|
Insight, Information and Inspiration on women's careers, business, technology and the Industry.
|
|
|
There are numerous resources online where you can learn how how to program or become a better developer. One great resource that I came across recently was Google Code University.
The website provides tutorials and sample course content including lecture slides and problem sets for a variety of topic areas including
- AJAX
- Distributed Systems
- Web Security
- Languages
And best of all, it is all FREE!
 Many of us are still clamoring on the Web 2.0 bandwagon while other interaction designers are plowing ahead to tackle new ways to share and interact with data. Sure, wikis and folksonomies are awesome, but information challenges are piling up, and a designer’s work is never done. In fact, that’s what makes our line of work so darn interesting—not to mention valuable to companies.
A while back after attending the Future of Web Design conference, I blogged about what Web 3.0 might look like. While my speculations were high level, a recent article entitled User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload in Read Write Web showcases information challenges that are starting to rear their ugly yet beautiful heads.
Each scenario in the post includes a description of the interface, a hint at new information challenges, and a clip from YouTube to show off the technology. Below are examples of the types of interfaces and new design challenges that are ahead.
Giant touch screens
Touch screens assume, well, touch. So how do users interact when items are out of reach?
Desktops that mimic the ordered chaos of a physical desktop
If we’re mimicking physical space, a pile of documents should get displaced or should react as another document collides with it. How do we allow users to create both tidy and untidy piles?
Thought-controlled menus
A thought-controlled interface might be hard to imagine, though we already have thought-controlled artificial limbs that react solely to nerves controlled by your brain, so why not an interface?
3-D gaming
The article shows the impact moving from 2-D to 3-D can have on even the simplest gaming interfaces.
Very cool stuff. Check out the full article: User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload
If you thinking of moving your career and/or business into a new place, check out Forbes’ Top 10 Up-And-Coming Tech Cities list.
Where will the next Silicon Valley spring up? Philip Auerswald, professor of public policy at George Mason University, surveyed regional innovation trends across the U.S. and came up with a list of up-and-coming tech centers.
Auerswald surveyed specific pockets of science–including advanced materials, nano-crystals and quantum dots, polymers and plastics, micro-systems and cell microbiology–that most experts consider today’s most promising frontiers of innovation.
Borrowing a method devised by Anthony Breitzman, a researcher at 1790 Analytics, an intellectual-property valuation firm, Auerswald then looked for important relationships among patents within each general technical area. The most important patents are generally referenced by other inventors in the field when they file for their own patents; lesser patents garner fewer citations. The greater the increase in the number of important patents in a given city, the higher it ranked on Auerswald’s list.
Here is the top ten list of cities. Click on each city to read why they are the up-and-coming tech city.
Continue Reading “Top 10 Up-And-Coming Tech Cities”
The National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT) published podcast interviews about women entrepreneurs in information technology (IT) careers.
The women profiled so far are:
- Lucy Sanders, CEO and Co-founder, NCWIT
- Helen Greiner, Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, iRobot Corp
- Elaine Wherry, Co-founder, meebo.com
- Sangita Verma, Founder and CEO, TAG Networks
- Elizabeth Charnock, CEO and founder, Cataphora
Listen and learn from these great role models…how they first got into technology, why they chose to be entrepreneurs, and what advice they would give to young people interested in IT or entrepreneurship.
Recently someone asked a great question on the Interaction Design Association’s discussion list: What music do you listen to while you design? Over the next few days, designers of all ages chimed in. Though some said they like it quiet and others commented that they were usually stuck listening to the sales guy’s phone calls, there was a strong, recurring theme: While we’re working with our ear buds in, we designers have background noise we don’t have to pay attention to to understand.
For example, many people said they listen to classical, jazz, electronic, and world music in other languages (like the Plutomayo series). Others said they let their iPod shuffle through very familiar songs. New music was off limits to most (though some people cited online college radio stations known for new indie music). To be fair, there was a punk streak, a little NPR, and a handful of nods to Rammstein. A wise soul acknowledged it’s nice to break from designing and play a little acoustic guitar. Even though hip-hop soars in the charts, it was mentioned only as a side note that people turn to when they’re in a certain mood.
One after another, people piped up about their favorite spots online to get endless streams of custom music on demand. Here are some cyber-music suggestions that came up in that discussion that I wanted to share with the Webgrrls community to keep you designing to the beat.
This site has canned channels or lets you build your own. They even have an Irish channel for St. Patrick’s Day. One cool feature is that you can put in an artist and it will tell you what radio stations play them.
The best feature on finetune is their widget that lets you put play lists on your blog. They say that “it’s the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.”
Continue Reading “Online Music to Help You Design”
« Previous Page — Next Page »
|
|
|
