Due to an upcoming community bike ride, I was exposed today to mapmyrun.com. I’m having some trouble with the interface on first attempt, but I thought you runners or bikers (particularly those who travel, like Doug and Megan) might be interested in taking it for a more detailed spin. It’s built using the Google Maps API, so much of it works like you expect it to. There are just some things particular to mapping a run that seem a little clumsy or counter-intuitive to me. Anyhow, it seems to have a bunch of converts and people are posting good runs for others to use, so it’s got to be fairly usable. After all, most of the people using it are probably recently oxygen-deprived, so it must just be me.

Anyhow, go take it for a spin — it’s not the most interesting use of the Google Maps framework I’ve seen, but it’s certainly a good idea.

The theme I was using seems to have some bugs. It was cutting the comment blocks in half (something I didn’t originally notice because I don’t typically see a lot of traffic around here). Anyhow, I decided to go back to a simpler theme. I tweaked it a bit this time, so it should work better than the last time I used it (the comments link should work now, some of the type is a little less cramped, and so on). Let me know if you have any problems with it.

Johnny Chung Lee is a student at Carnegie Mellon, and he’s gone bonkers with brilliant new applications for the Nintendo Wii using the Wii and easily obtainable objects. For example, he’s written some software to do real-time head tracking (changing the scene on the screen based on the position of your head — e.g., the effect of walking toward or away from a window). Using a pair of safety glasses with LED headlamps (fitted with infrared bulbs), the software he wrote, and what comes with a basic Wii, he’s built a fascinating virtual room.

His website has other Wii-related projects; other non-Wii projects; a link to his blog, called Procrastineering (giving in to productive distractions); as well as links to his very good photography.

This guy is a perfect example of why the Wii is so exciting — not only does it inspire this kind of thing, but Nintendo has been fairly open about how it works so people like Johnny Chung Lee can do neat new things with it. It’s cool enough that you can bowl in your living room — imagine how it’s going to be when people start writing new software like this for public use.

MIT has developed an interactive whiteboard — not the first one, of course, but this one has quite a bit of understanding of the physical world. Neat.

There was a discussion about the Evoluent VerticalMouse on Slashdot today — it’s an upright mouse to help people who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. I’m not convinced it wouldn’t be a pain to use (it’s huge, for one thing), but there was a post with another link to the Perific mouse. That one looks pretty neat. Just the number of positions it can be used in is great.

Slashdotters aside (who all seem dead-set on calling this a big touchscreen and nothing more), the new Microsoft Surface is very, very cool. It uses some of the latest new interface ideas (using two fingers to “spread” an element larger or “pinch” it smaller), does it all with cameras instead of heat-sensing (so objects with barcodes placed on the table can be identified), and so on. It’s neat. Face it, Linux geeks — it’s cool.

I’ve been fiddling with a couple new things the past couple of days. Thanks to Jono at Humanized and his latest post, I discovered Google SketchUp. This is a free piece of software that is apparently replacing AutoCAD in several types of business who need something powerful but not as big as AutoCAD. It will never replace AutoCAD for dedicated users, of course, but it does some pretty cool stuff very intelligently. Here, hold my beer and watch this …

I just stopped writing for a moment, opened SketchUp, and (with all the training and wisdom of over ten minutes of previous use) rendered a very basic garage with attached workshop, a little guy (okay, it starts with him already there), and a green-conscious garden roof to comply with Chicago’s Mayor Daley and his great ideas about green spaces in urban areas.

So I’m just goofing around, and I have some minor background in drafting and rendering (rusty though it may be*). But this is incredibly simple — Jono uses his six-year-old sister as an example of someone who just opened the application, poked around for a minute, and can now build cities of stubby buildings while she waits for something more fun to happen around her.

It’s a great example of a simple interface that does what it should do and nothing more. It doesn’t interfere with creativity or thinking (or creative thinking), and works right out of the virtual box. And you can also upload your buildings/cities/whatever to their site and share them with others. Some of the stuff that’s out there already is pretty amazing.

(You’ll also see my sidebar — I left it in the screen capture image on purpose. That’s Desktop Sidebar — a great freeware version of the Vista Sidebar for XP. Both of my PCs have widescreen monitors, so I don’t really lose any real estate to the sidebar. It’s overwhelmingly useful, and fairly customizable. Check it out if you like this kind of geeky stuff.)

Anyhow, I hate to say it because my Microsoft friends (in other words, the two people who routinely read this blog) probably hear this all too often, but Google has another well-designed alternative to paid software. Whether it will stay free remains to be seen, of course, but it’s great fun and a good example of smart design for now.

Macromedia Contribute

I have a client who needs to edit her own website fairly regularly. I was doing the edits myself, but that often turned into a longer-than-necessary turnaround time if a) I was bogged down with other stuff, 2) offline for a day or at a meeting, or iii) in need of more information that caused two or three rounds of back-and-forth stuff. So I tried Contribute, and got her set up with a trial version of it today. So far, it’s great.

What’s nice about it is that it allows for levels of control. I am set up as administrator on her site, but I can set her up as either a publisher (someone who can change the site in major ways but not the core site settings) or a writer (someone who can simply make copy changes but not change layout). I think I could customize it more — I could specify things she can edit and things she can’t, and so on. I haven’t dug too deeply into it yet, and we’re going to play with it over the next several days while we both get used to it. But again, it’s a very intuitive and smart piece of software. You punch in a few settings into mildly intimidating setup screens, but then after that, it’s mostly point-and-click and highlight-and-type. It even grabbed my include-file-ridden code and understood it all, rendering it properly from a local version in its IE-driven browser. It locks files properly (as we discovered) when they’re open for editing on another machine. It just works like you would expect an Adobe/Macromedia product to, and works so identically between Mac and PC that I could explain to her everything I was looking at on my PC while she was going through it on her Mac.

Adobe/Macromedia (okay, I know it’s just Adobe now, but I’m still not used to that) offers free 30-day trials for all of their software — the best selling point of all. Plenty of time to get used to it or not. Give it a shot if you have a site to edit — I already find it a bit easier for basic copy changes than going through my own code (albeit fairly sparse and nicely indented).

These comments aren’t meant as advertising, though they kind of read that way — I have no investment in whether these products do well. They’re sure neat, though, and fun to play with if you have a rainy (or ridiculously snowy) afternoon. And if these things break on me tomorrow, I’ll come right back here and bitch about it. So stay tuned — so far, so good, though.

* I was, after all, the technical drawing representative for my high school’s JETS (Junior Engineering Technical Society) team. We didn’t meet a lot of girls, but a couple of guys on the team managed to circumvent the coin vending systems of every coffee and “Soup: Chicken Hot” machine in every building we competed in. Laugh if you will, but we were always set for ample amounts of Soup: Chicken Hot. If only girls were into that.

So you may have heard me talk about Humanized, a company here in Chicago that is continuing and building on the legacy of Jef Raskin, one of the main UI designers for the Mac. His book, The Humane Interface, builds an interesting approach to pure user/computer interaction. Humanized, founded by Aza Raskin (his son) and three others, is beginning to build real-world applications using the ideas from The Humane Interface to bridge gaps between programs, creating a more unified user experience.

Enso is their latest offering — it’s not out yet, but it’s in beta and there is a demo film on their site. Take a peek, and read their site if you haven’t already. Good stuff.

Also, in their blog area, another designer named Braydon Fuller has posted a link to a video presentation of a UI project he did based on Jef Raskin’s theories. It’s quite compelling, and there are aspects of the new Apple iPhone interface that mirror some of the zoom techniques Raskin presented and that this Braydon Fuller person has implemented.

Anyhow, it’s fun stuff to read on a cold Tuesday afternoon. Take a look!

If it works like they say it will, the new Apple iPhone is amazing. It will come out at prices competitive with the Treo ($499 for the 4GB model, $599 for the 8GB model), and it will (frankly) blow the Treo out of the water. I love my Treo, but this thing makes me feel tingly in almost dirty ways. The UI is swanky and clean, and if the stuff they’re saying about the motion recognition and proximity detection (it will apparently lock its screen automatically when it gets close to your face or goes in your pocket or something) is pretty swanky, too.

Now to wait patiently for two years for a) my Sprint contract to expire, b) Apple to work out the kinks and release a 2.0 version, and c) my bank account to get to a point where I can do this kind of thing.

Check it out here, though. Make sure you’ve got Quicktime if you want to see all the demos.

So my designer friend Wendi recently unloaded a bunch of her old books on me (in an effort to create a nursery for their fabulous daughter), and one of them was Geometry of Design by Kimberly Elam. It goes over the golden ratio, phi (1.618), and so on. It doesn’t come upon anything earth shattering, and it does a bit of what all of these books do, which is cram (sometimes elegantly, sometimes awkwardly) current dimensions of recognizable things into the golden ratio.

But this is a beautiful book. Take what you want from the content, but it employs vellum overlays throughout to show the geometric alignments of what seem like organic, random structures (nicely registered, I might add). Leonardo’s Human Figure in a Circle and Albrecht Dürer’s Man Inscribed in a Circle are compared, as are French advertising posters from the late 1800s. Obviously, da Vinci and Dürer are doing this for mathematical studies, but some of the later pieces (the aforementioned French advertising posters, several European and American advertising pieces from the 1920s and 1930s, furniture design from the 1920s through the 1960s, and the new VW Beetle and the Braun coffeemaker) all show natural implementation of the mathematics inherent to the Golden Ratio.

I don’t want to overthink the designers’ intents. Honestly, I think the magic part of this is that good visual designers instinctively use circles, arcs, the Golden Ratio, and Pi to exquisite results, often without knowing intellectually what they’re doing. It just looks right. From a designer’s standpoint, it feels magnificently empowering — it makes you feel like the Visual Ratio Oracle or something. The fact that you can just eyeball something and get it right by this math is overwhelmingly satisfying. You’re just making it look good, but the academics can find formulas to back it all up.

This plays into every non-dirty fantasy I’ve ever had. And maybe some of the dirty ones.

But perhaps I’ve said too much. Whatever the case, check out the book. It’s a great and easy read, lives benevolently alongside other books in your bathroom, and really does reinforce in a little over 100 pages everything design schools try to teach you.