designbivouac

iPad, meet Hypercard

Clearly folks are hungry for a way to leverage Apple's newest mix of technology and artistry to CREATE as well as consume content. Dale Dougherty makes a case for the fact that the iPad could benefit from the equivalent of yesteryear's highly accessible Hypercard programming environment. Such synergy would allow a broader range of folks, beyond application developers, to create and shape content in rich new ways.Applications like A Story Before Bed portent the power of a new wave of multimedia content creation. However, developer's applications force users to work within the limits of the application rather than leverage a more free-form, powerful, yet still accessible creation environment. Even the Newton OS eventually got a version of HyperCard called NewtCard. Perhaps a little old school content creation, the kind that moves beyond making playlists, photo albums and email, mixed in with the latest delightful wave of technology is in the cards. Only time will tell.

Pure Visual Searching Goodness

Keen to add a visual element or some serendipity to your web searching? Try oskope.

The Big Questions

Designers begin by asking questions. It’s how we address some of the biggest, most complex challenges facing people and organizations today. This year, in keeping with the 2008 TED conference theme, IDEO posed a series of questions to TED attendees. Broad-ranging and widely relevant, these queries represent themes that inspire and inform our work at IDEO.

What's your big question? Visit www.ideobigquestions.com to contribute or download the nifty widget to keep big questions top of mind.

Your Design Here

Ever need to visualize branding or design work in context? With LiveSurface images, you can place your designs within layered photoshop files containing images of spaces or objects.

To learn more about LiveSurface visit: www.livesurface.com

Flagr Sharewhere

Flagr allows users to flag notable locations, upload photos and start collaborative commentaries about places. Spots can be flagged from a mobile phone as well.

Visit flagr.com and get flaggin'.

Motorcyclists, why not add your favorite spots to the Motorcycle Locales map while you are at it.

Simply Captivating

Ever wish you could cleanly capture those particularly lengthy web pages? Well, Paparazzi is a simple little freeware application that will let you snap away to your heart's content. Thanks for the heads up goes to the always informative Graham Hicks.

Now That Takes Me Back

Ever find yourself feeling nostalgic about something you saw long ago on the web? Well, thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive you may be travel back in time with "The Way Back" tool. You can visit many cached versions of sites dating back more than a decade in some cases. With millions of new pages coming on line every day, thankfully, someone is writing all this internet stuff down...or at least backing it up on servers somewhere.

Special thanks to the "Way Back Machine" for the trip down memory lane. While you are there, why not take a peek at what Yahoo! was up to back in 1996? Greatgooglymoogly!

Technical Evolution Map

Ever wonder how Postscript came into being or what ever happened to Lisa...or the Atari ST for that matter?

Answers can be found by following the interactive chart co-authored by John Redant and Bruce Damer

Layers

Keep up with the latest updates, features and tutorial videos via Layers: The How-To Guide for Everything Adobe.

Opera 8.52 Features

The Opera 8.52 browser has some nice features. It supports a "Small screen" viewing mode that simulates how web pages may appear on mobile devices with small displays. The browser also makes assists those with disabilities through its "Author" vs. "User" viewing modes. In the "User" mode, the browser strips away CSS styles and substitutes user text style preferences. There is also a "No images" button that turns off images. This provides an easy way to make sure all your images have appropriate alt text associated with them which is something important to keep in mind when designing for accessibility.

Visual Complexity Made Simple

Well, at least finding inspiring examples of ways to visualize complex information is easier thanks to www.visualcomplexity.com. The site does a nice job of capturing many excellent information visualization approaches all in one place.

AT&T's Text to Speech Generator

Need spoken word prompts in your interface? Check out AT&T's Text to Speech Generator. English, Spanish, German, French, and UK English dialects are supported and the interface quickly converts what you type into a QuickTime file.

Check out AT&T's Text to Speech interface.

Interaction Design Defined...Interactively

A colleague within the interaction design community recently pointed out this new entry in the Wikipedia for interaction design.

Take a look at the Wikipedia definition for interaction design

An Empathetic Eye Towards Color Blindness

The bivouac recently benefited from a greater understanding of some of the nuances associated with color blindness. VisCheck allows users to enter a URL of a web page they wish to view in the same way as those with one of the three variants of color blindness would see the pages. Users can also choose to apply the VisCheck color blindness simulation to specific images. This kind of application can go a long way towards helping us understand one another better...and towards possibly avoiding some dangerous interface decisions that can be made without paying proper attention to color blindness issues.