Maybe you remember Busytown, Richard Scarry’s famous town, from your childhood or from reading it to your kids. Tony Ruth has created the Silicon Valley equivalent, BusinessTown, (h/t The Verge) populated by the archetypes we all know and sometimes love. What do the inhabitants of BusinessTown do? “What Value-Creating Winners Do All Day,” natch. Who’s up… Read More
Mash up Oracle Cloud Application Web Services with Web APIs and HTML5 APIs
No more an “honorary” but now a full-blown member of the AppsLab team, I gave a presentation at the Chicago & Dubai Oracle Usability Advisory Board in November on REST and Web APIs and how they can facilitate the transition from on-premise software to cloud-based solutions (the content of which can be fodder for a future post). As we all… Read More
Editor’s note: John and Noel (@noelportugal) need to chat about Google’s Physical Web gBeacons. I have been a tad skeptical about the usefulness of smart watches, but my colleague Julia Blyumen has changed my thinking. In her recent blog post, Julia noted that a smart watch could become both a detector and a universal remote… Read More
Julia’s recent post about her experiences with the Samsung Gear watches triggered a lively conversation here at the AppsLab. I’m going to share my response here and sprinkle in some of Julia’s replies. I’ll also make a separate post about the interesting paper she referenced. Dear Julia, You embraced the idea of the smart watch as… Read More
An Interaction Designer’s Perspective: Samsung Gear vs. Samsung Gear Live
Editor’s note: In January of 2014, our team held a wearables summit of sorts, test-driving five popular watches, fitness bands and head-mounted displays to collect experiential evidence of each form factor, initial experience, device software and ecosystem and development capabilities. Julia drew the original Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, and she’s been using it ever since. A few… Read More
Editor’s Note: Noel did it! After competing in 2013 and 2014, he broke through and won a prize at the annual AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon (@attdeveloper). Congrats to the whole team. This year, Anthony (@anthonyslai), Raymond, Osvaldo (@vaini11a), Luis (@lsgaleana), Tony and I (@noelportugal) participated in the AT&T Developer Summit & Hackathon. From the beginning… Read More
Here Are Your First Links of 2015
Our team has been busy since the New Year, competing in the AT&T Developer Summit hackathon, which is Noel’s (@noelportugal) Everest, i.e. he tries to climb it every year, see 2013 and 2014. If you follow our Twitter (@theappslab) or Facebook page, you might have seen the teaser. If not, here it is: Look for… Read More
Another Echo Hack from Noel
Noel (@noelportugal) spent a lot of time during his holidays geeking out with his latest toy, Amazon Echo. Check out his initial review and his lights hack. For a guy whose name means Christmas, seems it was a logical leap to use Alexa to control his Christmas tree lights too. Let’s take a minute to shame Noel… Read More
Chromecast Guest Mode Rules
If you read here regularly, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of the Google Chromecast. It’s helped me cut the cable, I gave it as a Christmas gift two years in a row (to different people), I have several in my home, and I carry one in my laptop bag to stream content on the… Read More
Noel’s Amazon Echo Hack
Noel (@noelportugal) is one of a handful of early adopters to get his hands on the Amazon Echo, Amazon’s in-home personal assistant, and being the curious, hacker that he is, of course he used an unpublished API to bend Alexa, that’s the Echo’s personality, to his will. Video, because it happened: And look, Noel’s hack got picked… Read More
Our Week at UKOUG
Earlier this month, Noel (@noelportugal) and I (@joybot12) represented the AppsLab crew at the UKOUG Apps 14 and Tech 14 conferences in Liverpool. I conducted customer feedback sessions with users who fit the “c-level executive” user profile, to collect feedback on some of our new interactive data visualizations. Unfortunately, I can’t share any of these design concepts just… Read More
Update: I now “hacked” the API to control Hue Lights and initiate a phone call with Twilio. Check here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r58ERvxT0qM Last November Amazon announced a new kind of device. Part speaker, part personal assistant and it called it Amazon Echo. If you saw the announcement you might have also see their quirky infomercial. The parodies came… Read More
Back in the early 90s I ventured into virtual reality and was sick for a whole day afterwards. We have since learned that people become queazy when their visual systems and vestibular systems get out of sync. You have to get the visual response lag below a certain threshold. It’s a very challenging technical problem which… Read More
Magical Links for a Tuesday in December
It’s difficult to make a link post seem interesting. Anyway, I have some nuggets from the Applications User Experience desk plus bonus robot video because it’s Tuesday. Back to Basics. Helping You Phrase that Alta UI versus UX Question Always entertaining bloke and longtime Friend of the ‘Lab, Ultan (@ultan) answers a question we get a… Read More
About Proofs and Stories, in 4 Parts
Editor’s note: Here’s another new post from a new team member. Shortly after the ‘Lab expanded to include research and design, I attended a workshop on visualizations hosted by a couple of our new team members, Joyce, John and Julia. The event was excellent. John and Julia have done an enormous amount of critical thinking… Read More
Happy Thanksgiving
Editor’s note: Here’s a first post from one of our new team members, Thao Nguyen (@thaobnguyen), who runs our Emerging Interactions team, the Research and Design part of the R, D & D. That last D is Development if that’s unclear. Anyway, like Thao says, Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate it, and for those who don’t… Read More
Look What We Made
As a team-building activity for our newly merged team of research, design and development, someone, who probably wishes to remain nameless, organized a glass mosaic and welding extravaganza at The Crucible in Oakland. We split into two teams, one MIG welding, the other glass breaking, and here’s the result. All-in-all an interesting and entertaining activity.… Read More
From Concept to Code
Editor’s note: Here’s a repost of a wonderful write-up of an event we did a couple weeks ago, courtesy of Friend of the ‘Lab Karen Scipi (@KarenScipi). What Karen doesn’t mention is that she organized, managed and ran the event herself. Additional props to Ultan (@ultan) on the idea side, including the naming, Sandra Lee (@SandraLee0415)… Read More
This year some of us at the AppsLab attended the Samsung Developer Conference aka #SDC2014. Last year it was Samsung’s first attempt and we were also there. The quality and caliber of presentations increased tenfold from last year. Frankly, Samsung is doing it really hard to resist to join their ecosystem. Here are some of… Read More
Editorial Note: This is a guest post by friend of the ‘Lab and colleague DJ Ursal. Also be sure to check out our Hackathon entry here: EchoUser (@EchoUser), in partnership with SpaceGAMBIT, Maui Makers, the Minor Planet Center, NASA, the SETI Institute, and Further by Design, hosted an Asteroid Hackathon. The event was in response to… Read More