Bildr and graduation

Now that school is over and “all” I have to do now is take care of graduation/ go to interviews in NYC, I figured I would start on a proof of concept for Bildr. I installed a visual editor and syntax hi-liter on mediawiki. The first thing I did was to get rid of the horrible look on the visual editor but it was sadly harder than it should have been.

Because so much of bildr is about easing the contribution process and enabling people to post and edit code easily I really need to get this working well. Right now, it does anything but. I will get there though.

I have a ton of plans for what I want to do, but I’m swamped right now with all the stuff happening for my graduation.

So much for a week off.

Video of wikipedia redesign

Here is a 2min video that showcases some of my thesis project. (redesign of wikipedia). This is a composite video, so most of it is fake, but it was a good way to show what a user might go through when using it, and how I feel I was able to engage users more, and get them to contribute and a micro level.

The video currently does not have audio. It really needs it, and it will soon have it. I just need to record it.

Think about it

I went out to california for an interview for a job that I sadly didn’t get. But I’m back now, and I will be done with school in 6 days. Im still trying to figure out what it is I want to do, and trying to make a plan for the next 2.5 years.

But something I made for my thesis presentation I wanted to share. Wikipedia houses over 2.7 million articles. That’s a lot we all know. But even with many of the articles being smaller than something found in Britannica, it still amounts to a ton. How much? Taking into consideration the word count in the 32 volume Britannica, wikipedia would be…

Thesis update – color

Awhile back I was talking about how, everything on Wikipedia being built and confirmed around peer-review and editing, the oldest content (having the most review) has the highest probability of being correct, and the newest content (little review) has the highest probability of being incorrect or even spam. Then a few posts ago, I used this idea to show how it could be used to the benefit of the users. But what might it look like if we took this to the extreme and color coded all the content based on its age?

For that, just look below. This is all done with javascript/ css, so it can be easily be toggled on and off, and exclude or include text.

New prototype – and life

I have been working on a new prototype for my thesis. I had mentioned this idea before, and have been looking at it for a bit now. I have a semi functioning prototype here (please dont judge my code, it was just really quick (and 99% of it is taken from wikipedia)). I know it works in safari and firefox, I really doubt it works in IE, but as it is only needed so that I can record people using it, it really doesn’t matter. Just figured you might want to check it out. This is really playing with showing off the idea of the living article. This isn’t the article on Mao, this is the article on Mao as of 2 hours ago, maybe even 3min ago. So how can we engage users and let them know this while at the same time get more people to contribute/ peer edit the information quicker. More peer review means better articles and less false information.

I was going to go into jobs and how much I am loving Espresso, but I have to get more work done. I will at some point talk about these things, and maybe some day talk about what ever happened to my multi-touch table… Maybe

Update of the week

Matt Cottam of Tellart has been my self appointed mentor/friend for over a year now, but recently I have been working on a project with him that can be seen in the video below. It is a really simple concept, but thinks kept getting the way. The hall sensor is a 5v chip, and the board is 3.3v so I just added a 5v step-up board. However, that required too much power so i had to solder it directly to the battery terminals. Well, then I had a problem where the hall sensor we are using also required it be reset after being powered up. So the power to it turns on then cuts off for a second when booting up. The piezo-electric buzzer was also to quiet at first, but I found that by putting a small magnet on the back of it they became much louder. This all seems to work now, but it was a trip getting everything to work as one.

Job update: I won’t say who they are, but I have interviewed with a few places now, and some things seem like they are going pretty well. Im not sure where I will end up after school as of now, but it will be fun finding out. I have also been contacting other places just incase, but on a few of them, I was just told that they are not hiring this year.

I know a while ago I talked about my wood block project. It didnt die, just put on hold. I have CNC (thanks Zack) two of them so far, and I hope before graduation I will have 6 done. Here is the starting of one of them. (pics and video)

Media Lab {Update}

Just got back from vacation last night.

I just got my letter from the Media Lab an hour ago…………….. Sadly… No go.

This just in —> Im now on the job market!

Usability testing, analog digital, and more

Just to start things off here is an orientation sensor that I soldered some 32AWG wire onto. It broke.. I accidentally pulled off on of the chip’s pads. So I bought another one. I put epoxy around it so It wouldn’t break again. Yeah… that worked. Until I broke it again. (trying to trim the epoxy) No more. Im waiting for a breakout board for this guy till I try again.

But what would I be using this for? Besides screwing around like I like to do. Well I have been working on (mainly drawing and order parts for) a set of new projects. They are all part of a family of single interaction blocks. They are blocks of wood that output information in some analog way in response to one thing.

For instance one of them has a nice old analog meter on it that just responds to sound. One has a circle of LEDs that all follow a magnet. One that shows your distance. One that glows based on how far your hand is over it. One that glows the color of anything put on top of it. I think there will be 7-10 of them in all. But they will be beautiful blocks of finished maple wood. So anyways, one of them was going to use this chip. I guess it will have to wait.

This past week I gave my first presentation on my thesis thus far. I was scared to give it at first because I didn’t feel like I had a conclusion. But on giving it I realized I shouldn’t have a conclusion this early on, and it went quite well. 

I have been doing usability research this past week, and what I have been finding is quite useful. I have been watching while the users perform a series of tasks on various sites vary similar to what then also need to do on wikipedia. I am not able to help the users, and I ask that the users think aloud so I can understand what they are doing/ looking for, or expected to find during the tasks. So far, all the users have had no, or almost no, trouble doing the tasks on the other sites. However, except for one user who was a wiki admin, the users have been unable to do such tasks such as adding an image and a link to a wiki page.

Bilder now has a homepage, with a logo! It is hand done (marker on mylar), and it gave me a really cool idea. Im thinking that I will enable user submission of hand done logos that will cycle through on the front page. Also, my thesis has really given me a ton of ideas, that if I can pull it off, will make bildr the best wiki I have ever seen.

In the next 3 weeks I will hear back from grad school. I wont lie, im going crazy.

Arduino, Xbee, and me

For my recent birthday Mary was nice enough to get me a gift certificate to sparkfun. So what else could I do… I spent it, and then some), and on new Funnel IO Arduinos, Xbee modules and Lithium-polymer batteries for them. The funnel is amazing. It has a LiPo battery charge chip on it (thorough mini USB) and Xbee socket built in.

Because the Xbees are version 2.5, I didn’t know that you couldn’t use some of the same commands on them. Also, the book I have doesn’t even mention some of the things you need to do. It only took me 12 hours to get it all working. Of course I could do it all in 20min now.

My senior show was this last week. This is the time when everyone shows off all their work from the time they entered their major in a gallery setting. The opening had hundreds of people there, so it got very crammed, but the show was great, but it’s sad it’s over now… I remember every year thinking about that day. I did however buy a suit for the occasion, I figured I will need it for interviews at some point anyways.

My senior thesis in in full swing now. I am redesigning mediawiki from the ground up in the fashion described in Alan Coopers book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. I have started deconstruction every part of the software, and already I can tell you it is in dire need of some interaction design. I’ll keep this updated as I work on it.

Last but not least. I was playing around with Mootools, and I started to think. Tellart, the place I have been interning at redid their website this summer. It was all done in flash, and I actually did a hefty portion of the original code in AS3. I was looking at some effects I am using for my new portfolio site (more on that later) and thought I could redo the Tellart site in JavaScript just to try it out. I was able to do it in under 2 hours (flash site took a week). A lot of that had to do with knowing what needed to be done, but also the face that html elements dont want to overlap. Either way, it is really cool to see it working on my phone.

Idea friday – Finish Sunday

When the Ideas come, they don’t stop. I work up early on friday to get some work done before I went to my last day of my winter internship at Tellart when I came up with an idea. 

One of my sites, TheGiant.org, is home to a community of over 2500 art collectors. It is just over 3 years old, but friday morning I felt compelled to make it possible to allow the members of the forum to keep track of their Shepard Fairey works. My last semester starts tomorrow, so I knew I had to finish it by tonight. 

I got it done faster than I thought I would, and I think it came out better, and having more functionality than I thought it would when I started it. I managed to interface with the existing database to handle users, messaging etc. The add-on allows users to track their owned, selling, and wanted prints, and even allows for privacy settings for each list. Users can also take advantage of the friends feature the site has and set lists as friends only. Each user has a URL can link to, to allow them to see their collection. The site also allows users to search others wanted/selling/trading lists to help each other find the pieces they want.

The entire system was built in an AJAX fashion which actually made it much faster to code the php.

Mootools allowed me to make the interaction of the site much nicer, and give a lot more feedback to the user when things happen, and the MooTools AJAX allowed me to reduce the entire system down to only 3 pages. The layover system I normally use is called SmoothBox, but for what ever reason wouldn’t work inside of MediaWiki (Where the user adds prints to their collection). I figured I’d give it a shot and make one my self. Knowing some tricks in css (full bowser compatible transparency etc) , I was actually able to do it in 3 lines of JavaScript. It surprised me how well it worked, and SmoothBox never worked on the iPhone, but mine did. Maybe Ill write plugin of my own sometime.