Lots of Eyes…

Apollo in Beta

Adobe (nee: Macromedia) has at last released a beta version of their hotly anticipated Apollo desktop environment that has the potential to offer application developers an easy way to write cross-platform desktop applications. Apollo basically is a browser-less shell that allows people to run applications written in Flash, JavaScript , CSS and HTML to run natively on Mac and Windows desktops. This is important because security restrictions on web-browsers make it impossible to access files on the local computer’s hard disk, and ushers in a new era where the operating system becomes that much more irrelevant.
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

Digital Campus

Dan Cohen and his cohorts from GMU’s Center for History and New Media have started a new podcast called "Digital Campus,” which looks at the digital revolution from the perspective of higher education. The first podcast had GMU History professor Mills Kelly talking about using Wikipedia in his classes in a constructive manner. Rather than banning kids from citing it, (“They’re going to use it anyway”), he used it as a teaching experience to help students understand the role of perspective and characterizing Wikipedia as a different kind of scholarship, “a community of enthusiasts… using lots of eyes.”
http://digitalcampus.tv/

Many Eyes Visualization

Martin Wattenberg, a researcher at IBM’s Visual Communication Lab has put together an interesting website that explores the social aspects of data visualization. They provide a place for people to upload sets of data and apply a variety of dynamic visualization to it, such as topological maps, geographical maps, tree maps, and a wide variety of charts and graphs. The ability to do this is great on its own, but they make these visualizations public, and invite people to explore them. Viewers can create and share a “snapshot” of the settings to show some aspect with others.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

Data Visualization in Shopping?

Crisyshop has a nicely done AJAX-based visualization tool they call the ShoppingPath, which links a graph with information and pictures for consumer product items . I don’t think I’d really use it for anything, but it’s worth looking at for a hint at how innovative sites can integrate interactivity and data together.
http://www.crispyshop.com/

Ask City Drawable Maps

Ask.com has a very nice feature on their mapping web app that let you explore maps coupled with limited data searching that makes it easy to draw annotation on top of the map’s view, and save those “snapshots” in permanent links that can shared with others. Enterprising social studies teachers could have a field day with this, making elementary school geography boring rote memorization worksheets come alive.
http://city.ask.com/city

Fat Maps

The University of Sheffield is offering an interesting twist in visualizing geographic data on maps. Rather than simply highlight the area by changing its color, as most GIS displays will do, the country changes is shape to give an idea of its size. For example, one map shows the world warped by the relative numbers of elderly people.
http://www.worldmapper.org/

---

Audio of the Week

Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham, the founder of Yahoo Store and now the force behind Web 2.0 business startup venture capitalist/incubator Y-Combinator, talks about his book, Hackers and Painters, (a good read) which paints a compelling story on the similarities between hackers and artists.
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail164.html (audio)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom (book)

Book of the Week

Interaction Design by Bill Moggridge. Industrial designer and principal at the highly regarded IDEO design firm has produced a great book that looks at interaction design historically through interviews with the designers of the mouse, Macintosh, Palm, Grid, and 37 other design breakaways. The book is a joy to read, the pictures great, and the systematic definition of interaction design as a field is very timely. It’s long, but easy reading with lots of pictures.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262134748/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill