I use quick prototyping tools quite often and my definition of prototyping is quite broad. Usually I start with paper sketches, as they are cheap, quick, and easy (There are a number of other good reasons for paper and pencil sketching, see Bill Buxton or my dissertation.) For paper and pencil works well for both hardware and software prototyping, but there are some other useful tools out there. If I’m prototyping in hardware, I usually use Arduino (over, mBed, PIC, etc). For software, and screen-based work, the list of useful tools keeps growing.
On the LDSE project, I used Omnigraffle to produce the wireframes for the user interface, which were very useful as paper prototyping and user feedback, before we coded in Java and JavaFX. For moving to a higher fidelity and for wireframes, there are a couple of handy web-based tools out there, which allow you to model interactions as well – also without cutting new code. This has the benefit of testing interactions where the transition is hard to model easily in paper (e.g., zooming, dynamic representations, etc.). I’ve tried Mockingbird, which is very good for quick and dirty mockups, and which uses a “sketchy” look for UI elements. This is great for making sure stakeholders don’t get hung up on trivial things like button colours, etc. JustInMind moves up the fidelity scale a bit, with benefits and drawbacks. Both have free-use modes for quickly sketching up something and sharing it, but for any serious work, you’d need to pay a nominal amount for the services to be useful – for example, sharing with clients. I’ll be trying out both of these further for an upcoming iPhone app I’m working on with the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. I expect the trend in web-based tools will continue to grow until a couple of players win out.
I like London’s new Cycle Hire scheme (Boris Bikes) but don’t always want to hunt down the Barclay’s website to find out how many (if any) bicycles are available at the docking station near my office. So, I’ve been working on a little project to make a physical bar graph to illustrate the current situation. At a glance, I’ll be able to see if I can use a bike to grab some lunch. An Arduino+a harvested printer head transport mechanism will do, I think.
You have to apply to TFL to get a feed from them and I didn’t want to bother. I figured I’d use CURL to screenscrape it. However, using curl with no parameters returned a page-not-available result from the page which displays the map content using Javascript. Crunch! Not very helpful. It turns out you need to specify a user-agent to get a valid result from the cycle hire site, which returns the expected page nicely:
curl -A “Mozilla/4.0″ https://web.barclayscyclehire.tfl.gov.uk/maps
After fiddling about parsing this I got the data for the terminal I am interested in. However, I also poked around and found this very nice API, which allows me to simply sent an HTTP request for the the relevant information in XML, JSON, CSV or YAML, formats. Very handy indeed, and updated every minute! Now I’ll be spinning along with my project pretty quickly, I think…
I’m really pleased that after a few months of planning, we are able to announce that Tinker London is working with Planet Money of National Public Radio to develop a t-shirt using QRCodes (see the podcast on their blog). We’ve been prepping this since May. Way back then, I was listening to the PlanetMoney podcast, when they announced that they were working on a new t-shirt design, which has to tell a story. It’s hard to get very much “story” content onto a t-shirt (much less, to make it appealing), so I figured using QRCodes to link to a website (as has been used at Internet of Things events and other conferences, like SxSW) would be a good way to resolve the real estate problem on a t-shirt. Our team has been refining this inspiration for a while now.
We’re moving onto refining the design ideas and getting the details right, so that the final t-shirt can do what it’s supposed to do. Check us out on twitter (@tinkerlondon) or by scanning the QRCode at the left…
After a year of requirements gathering, development, refinement, and testing, iBats is finally ready for release! I’ve been working in collaboration with Adam Talcott of Atomic Powered to create a new iPhone application for the Institute of Zoology, in London. The app allows anyone with an iPhone to collaborate with the Institute to collect data on various bat species. The app connects to an ultrasonic microphone and records bat chirps, marrying this audio data with geotagging. Volunteers can drive around and sample bat sounds, so that data about populations and activity can be collected and uploaded to the Institute. People can set up an account to help out with the Indicator Bats Programme which tracks biodiversity.
As part of this project, I had to develop a cable adaptor which would allow users to connect a stereo line-in jack to the iPhone. The iPhone has a sensing circuit, so that it knows when a mic is plugged in – so you can’t simply plug a stereo line directly into an iPhone and get it to work. I previously posted details about hack to deal with this, and a circuit diagram so that you can build your own. Special props to Peter Knight for assistance with this part of the project!
The iBats app will be integrated with online user accounts and will be released on the App Store in the near future. I’ll post a link when it is ready for download there. An Android version is also being written.
In the US, there’s recently been a great furore over a planned Islamic Community Center to be built near Ground Zero in New York. Inflammatory rhetoric from detractors and anti-Muslim fanatics fans the flames. Inspired by a graphic sketch by Mark Schmidt on Facebook, I created an Infographic which shows the approximate relative sizes of the various parties involved. The chart illustrates the absurdity of gross generalisations which lump all Muslims together with Al Qaeda and discount the fact that lost of americans are Muslims, too. (Many Muslims would also argue the red dot should not be included in the circle containing all Muslims.)
Just finished a really pleasant seminar yesterday at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the Univeristy of Nottingham. “TEL” in the title refers to Technology enhanced learning. I’ve been trying to unpick the connections between making and hacking and TEL for a while now and appreciate any comments of suggestions in this area.
There’s streaming video on their site and here are the slides:
Just came across Adobe’s Kuler, an excellent online tool for creating and exploring colour palettes. I’m using it for making some aesthetic choices for some prototype GUIs in Processing…nifty!
Presentation graphics packages like PowerPoint have always been slightly irritating to me. Although they can make it easy to present ideas, this doesn’t mean that the presentation will be meaningful to an audience. Information design heavyweight Edward Tufte has offered scathing critiques of presentation software and argues that they lead to a different kind of thinking for both present and audience.
This funny poster on BoingBoing (thanks Cory) encapsulates this love-hate relationship and pokes fun at Tufte as well. I’m still chuckling…
For an added knee-slapper, check out the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation by Peter Norvig.
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I use quick prototyping tools quite often and my definition of prototyping is quite broad. Usually I start with paper sketches, as they are cheap, quick, and easy (There are a number of other good reasons for paper and pencil sketching, see Bill Buxton or my dissertation.) For paper and pencil works well for both hardware and software prototyping, but there are some other useful tools out there. If I’m prototyping in hardware, I usually use Arduino (over, mBed, PIC, etc). For software, and screen-based work, the list of useful tools keeps growing.
Themocracy