These days everybody seems to be crazy about building iPhone apps, but what if I told you that you could do widgets and small apps for Sony Bravia TV sets. It’s true. Apparently recent models fo these TV sets come with a small OS that can handle small apps (1,3 Mb max.) such as widgets for weather, time, RSS and even webbrowisng if connected to the internet through its ethernet port.
Sony Japan has released a Bravia App SDK for those developer interested in bringing interaction to the TV. Most of the info seems to be in Japanese, though. I wish they opened it to the rest of the world so we could build a light TV version of Planetaki :)
It left me thinking about its application to an online service of say… dating. Most of todays online dating websites are based on browsing or searching. In fact it’s a combination of the two, since it’s some sort of filtering (gender, age, location, etc.). But no one, or at least no one that I know, has implemented an online dating system based on recommendations: “Javier, I know you so much I bet this girl is definitely a good match for you”.
I am sooo thinking about it these days.
This will be Vostok‘s next project.
Yeah!
Sam couldn’t stand it and made a Ubiquity command for Planetaki, so it’s easier to add websites to a planet from the website itself. Plain simple, just type
Youtube’s ActiveSharing seems to me like a failed attempt (another one!) to kick the social and sharing side of their website. This is how they explain it:
Are you a video trendsetter, an expert at finding the cool stuff on YouTube? Now you can share what you find immediately by Active Sharing with other YouTube users.
Click the “Start Active Sharing” button, then go watch some videos. Your username will show up on the page of the videos as you watch them, and a list of the latest ones you’ve seen will appear in your profile.
I don’t think that such a small feature deserves so much explanation, activation and even a name (ActiveSharing). It could be because Youtube guys want to feature something that will be surrounded by a bunch of other confusing features. I think that removing some functionality would be a better strategy than adding more stuff to the mess.
My suggestion if you want to share videos with your friends is to use Unvlog, especially now that it has an English version. Way clearer, simpler, smarter, nicer and to the point.
This is Orange-Cosmo (technical name: UniPo, Cosmo Knots-Series 3), one brave traveler ready to cruise the universe in the quest for adventure and beauty. It is now part of the crew at the Vostok Spaceship:
Orange-Cosmo comes from Smupf, a beautiful store of vinyl toys where there sure is something cute for your next gift, something that will stand on the owner’s table and say “hey” every morning.
Silverback is already out. What is special about it? Well, it’s basically a software to merge the captured interaction of a user on the screen with the recording of his face, all in one screen for easier test usability documentation.
On the typical usability test set-up you have the usual screen pointing to users’ face and also some camtasia-like software for recording what goes on the screen. Then you dream of merging it together to create a killer DVD for your client but actually never do so because of the time it would take to review both tapes, digitalise and do the necessary video edition.
I am a big fan of contextualised user testing: doing the testing as close to the real user environment as possible. This really makes it easier. Taking advantage of the Mac computer which usually has an embeded webcam, makes the test way less intimidating for the user.
The solution is so clever I wonder why nobody did it before. Congrats to the guys at Clearleft. I may use it soon.
I just found out that the guys at Unvlog have a tumblelog, which is nice. Some say that an English version of their service is on its way, almost here.
I just found Tumblr and automatically felt in love with it. The concept is simple, almost like a maoist cultural revolution: back to the roots, back to the original values. Tumblr is a tool for creating blogs the way they they were back in 1999: just simple posts on reflections and findings, short stuff.
The admin interface, being a derivation of such a simple concept, is necessarily beautiful:
And the result, in terms of appearence, could be something like this.
I love such a fundamentalist approach to web applications .
Congratulations to the people at Tumblr and good luck.
PS: Tumblr domain ends with .net. You gotta love such details!
Well, 11870.com finally launched. Those who know me are already aware that I have been in the position of design director for this project, together with Nacho Puell until very recently.
The service is intended to work as a social bookmarking and commenting tool for real-life businesses and services. I guess you could call it a real-life del.icio.us.
I could say many nice things about 11870 but since I’m defenitely biased I better let you inform your own opinion and let some time pass and see how it behaves. Just one detail before I shup up: being a Spanish service as it is, yesterday it made to the first place on Technorati (ain’t that amazing?).
I hope we soon have the english version up and running.
