It has come to my attention that potential employers may end up at this site. While my recent posts are rather telling of my opinions of touch technology, they don’t do much to sell my skills or other technical knowledge.

The about me page now features a projects section which acts as a portfolio to highlight the projects that I’ve been a part of that are related to my technical skills. Take a look to see what kind of shenanigans I get myself into on my spare time and through school.

Touch technology has its place in consumer products, but shouldn’t just be used because its new and exciting. A couple of weeks back I highlighted some concerns over the use of touch technology in cars. Since then I had the opportunity to attend the Interior Design Show 2010 in Toronto. While I was there I spent time looking over various household appliances and thinking about their usability. What concerned me is that sometimes the technology in these appliances, while very cool, didn’t actually suit the needs of the user.

Take for example, a stove I saw with touch controls. This stove had an attractive glossy black surface, with touch sensitive areas seamlessly built into the surface. It looked very elegant, however I was immediately concerned about the usability of such a stove. The first scenario that came to mind was the user groping around for controls while trying to cook a difficult dish. It’s not difficult to imagine that the user might burn themselves by touching part of the element because there is no tactile or visual indication of where the touch-controlled area ends and the element begins.

Similarily in the comments of my pseudo-review of the new MyFord Touch dashboard, Jon and I discussed the issue of having these touch sensitive buttons in place of traditional dials and push buttons. The old input methods worked for years because they’re easy for the user to find when their attention is required on the road, and using them provides tactile feedback – be it the physical turning of the dial, or the depression of the button when you press it. Touch buttons and sliders will not lend the same convenience.

But now, an example of touch technology done correctly. A colleague showed me this video for the Delta touch faucet using Delta’s Touch₂O technology – a faucet that can be activated by a touch from the user. The purpose of the touch control is highlighted in the video below.

The video highlights how a user with dirty hands can tap the faucet with their wrist to activate the water – preventing the mess from spreading onto the faucet’s handle. A lot of the usual concerns about touch technology don’t apply to this situation. Since the faucet only preforms one action “turn on the water”, the user will not have to search for the correct button or area to touch. Additionally, it’s easy to tell if the action worked – the water will be there, or it won’t. Another piece of convenience of this product is that the traditional controls still work alongside this new fancy one, so that the user can make the transition to using the new feature easily.

If more industries can work on thinking of creative ways to use touch technology instead of trying to work them into already existing systems, I think that we’ll see more applications of touch technology that won’t aggravate or inconvenience the user.

Source: Smart Solutions: Touch₂O @ Delta Faucet’s Website
Source: Delta touch faucet, infinitely better than a pump handle @ dvice
Video: Delta Faucet “Hands” TV Ad @ Youtube

A while back Ford and Microsoft partnered up to create Ford SYNC, which is based on Microsoft Auto. SYNC is essentially a really cool in-car computer which provided integration for many phones and media players through in-vehicle voice control, the steering wheel or the radio controls. I’ve been wanting a computer in my car for a long time, chief reason among them is the ability to listen to music from my cloud-music site of choice, the Hype Machine. I was hoping for a touchscreen display in place of the radio, however the hardware part of SYNC equipped cars failed to impress me.

It seems though, that while I was off dreaming of the future, Ford decided that the future is now. At this year’s CES, Ford showed off its expansions on sync, as well as their new MyFord prototype. The MyFord prototype featured a single, giant, Volkswagen-esque speedometer, with a digital display on either side. As Engadget points out in their coverage of MyFord at CES, the kicker of the whole MyFord setup is the 8-inch touchscreen display in place of traditional radio controls. This is where SYNC will display information, and allows for a slew of features – including 3G/4G connectivity, and an in-car browser.

Ford didn’t just limit their news to hardware, as they announced what they’re calling the “Sync App Ecosystem”, which will allow smartphone apps to easily hook into a SYNC API. They also announced increased support for different mobile phones, including Android, iPhone, Palm, and Blackberry. This approach is useful because it won’t introduce yet another “app store” for you to have to buy apps from. Ideally, the developers of your existing apps on your Smartphone will just push out updates that include SYNC support, and voila! SYNC integration for everyone.

Alas, these announcements were not without some drawbacks. While the browser was by far my favourite announcement, as it would allow Hype Machine use on the go like I mentioned earlier, Ford’s has decided for safety concerns, the browser will be disabled while the car is moving. A good idea if you want to prevent drivers from reading the news or watching Youtube while they’re driving – however what about the passenger? Why can’t they use the browser? Ideally, they should be able to, without distracting the driver. Additionally, this means no Hype Machine support either – as there is still no mobile phone application for the site – even though they teased one for the iPhone back in October 2008. Even then, who knows if Flash support would be enabled.

On the hardware side of things, in what I assume is an effort to make operating the rest of the vehicle seem like operating the 8-inch touchscreen, they’ve removed traditional buttons and replaced them with touch sensitive areas. While this seems good, I can garuntee that lack of tactile feedback will not be appreciated – if for nothing else than that you won’t be able to fumble around with the controls until you feel the button you’re looking for. In fact, you’ll probably end up writing a tweet, listing yourself as “its complicated” on Facebook, and changing the radio station 8 times before you finally feel your way to the button you’re looking for. This sort of defeats the purpose of trying to create a user interface that doesn’t require the driver to take their attention off the road.

Overall I find this a much more promising development in the area of having computers in cars than the initial launch of SYNC. The new hardware opens up a lot of opportunities for developers to get in there through mobile phone apps and have a presence in vehicle. Hopefully the whole situation with browser-lock can be alleviated somehow, and the tactile feedback won’t be as much of an issue as I’m expecting it to be. Additional technical features, pictures, videos, and Engadget’s thoughts can be read in the source links.

Source: Engadget – MyFord dash and Sync App Ecosystem hands-on

Over the last four months of 2009, I had the privilege of being part of the Linux Experiment – a four month period where me and some of my colleagues from school switched to Linux as our primary computing environment to test if we could move away from using windows. While the results were varied, I’ve now decided that I’d like to keep my online presence going.

There was a lot of technical stuff I discovered during the experiment, but not all of it was related to Linux so I couldn’t post it on the blog. Since some of my friends from the experiment have been using their blogs to post about their interests in technology and other related fields [check the links at the bottom of the page], I decided to re-purpose this blog yet again.

Part of re-purposing this blog has been getting a new theme. It turned out to be a fairly technical process, so I’ve decided I’ll chronicle the experience here – so that if nothing else I’ll remember all the steps required next time I do something like this. Let me just say that I’m kinda familiar with the workings of WordPress, but I’ve never made my own theme from scratch. All the theme tweaking I did for this blog was through trial and error, some PHP experience from dabbling and two courses I took in University, a general knack for all things technical and some Photoshop skills I picked up in highschool.

Lets start with my motivation. At first I wanted a light coloured blog, so that this site would have an air of professionalism to it. However, anyone who knows me probably knows that I really like pretty things. In fact, I like them far too much to go for the stark professional look for something as personal as my own website. On top of that, where is the fun in using some pre-canned theme? This blog is suppose to reflect me and my interests. After some searching I eventually found this theme called Pixel. I liked the layout and the visual effects, but the background just wasn’t really me.

Being the Photoshop connoisseur that I am, I decided I’d take a look at the theme and see if I could take a swing at changing it to suit my tastes. As I stated above, I’ve been exposed to WordPress before, and have tweaked themes in the past – but its all self taught by diving in and looking at what makes the guts of WordPress work. I hardly ever consult documentation about these things, which might be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it!

Recently I’ve been in love with this wallpaper I found on interfaceLIFT of the orion nebula. I decided to use that photo as the base for my blog’s theme. After downloading both the wallpaper and the theme, I started digging around. I went into the images folder of the Pixel theme and looked to see what combination of images was used to create the look. It turns out the entire background including the frosted header, the black category header, and the translucent overlay for the body of the blog was one image that is centered and set as the background image of the site with horizontal and vertical repetition disabled. This works nicely because this image fades to black on all edges, so a solid black background causes the whole site to look fluid.

In order to create a new version of the theme visually, all I had to do is replace this image with one of my own! Sounds easy right? No? Yeah probably not. I’ve a friend who I taught Photoshop to, and while he’s good – the idea of doing something like this seemed impossible to him. He watched me do some of the steps I’m about to detail and informed me that it was “really cool” and he would have had “no clue how to edit a theme like that”. The tricky part, is that I had no idea what I was doing when I started either. I just dove in and tried my best to create something new.

I started by creating a new PSD with the original background image as the background. I then recreated the regions of the image on individual layers. These regions were:

• The header strip – The rectangle with the blog name / description
• The category strip – Contains a link to the home of the blog / the post categories
• The body of the blog – Contains the posts / pages of the blog
• The background – Contains… everything!

All the first three layers contained was a white rectangle outlining the regions. The background layer I left blank for now. The category strip presented an interesting challenge as there were rounded corners, but I busted out the handy pen tool to create a nice rounded curve which I turned into a selection region and removed from the rectangle. After that I threw in the orion nebula image in the background, overtop of the existing background. I now had an interesting choice of what colours to make these regions. I toyed with white, black, and other colours from my chosen background image.

I ended up making the header and category strips one of the bright pinkish-purple colours from the orion nebula image, but changed the opacity so they’d be slightly see-through. The body I made black, but lowered the opacity on it as well. I then created a copy of the body layer, changed the opacity back to full, deleted the black, and created a transparent to black gradient from the top to the bottom.

This allowed for the image to blend into an all black background, so that I didn’t need to use more images to create the look of the blog. The header I replaced with a black to pinkish-purple to black gradient, so that it blended into back on the left and right sides. After throwing some white borders on the bottom of the header layer, around the category layer, and down the sides of the body layer I was almost done. I faded some of the white borders to black so they’d blend properly [just using my eraser tool at a really low opacity]. To finish up, I placed a solid black layer beneath all the layers except the original background and erased the edges of the orion nebula image so it also blended into black. After all this work, I had the base for my new look!

Sometime soon, I’ll post about some of the CSS tweaks I had to make, the layout changes I made, and the custom logo I designed!

I was reading up on Adam Schwabe’s blog [who is a friend of a friend of mine] and found a link to the site cookthink. It basically takes keywords of things you’re craving and provides you with recipes that might be to your fancy. After throwing in “cajun chicken” I was greeted with some interesting gumbo and jambalaya recipes.

Its a very interesting idea, and as Adam points out – it uses a tag cloud to present options to the user incase they can’t quite but their finger tongue on what they’re craving. Its already got my mouth watering even more for some cajun, alas I’m lacking with ingredients.

A powerful use I see this site being used for is to find recipes when you’ve got a few ingredients floating in the fridge. Combining leftovers has provided me with greatness before, but using real recipes is usually a safer bet.

Original Post: What Are You Craving

Cookthink beta

Need virtual desktops on vista? I posted over on Bus error some solutions I found for this.

I found two solutions, neither of which really did what I wanted to – but they’re useful none the less: VirtuaWin and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager. Both are open source, the former on sourceforge, the later on codeplex.

Check them out, and follow the jump for the full article + download links.
Original Post: Virtual desktop solutions for Vista

This post discusses tools that can, but are not designed to, aid copyright infringement. Leaving aside potential legal issues, this post is intended to serve an educational purpose and merely describes already available services and software.

A few days back my friend Jake posted an article about the state of downloading music in a post-LimeWire age. Over the years, there have been a few ways that people have gone about getting music from the internet, the most popular being:

• Napster
• Morpheus
• Kazaa
• LimeWire
• BitTorrent
• The iTunes Store [and its ilk]

Jake mentions another alternative – newsgroups. Its a viable option, but most people don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee for content. Another up and coming site, especially for electronic music is Beatport. Lots of artists are putting their songs up on this site, and the prices aren’t too bad.

A big question now is, where do you find new music? Thanks to the explosion in social networking sites like Facebook and sharing sites like Youtube, there are new methods of finding your music. There are a few websites that allow you to stream audio at any time, but you can’t download it. The bonus is these sites are not like LAUNCHcast or even Last.FM radio – you still get to choose what you listen to.

Some of the best sites for this are:

The Hype Machine: “The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.”¹ It also provides links to the iTunes Store and AmazonMP3 to purchase the music. The Hype Machine is unique when compared to the other services listed here because it indexes new music much faster than the others, and if you’re looking for a brand new track, you’re most likely to find it on the Hype Machine.

Imeem: I don ‘t use the service, but it seems like users are allowed to post MP3’s, videos, make playlists, and all other sorts of goodies. This site seems to focus on a lot of the social aspect of sharing.

Skreemr: Like Google for .mp3 files. It scours the web for MP3s and then provides an interface to listen to them, a link to the site that hosts the files, as well as a link to Amazon for the song.

iLike: The most commercial of the listings here, this site looks at your existing tastes and recommends artists to you, much like Last.fm. However, I’ve noticed there seems to be a much higher quantity of full songs on iLike than Last.fm. iLike also focuses a lot on the social aspect of sharing.

The best part about all of these services, in my opinion, is the ability to listen to your music right away. No downloading required [unless you want to, in some cases], you just press play and you’re good. I actually use the Hype Machine more often than I use iTunes now, because there’s no hastle and I can listen to it on any computer, not just on my personal machine.

Have you tried any of these services out? Let me know in the comments.

From http://hypem.com/about¹