Today, we are very excited to announce the launch of iWitness, a free tool for exploring social media content by time and place created by Adaptive Path.
The iWitness concept was one of the winners of last year's Knight News Challenge, an open competition that funds media innovation projects. That funding enabled us to bring in a development partner, New Context, to help turn our concept into a reality.
As someone who has followed the web and technology landscape for the last 15 years, I have noticed that the companies which have proven dominant are those that demonstrate what I would call a network mindset. By which I mean, they grok the emergent properties of network effects, and use that to establish a dominant position that is remarkably hard to replicate.
Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.
Tireless and timeless software commentator Dave Winer recently declared that “web browsers are done. Feature complete.” His point is that product categories stop evolving, and when they reach that point of maturity, all that's left are the occasional tweaks to maintain compatibility with the latest platforms.
I don't know if I agree.
Can I have a single messaging platform yet? I just performed an accounting of the various ways I send messages to friends, family, and coworkers:
Last summer our San Francisco studio realized it had a problem. Our fussy upstairs refrigerator wouldn't latch every time it was closed.
One thing I love about UX designers is our diversity of backgrounds. We tend to be refugees from other disciplines. At Adaptive Path we have former librarians, journalists, engineers, musicians, and literary theorists. We make good designers because of the breadth of skills we bring from these backgrounds. For this reason I’m disappointed to find that once we become UX designers we tend to focus mainly on screen experiences.
In an effort to get back to the roots of my interest in UX design I decided to talk to some of my former coworkers at SFMOMA. My work in…
C’mon, admit it. You’ve drooled over the nifty augmented reality stuff and thought…”gee, how can I get involved?”
Look no further! Come to the Layar Meetup at Adaptive Path this Thursday and learn how you, too can make augmented reality your reality. Meet the ultra-cool Layar team at Adaptive Path this Thursday, Aug 12, 6-8pm.
A little about Layar:
The Layar Reality Browser shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of the real world as seen through the camera of your mobile phone (aka: augmented reality.) We augment the real world…
Several years ago I wrote about the virtues of Keynote as a prototyping tool. In a nutshell: it’s fast, it doesn’t require code writing, and you can turn it into flash and present it over the web.
This week I was shocked with the inventive but pragmatic application of Keynote as a prototyping tool for iPad. See Amir Khella here using Keynote to prototype a realistic iPad application, and (if you skip ahead in the video) run it on the iPad:
Here’s more about how he did it.
Such a good way to test out your concepts…
As designers it is often our responsibility to imagine the future possibilities of things. We rarely get to design independent of social and cultural contexts, and we never get to design independent of the perceptual capabilities of our users. You could design a marvelous interface that makes terrific use of “color” outside of the visible spectrum, but it is unlikely that a human would be able to see it. It would be rare indeed to find a visual designer who bemoans the shackles of human perception, which unfairly force her to work entirely within the visible light spectrum.
Recently, Adam…