Author: Jake

Yesterday, our entire organization, Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps) got a treat. We learned about Oracle’s corporate citizenship from Colleen Cassity, Executive Director of the Oracle Education Foundation (OEF). I’m familiar with Oracle’s philanthropic endeavors, but only vaguely so. I’ve used the corporate giving match, but beyond that, this was all new information. During her presentation,… Read More

While I spent June wrapping up conference season at OHUG and Kscope, Ultan (@ultan), Misha (@mishavaughan) and company (@usableapps) have been busily publishing content. This here is a wrap-up of that content, but let’s be honest. If you like OAUX content, you really should follow the official blogs of OAUX: Usable Apps in the Cloud, VoX, user experience assistance:… Read More

As my wearables odyssey continues, it’s time to document my time with the Fitbit Surge. I ended up wearing the Surge a lot longer than I’d worn the Nike+ Fuelband, the Basis Peak and the Jawbone UP24 because June was a busy month, and I didn’t have time to switch. For comparison’s sake, I suggest you read… Read More

Noel (@noelportugal), Raymond (@yuhuaxie), Mark (@mvilrokx) and I traveled to sunny Hollywood, Florida last week to attend Kscope15 (#kscope15), the annual conference of the Oracle Development Tools User Group (@odtug). Check out some highlights of our week. If you read here, you probably know that this year, Noel had cooked up something new and different… Read More

A busy June is half over now, but we still have miles to go before July. We’ve been busy, which you know if you read here. Raymond went to Boston. Tony, Thao (@thaobnguyen), Ben and I were in Las Vegas at OHUG 15. John and Thao were in Minneapolis the week before that. Oh, and Anthony was… Read More

Not long ago, Ultan (@ultan) wrote about our framework for wearable, and other, devices. We’re calling it Glance to reflect the OAUX glance-scan-commit design philosophy. Noel (@noelportugal) produced a video highlighting Glance on several smartwatches as well as in the car, on Android Auto. It’s pretty sweet. Check it out: Glance has been in the works for more… Read More

Lots going on here in AppsLab land and in Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps). This here is a recap post. Showing the Oracle Applications User Experience Roadmap to Oracle’s Asia Partners At the beginning of May, Anthony (@anthonyslai) and Raymond joined a large contingent of the OAUX team in an two-stop tour of Asia. The… Read More

After three weeks with the Nike+ Fuelband and four weeks with the Basis Peak, I moved on to the Jawbone UP24. The UP24 has been out for quite a while now. Back in January 2014, Noel (@noelportugal) and Luis (@lsgaleana) did cursory evaluation, and not much has changed in the Jawbone lineup since then. At least,… Read More

And now back to the Apple Watch content. If you’ve read here for a while, you might remember we used to be part of the WebCenter development team, and we worked with Oracle Social Network, affectionately OSN. We even ran a developer challenge for OSN at OpenWorld back in 2012. Yesterday, longtime friend of the… Read More

Ho hum, Apple released a Watch on Friday. I haven’t see this kind of nerd frenzy since Google Glass finally reached its first Explorers. The Watch has transcended nerd-only fandom to reach regular people’s consciousness too, e.g. when I wore the Basis Peak, several people asked if it was *the* Watch. Well, Noel (@noelportugal) and… Read More

Speaking of strategies, Misha (@mishavaughan) asked me to write up an article–not a post, there’s a difference–describing how this team goes about its business, i.e. researching, designing and developing solutions for the emerging technologies that will affect our users in the near and not-so-near future. You can, and should, read the resulting article over at the… Read More

So, apparently Apple is launching a watch soon, which has people asking us, i.e. Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps), what our strategy is for the watch of watches. If you read here, you probably already know we’ve been looking at smart watches, super watches, and wearables of all kinds for a few years. So, the strategy is already in… Read More

The kid in me loves this behemoth so very much, h/t to Kottke. This rail refresher is a Swietelsky RU 800-S. There are lots of videos showing this dream machine at work.

Right after I finished wearing the Nike+ Fuelband for three weeks, I moved straight on to another wearable device, the Basis Peak. The Peak falls into a category Ultan (@ultan, @usableapps) calls the “super watch,” a term that nicely differentiates watches like the Peak (and the Fitbit Surge) from fitness bands (e.g. Jawbone UP24, Nike+ Fuelband,… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s a review of the Fitbit Surge from Ultan (@ultan, @usableapps); if anyone can road-test a fitness tracker, it’s him. As luck would have it, the Surge is on my list of wearables to test as well. So, watch this space for a comparison review from a much less active person. Enjoy. I’ve upgraded… Read More

I’m currently in Washington D.C. at Oracle HCM World. It’s been a busy conference; on Wednesday, Thao and Ben ran a brainstorming session on wearables as part of the HCM product strategy council’s day of activities. Then yesterday, the dynamic duo ran a focus group around emerging technologies and their impact on HCM, specifically wearables and Internet… Read More

For those of you who enjoy our content via the feed (thank you), I have news. Next week, I’ll be changing the feed’s name, so if you want to continue to receive AppsLab goodness in your feed reader of choice or in your inbox, you’ll need to come back here and subscribe again. Or maybe it’s… Read More

Here come some rapid fire tidbits about upcoming and recently past Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps) events. Events of the Near Past Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) team (@InnovateOracle) has been organizing events focused around stimulating and fostering innovation for quite some time now. I’ve always been a big fan of group-think-and-work exercises, e.g. design jams, hackathons, ShipIts,… Read More

I don’t like wearing stuff on my wrist, but in my ongoing quest to learn more about the wearables our users wear, I have embarked on a journey. For science! And for better living through math, a.k.a. the quantified self. And because I’ll be at HCM World later this month talking about wearables, and because wearables… Read More

A couple days ago, I was preparing to show some development work Luis (@lsgaleana) did for Android Wear using the Samsung Gear Live. One of the interesting problems we’ve encountered lately is projecting our device work onto larger screens to show to an audience. I know, bit of a first world problem, which is why I said… Read More