless infographics, here’s a really good one for a change. It explains how a cell phone call works, how the network is set up, and even illustrates some very technical points like code-division multiple access (CDMA).

From Cellphones.org. That site also has a few other interesting infographics.

Boxcar: Introducing Boxcar Streaming

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:13:00 -0400

Boxcar: Introducing Boxcar Streaming:

Boxcar is very awesome. It pushes notifications about Twitter mentions and retweets, and using its simple API, I can have my server push messages to me (it can also push messages about other things, like emails that arrive). That’s even better than a twitter bot, because I don’t have to even have twitter open to get the message.

Being able to tap into the stream on other devices is a great idea, and will make it even more useful.

Affectionately nicknamed the ‘farm’, we’re pleased to introduce real time access to your own Boxcar notifications.

View the documentation here. We’ve created a sample Ruby implementation over on Github.

This is a technology preview for developers.

"A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer...."

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:19:18 -0400

“A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.”

- From Wired’s story on the guy who found and sold the 4G iPhone to Gizmodo, Brian Hogan. He seems to be blaming Gizmodo for leading him to believe that selling it (or “giving them access”) was okay. This is going to get pretty ugly if it goes to court – and it looks like it will.

This is an almost completely nonsensical...

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:24:22 -0400

This is an almost completely nonsensical “infographic” about Apple’s iPad. It’s a collection of random facts, many of them represented in the wrong way (see the pie chart on app prices, for example). It’s no wonder people are getting weary of the flood of infographics. Many of them are like this: good-looking but devoid of any content.

Shame on you, businessinsider.

In related news, see my posting on the Visualization Cargo Cult.

This image of the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:01:00 -0400

This image of the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter looks like it’s straight out of Star Trek: the Dark Matter is Condensing and About to Attack the Enterprise.

But apart from that, it’s actually not a great image. It uses the rainbow colormap, and it seems to only convey limited information. Is the distance really all that important? Do they have an image showing amount of mass, but it’s not as pretty? What about the data they used to calculate this, I bet that’s much more interesting than where on an image of the sky the dark matter can be found.

New Year's Resolution

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:49:45 -0400

Neven Mrgan thinks the next iPhone might have the same screen resolution as the iPad:

Unless, of course, Apple comes out with an iPad-resolution iPhone.

On a slightly larger screen that the current one, this would call for the crazy PPI of 341 (the current one is 163). The Droid, by the way, is 267, which I also would’ve called crazy a year or two ago.

I don’t know if a 340-PPI display is possible, affordable, or necessary. What I know is that it would let developers take their newly iPad-ified apps and move them to the iPad a bit easier; I don’t mean literally, since adjustments would still have to be made to account for the general form factor of the device. But it would be a little easier than developing for a completely different resolution.

It’s not going to happen, though, for three reasons:

Resolution. Even if the next iPhone was the same resolution as the iPad, that would not save developers much time. At the same pixel size, controls would be much, much smaller, so a different UI would still be necessary for the two devices. Apple has introduced a few new UI elements for the iPad, and it’s doubtful that many of them will be available on the iPhone. That is not a question of pixels, though, but a question of usability and fitting the UI to the device. Scaling iPhone design elements up may look clunky, but at least it’ll be usable. Scaling iPad stuff down will be unusable.
Form factor. The iPhone’s aspect ratio is 3:2, while the iPad is 4:3. This makes sense for the different devices because they are used in different ways. A phone that is mostly held in a portrait orientation needs to be longer so it can show more data and can show the keyboard plus a reasonable amount of text. The iPad is a very different beast that would look oddly long at that aspect ratio. Changing the resolution is one thing, but changing the aspect ratio is quite another. While I don’t doubt that we’ll see an increase in resolution (if not this year, then next), they’re not going to change the aspect ratio of the device.
Horsepower. All those pixels need to be filled with content. This is already an issue with the Nexus One, which feels slow because it can’t push all those pixels around fast enough. And its screen is still a far cry from 1024x768. The horsepower to drive that many pixels will not be feasible in a phone form factor (and power envelope to keep battery life acceptable) for years.

So while it is quite likely that we will see an increase in screen resolution in the next iPhone, it’s a safe bet to assume something closer to 480x720 or thereabouts, not something crazy like 1024x768.

MineShow

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Mike Wirth asked me to submit up to five pieces of work to an art/design show he was organizing, called MineShow. The idea was to get work that 12 Charlotte-area designers had done on their own, rather than for somebody else.

The show opened last night at Queens University in Charlotte, NC, and will be open until April 9, 2010.

Three of the pieces I submitted were accepted: the U.S. ZIPScribble Map, the iTunes 10 Billion Downloads Visualization, and a screenshot from the Parallel Sets program showing the Titanic dataset.

There was quite a bit of interest in the visualizations, particularly the ZIPScribble Map and the Parallel Sets. I had been a bit unsure how these visualizations would stack up next to the more artistic work, but they actually fit in quite well.

It was fascinating to watch people explain to each other what they were seeing. There were usually small groups of people there looking at the images together.

Of course, the other pieces were highly interesting too. They also tended to be framed much better than mine and usually quite a bit larger. I’m still learning. But it was a great experience, and I hope to have this opportunity again.

Keep Your Org-Chart to Yourself!

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:05:30 -0500

I was looking for Kaiser Fung’s Numbers Rule Your World on Amazon, and saw that there was no Kindle version. So I figured I’d check with the publisher, McGraw-Hill, if there was perhaps some other kind of e-book (like O’Reilly has for most of its titles).

Googling for the name McGraw-Hill took me to their Corporate Website, which has a convenient little search box in the upper right. So I typed in the title, but only got bogus results. Nothing seemed to match the full title, and the pages were all generic corporate-style stuff.

Turns out there’s a little drop-down box on that search results/refinement page where you can select what you want to search. It defaults to McGraw-Hill Corporate, but it has options like Books and Educational Products. And lo and behold, of course it finds the book once I tell it to search for books.

But why does it search the corporate site first? Isn’t it more likely that people will want to search for your products, rather than your press releases or investor info? You have a lot more customers than investors, so why does your search default to boring corporate stuff?

It’s not that there is an additional step involved here that I can’t be bothered with, it’s the attitude. I don’t care about your org chart or your subsidiaries or whatever. I want information, fast. I want the website that comes up when I search for your name to make sense to 90% of the people. How can you put so much effort into a website and not think about who the visitors are and what they’re looking for?

This is similar to HP’s “license plate” URLs, and I’ve seen IBM do the same (though they seem to have stopped doing it). Don’t tell me your internal structure or your server names. Don’t tell me what you think is important; I don’t care. I care about the stuff that’s important to me. I want a simple URL, I want relevant information.

Is that really too much to ask?

These scans from the Ninth U.S. Census 1870 are truly...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:09:41 -0500

These scans from the Ninth U.S. Census 1870 are truly fascinating. Check out the fiscal chart on page 35, the population pyramids on pages 40 and 41, the death charts on pages 45-46, and the disabilities on pages 49ff (including “insanity” and “idiocy”). There are also a few more treemap-like pages like the one above.

Incredible to think that all of these were done long before computers, by hand. The number crunching alone must have been a huge task, and then drawing these charts and transferring them onto plates for printing. Wow.

(via robertogreco)

fuckyeahinfo: datavis: Why does a salad cost mmore than a Big...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:24:38 -0500

fuckyeahinfo:

datavis:

Why does a salad cost mmore than a Big Mac?

It’s a good cause, but the chart badly distorts the data. See my recent March Chart Madness criticism roundup for an explanation (it’s about 2/3 down the page).

Interesting idea by Sam Loman: the human body as a subway map....

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:25:01 -0500

Interesting idea by Sam Loman: the human body as a subway map. Blood vessels, nerves, digestive system, etc.