From Brick to Click – Bridging the Divide 5/7: Providing Immediate Gratification

“(…) there are some scenarios, products and situations that eCommerce providers realistically will not be able to match traditional stores on. But in many cases, by re-framing the problem and innovating solutions that are thoughtfully engineered for the needs and desires of our customers, we can not only make our personal eBusinesses prosperous, but completely re-define categories and change what people are buying, and how.” (Dirk Knemeyer – Thread, Inc.)

Education for IA: Talking Heads and That D-Word Again!

“If you consider the subject only to be concerned with organizing websites, then it is pretty clear that a master’s degree in the topic may be overkill, and a course or two within a more general program will probably suffice to get you on the path. But if, like me, you think of IA as a more encompassing effort aimed at understanding how information can be organized and presented for human and organizational use, both within and beyond websites, and addressing issues of performance effectiveness and efficiency, user satisfaction, sustainability and indeed aesthetic response to a resource, then a degree program looks to be more like a minimum requirement to get started.” (Andrew Dillon – ASIS&T Bulletin Feb. 2004)

Don Norman on Emotion Design (IT Conversation)

“Don Norman used to be known as a critic of unusable things but now, he says, he has changed. He has transformed himself into an advocate for pleasurable, enjoyable products. Beauty is good, says Norman. Successful products should a pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self, of accomplishment, and pride of ownership. In this keynote address, Norman shares work from his latest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.” (IT Conversations) – courtesy of ben hyde

The Visual Language of PowerPoint: Q&A with Bob Horn

“Are we at the verge of the creation of a new global verbal-visual language? In 1998 political scientist and Stanford scholar Robert Horn released ‘Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century’, a ‘must-read’ for anyone who communicates with words and images, and an important roadmap for any serious PowerPoint practitioner.” (Cliff AtkinsonSociable Media) – courtesy of ben hyde

segusoLand: Screenshots and tutorial

“(..) a program for GNU/linux that enables users to specify any kind of action in a very uniform way, with an artificial intelligence that aids you while you are composing the action, by showing you only the relevant options. segusoLand features a completely new user interaction paradigm called ‘reciprocal list narrowing’. You won’t find it anywhere else. Some people would call segusoLand a ‘desktop environment’, some a ‘file manager”, some a “start menu’ … it is difficult to classify it because it is quite innovative.” (Maurizio Colucci – segusoLand) – courtesy of nooface

Component Technology and Modeling Support in UML for Developers

“In this article, a try has been made to see CBD from a developer’s perspective. We shall see that support does exist in terms of modeling the CBD process, but the level of support differs significantly at different stages of the process. We will see how UML supports a service-based architecture and what sorts of model it provides for the different people in the development team. We try to explore the different models provided by UML to analyze, design and implement the Component-Based systems and see what sort of support do they provide for the different levels in development process.” (Amjad Bashir – Journal of Conceptual Modeling)

Abstract identifiers, intertextual reference and a computational basis for recordkeeping

“This paper presents three proposals concerning the structure and maintenance of formal, inter–referential, digitally stored texts: (1) include abstract atomic identifiers in texts, (2) identify these identifiers with references to text objects, and (3) keep among the texts records of computationally substantiated claims about those texts. We use ‘formal’ in a narrow sense approximating computer–checkable; we are informed by informal symbolic practices used in mathematical text and program source text, which we hope to enhance and exploit explicitly. The basic management problem is how to alter texts rather freely without ruining the bases for claims depending upon them; this becomes an issue of accounting for various dependencies between texts.” (Stuart Frazier Allen – FirstMonday 9.2)