Wimbledon Championship is here.  In search for app or service for real time updates about everything tennis at Wimbledon on my Android, I came across IBM Seer. Simply amazing mobile app utilizing maps, geolocation, augmented reality, live video streams, results, restaurants and public transport information. All in all, I think IBM nailed this down perfectly with great UX too. The iOS version is not as advanced as Android one.

I gave a talk about Google UX and “Top 10 UX Gotchas” at London Web Meetup. Here is the video and the presentation.

LONDON WEB – May 2010 – 1st of 2 talks – Google’s Top 10 UX Gotchas from Nathan O'Hanlon on Vimeo.

Top 10 UX Gotchas

UX seems to be everywhere today. Large and small companies are learning the importance of it trough achieving better success if they dedicate more time understanding the user needs.

But personas, wireframes and workflow prototypes are not enough when you start UI implementation. Everything will end up in code, and if that segment of the UX is not taken care of, your hard UX design work might be wasted.

Although, the interactivity and desired visual appearance can be achieved with non-accessible client side output, or at least with screen-reader friendly or ARIA equipped markup, the final experience we are offering for accessibility is still poor and not of much help for users in need.

It is not enough to just read the navigation or page. It might be good enough for a blog or news page with static and linear content, but for web applications, tablet and mobile applications (direction it seems we are heading to) – it just doesn’t work.

We need designed workflows and audio interfaces that offers smooth experience for the users in need. Bombarding the user with audio output by just reading the whole page word by word is totally useless. Closest we should get in desigining and implementing accessible user experience are the traditional telephone bank services  (the best practices, of course, there are some bad ones out there as well). Your markup should be able to offer this alternative layer of accessibility and user experience, you just need to write it with accessible user in mind, or develop alternative audio widgets for your framework.

I visited the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exibition in V&A Museum. It was interesting to see how the artists were consideing screensavers as art like achievement, something old as the first computed math formulae. I was also disappointed with displays considering data visualization as art. Those we really beautiful graphs but not art.

On the other hand there were some really thoughtful creations blurring the borders between the digital and physical worlds. I liked the mirrors reflecring reality using computing to move vintage like mechanical devices. That was well crafted art.

Worth seeing.

Writing, or should I say tracing this post on Android wpToGo app. Since i moved from G1 to N1, only thing I miss is the fast typing physical keyboard. Soft keys are not cutting it for me.

When I say physical, I mean full qwerty keyboard in comfortable landscape model. Small squeezed keys found on some devices are even worse then the soft ones.

But, a friend suggested Swype to me, and I was amazed from the creative approach by the developers, implementing an oldish but valuable IBM research introducing new way of typing by tracing your words on the soft keyboard. Writing the post with this input method I’m more then impressed with its usability. The learning curve is very short, just after writing two tweets you get familiar with it. Word accuracy is excellent, offering choice of suggested words if your trace was a bit crazy.

Small downturn is you have to switch off autosuggestion if you want to type in different language then English. There are many users like myself using English as first language but with need to communicate with second language without switching keyboard layouts, although if your language is supported on the device, Swype offers very easy switch between the available keyboard layouts.

Turning your device to landscape mode will give you an error, but this is still trial version and not official release, so this iI completely forgivable. Having said that, I’m thinking how tracing can be implemented with two thumbs combination when turning the device in landscape mode. I leave that challenge to creative developers of the very usable Swype keyboard.

This input method is also a good accessibility potential. Adding TTS and speaking out selected keys while tracing and speaking out the word to be inserted, can make this keyboard a good companion to apps designed to utilize assisting technology available on the latest Android releases.

Wonder if this method will be used on the much speculated tablet.

The new SVG-Edit 2.4 release candidate, codenamed Arbelos, sports great improvements and brings this web app very close to standard vector graphics editing desktop software like Flash (drawing only) and looks like it will have features like path-finding and FX effects (shadows) found in more mature apps like Illustrator very soon.

This is a quick retro magnetic tape artwork I designed testing the new features. Open it with any modern browser (IE too, if you have Chrome Frame or Google Toolbar installed). Here is a screen-grab with the SVG-Edit and the artwork:

Svg Edit

Almost all features designers need to create vector artwork are there: Layers, Raster Images, Bézier Curves, Transform positioning and re-size with pointer or forms, Arrow keys nudge, Align, Grouping, Transparency… to name a few. Using Flash or SVG-Edit to produce the image above made no difference to me. There are few bugs like; you can’t see gradients when you hit Save, or you can’t start multi-select or resize objects when your pointer is outside the canvas, but this is only alpha release and all this will be fixed soon I believe. Double-clicking to reset Zoom tool to 1:1 ratio or entering curves edit mode is very intuitive. Colour pickers are working good. Maybe live preview missing when you try to fiddle your colours and transparency, but this is minor bug comparing to the great usability the SVG-Edit already achieved with this release.

SVG-Edit Team shows great commitment and I look forward for the new releases. Will be great if they consider adding simple object transitions, animation and JavaScript editor capabilities for developing custom object behavior for advanced users. I really wanted to make those tape reels rotate.

You can learn more and see release notes on the SVG-Edit developer’s YouTube Channel.

Side note: this is also a great implementation of jQuery, the revolutionary JavaScript library.

So, you never have enough time to record a new tune? You have millions ideas in your head and they all go unrecorded because you are not in front of laptop or desktop box with your favorite editing software? If you are lucky enough to have Android Phone with this really simple work-flow you can start capturing your ideas and turn them into songs.

You will need to install only two free apps from the Market, SoundTrail and Robotic Guitarist and with the native Android Music Player you can start composing new songs whenever a new idea strikes you anywhere. You can also use any notepad (my favorite is AK Notepad) to write the lyrics starting to circle around your melodies so you don’t forget them.

Robotic Guitarist

SoundTrail

Start by tuning your guitar with the excellent tuner featured in Robotic Guitarist, or layout few chords in the same app to make your chord base for your new idea, test how it sounds when you are away form your instrument . Robotic Guitarist is offering you all possible guitar chords with option to have 7 chords to play with in same session. Once you have your basic idea, record it with SoundTrail with your guitar, piano or just whistle or sing.

You can play your base in the music player and launch the SoundTrail on top of it. This is one of the great advantages of Android, running up to six apps in the same time and they can all share device I/O sound capabilities. You can’t do this on iPhone yet.

Since you will need some sort of mix/edit software to hear all your separately recorded files/tracks, you can use the excellent and free indabamusic.com collaboration app, to upload your tracks (small downside is you will need to convert AMR SoundTrail file format  in to MP3) and mix them in their free Java based mixing console. Works really well on both Mac and PC. In the same time you can start sharing your ideas with your collaborators and download their takes and mixes on your phone and meditate on top of them in infinite iterations until you are sure you nailed that song down.

You can use all this apps and services for free. Free Indaba account limits you to only six sessions, but that is more then enough for idea capturing. What’s not free is your mobile data plan and of course you will need to end up in pro recording studio to turn your drafts in to everlasting recordings.

Finally registered domain for myself. Welcome to GiiZii.com! All old posts from old blogs are imported here.

The conference is over, and it was a good overview of the state of SVG across many topics: the spec, browser support, JavaScript libraries, IE workarounds and usage in the mobile industry. What I was interested was to see how far is the 1.1 spec implementation in browsers supporting this technology, hacks (SVG Web) to deliver SVG content to IE users and examples of accessibility using SVG.

You can find links to all papers and presentations on the svgopen.org website if you use the Schedule page and click on presentation titles.

The paper I presented, “Rich Media Advertising with SVG and JavaScript“ or “Introducing SVG and HTML5 VIDEO element to the mainstream advertising”, had a good competition from Wikipedia presenting on the other conference track, was well received and few good points were raised by the audience.

Overall, for what I’m interested in, implementing Open Web technologies in advertising, I would say we are still not quite there in terms of browsers implementations and support, but also that is not a reason not to start doing early attempts, start with a bit simpler solutions that could work cross-browser and do preparations for the near future. Not sure how advertising Agencies will adopt something that is not having even alpha versions of tools and software available on the market, but surely we have to start somewhere.

There is no clear and strong signal that any soon IE will have native support for the SVG technology, but I hope it will be a case in near future.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickymontalvo

This was announced just two weeks before the conference start by @bradneuberg. Microsoft is joining IBM as gold sponsor for the SVG Open 2009 – “SVG coming of ege.”, hosted by Google in Mountain View, California 2-4 October. Wow!, what a nice display of big players supporting the event.

What does this mean? Are we finally going to have SVG support for Internet Explorer, or at least they are thinking about it? Even if they decide to do so, what do you think, how long it will take to have IE8 patch released with native SVG support? If they plan to do this, wait is going to be worth while. We alrady have ways around to render SVG in IE thanks to SVG Web, still in alpha though, getting better and better, but native support is best, right?

Personally, I would really like to see Microsoft going in this direction. It is all surreal to me to be true. But hey, they adopted jQuery as JS Library for the new .Net platform, who knows, maybe this guys are really starting to open up. But, I’m not going to get excited unless I see some real signals this is going to happen. Still very sceptical.