Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
programming

 
In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface.

Lukas Mathis, Gestures from Ignore the Code

Possible solution: use complex gestures only as shortcuts:

Instead of forcing people to learn complex gestures, such gestures could be offered as optional shortcuts, offering quicker access to certain features for those people who are willing to learn the gestures.

An example of this can be seen on the iPhone, when deleting an element in a list view. You can either touch the «Edit» button to activate the «Edit list» mode, which allows you to delete list entries. Or you can swipe across an individual entry and delete it this way; the gesture is not obvious, but this doesn’t matter since it is not the primary way of deleting list entries, but merely a shortcut.

Gestures may be harder to discover than elements of a GUI, but they are also a lot more fun to discover. In time, as we internalize all the potential ways that we are able to touch interfaces, complex gestures will become more easily discoverable.

Auto Smiley is the latest F.A.T. project by Theo Watson. It’s a little app that runs in the background while you work. It analyzes your face and each time it detects a smiley, it adds a smiley :) to the front most application.

I would like a lie-detector application that lets you know whether or not the person who just IM’d you a “:-)” or “hahaha” is actually smiling or laughing. See also: semantics of laughter.

(via today and tomorrow)

My opinion of the olympics is generally in line with @joehewitt, who tweeted: “All hail the power of marketing convincing people they need to suddenly care about these obscure, dull sports once every 2 years.”

But, at the closing ceremony of the winter olympics, 20 giant “Zygote” touch-responsive glowing bouncy balls—based on open-source software—were released into the crowd. How cool is that?

Flyfire

Imagine a small flying object with a multicolored light source, flying along with others, controlled in synchrony, creating a free-form display with animated light control…

Jonathan Harris on Cool Hunting

(Thanks, Jenny!)

Good software makes images that are too slick. It’s hard to get good software to make smudgy, jagged, off-color stuff. Purebred imagery is predictable. Artists often make junk and crazy mistakes but it’s a process of trial and error that leads to new styles. Good software and professional skills is a toxic combination that gets everything right the first time and inevitably leads to the best fractals — a dead end.
Tim Hodkinson — Art from Pushing Buttons and Turning Dials (via bdif)

The Generative Manifesto (Curiously enough written by hand)

  1. Attention to detail that only hand made generate work can allow. (You can go depper into structures using code.)

  2. Realtime output and compositional control, we hate to wait. (It is inconceivable to expect nonrealtime systems to exhibit signs of life.)

  3. Construct and explore new sonic environments with echoes from our own. (Art reflects human narrative, code reflects human activity.)

  4. Open process, opens minds, we have nothing to hide. (Code is unambiguous, it can never hide behind obscurity. We seek to abolish obscurity in the arts.)

  5. Only use software applications written by ourselves. Software dictates output, we dictate software. (Authorship cannot be granted to those who have not authored!)

See also, these two definitions of generative art:

Generative art is a term given to work which stems from concentrating on the processes involved in producing an artwork, usually (although not strictly) automated by the use of a machine or computer, or by using mathematic or pragmatic instructions to define the rules by which such artworks are executed.
— Adrian Ward

and

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.
— Philip Galanter

Got a projector this afternoon and tried playing with the Processing app I put together to take notes about music on an animated timeline.

My projector was stuck low to the ground inside a heavy A/V cart, however I realized it would be ideal to have the projector on the ceiling and pointing down at a table to be able to work horizontally. Drawing on a perpendicular surface fairly low to the ground was no fun. Also, I’d like a jog wheel so I can quickly scrub back and forth.

I kept getting the feeling, as I was drawing, that it wasn’t that revolutionary to have a vertical line and time code scrolling across my page. But once I shut the projector off I realized how much richer the simple animation had made my note-taking experience. I feel like having the soundline was incredibly helpful for understanding the structure of the song (see those thick black lines? they represent different acts in the piece. look how differently they are proportioned!), but as always I wish I was at this point a week ago to see where I could take this into the realm of color, rather than just sort-of-random marker scribbles.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is translating a piece of music into a color relationship, but I’m having trouble unpacking the dense composition.

I was looking for a specific musical analysis tool that I wanted to use today but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to take a shot at building it for myself. It’s a super-simple Processing app (tentatively given the imaginative title of “soundline”) that augments note-taking for time-based media.

How it works

  1. Tape a blank piece of paper to the wall.
  2. Set up a projector to project the soundline interface onto your sheet of paper.
  3. Select the audio that you wish to work with.
  4. Press play, listen, and start taking notes or doodling as the projected line and timecode scan from left to right, in sync with the exact duration of the song.

Why use it?

  • Imagine that the paper represents the song as a timeline from the start (on the left) to the finish (on the right). The soundline helps you place your notes and doodles in the linear context of the song.
  • Want to remember a specific musical transition or recurring pattern? It’s easy and totally painless to capture the tiniest details and then return to them later. Simply make a dot or hatch mark on the page and write or draw a short reminder. When you want to return to this point to study it further, just use your computer to scrub through the song until the soundline is touching the mark. Hit play and observe your notes in sync with the sound.
  • Write, draw, paint, use different colors, paste stickers, draw connections, use graph paper. The possibilities are endless.
  • If something isn’t specifically related to a point on the timeline, nothing is arbitrarily stopping you from noting it anywhere you want at any time.
  • The simple animation transforms your blank piece of paper into a time-based notepad that allows for densely layered, unobtrusive, and organized annotating, second-by-second.

The concept is sort of like Muji’s brilliant Chronotebook, a daily planner with a clock in the center of each page, allowing you to make radial time-based notes about the day:

In fact, maybe a radial interface would be another good experiment! I’m going to actually play with this tomorrow and see if it helps me understand the song.

The algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

Once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Wired Magazine (via Zeldman)

Fascinating piece in Wired about Demand Media, a company that is paying freelancers at most $20 for the creation of low-quality how-to content and running it lucratively against Google ads. By next year they will be producing one million pieces of content a year at a cost of $200 million, a fraction of what the NYT pays their journalists.

The most interesting part is that they’re, in a way, legally gaming Google by determining what to write about algorithmically, based on what people are searching for, how high they can appear in search results, and how much the ads will generate over the lifetime of the article.