Helpful resources on interface design patterns from Smashing Mag

Those rather helpful guys at

Smashing Magazine

have posted 40 useful resources for interface design patterns. I have some of these bookmarked and others where new.

They also just posted 10 design patterns to be paying attention to, talking about some of the recent patterns that are emerging and re-emerging in the websites that we know and love.

Good stuff to snack on and chew.

Free your phone from AT&T shackles

"Take Action
Tell Washington: Free My Phone!

New "smart" phones have set the stage for the future of a mobile Internet. But companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting in the way by shackling open and innovative devices to closed networks. The FCC and Congress must step in to protect consumers and foster innovation. We demand:

1. The freedom to choose any phone or network.
2. The freedom to choose among many carriers in a competitive, low-cost marketplace.
3. The freedom to access any Web content, applications or services we want through our phones."

http://www.freepress.net/FreeMyPhone

From this to THIS

1984



2009

The web without words

Explore the Web Without Words - a visual playground. Every week Paul Armstrong takes a popular and known website and reconstruct it by removing all words and images, replacing them with blocks (what is typical in the "concepting" and "wireframeing" phase of a architecture/ design process).

Can you guess which websites these are:

Website A
Website B

Graduating from usability into delightability

This is exactly what Clearleft's design lead talks about... mixing unexpected delights and unconventional designs, as the arcane art of smoke and mirrors to spread wonder and create buzz.

This is exactly why we have graduated from usability to delightability.

Oooh, that's Clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)

View more Microsoft Word documents from nicepaul.

What's this?

If you said an arrow pointing to the right symbolizing movement and forward progression, you are right.

But if you said the Fed Ex logo, you're also right.

Check your brand

http://www.brandtags.net/

The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.

People tag brands with whatever words they think when seeing the logo and display in a tag cloud. They have 1.5 million tags and counting.

US wants to paint the world white to save energy

Talk about every little bit helps! We've known for years that white reflects the light back out, but it might just take creative thinking like this to help us turn this thing around. I wonder if this would make my roof shingles last longer :)


"Making roads and roofs a paler colour could have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years, Chu said.

It was a geo-engineering scheme that was "completely benign" and would keep buildings cooler and reduce energy use from air conditioning, as well as reflecting sunlight back away from the Earth.

For people who found white hard on the eye, scientists had also developed "cool colours" which looked to the human eye like normal ones, but reflect heat like pale colours even if they are darker shades."

Whole story here

Gary Vaynerchuk on CNN: Your $$$$$

Good segment of Gary trying to explain new media to people that in all honesty aren't getting it. Old media has such a hard time wrapping their heads around it, that it becomes funny!

Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications

Pretty cool site that gives you alternatives to other software you use, found this originally on twitter and it's pretty interesting to see what alternatives there are to software we use everyday!

"AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what applicatio

Save Now

n you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you're not satisfied with. And the "blog posts" are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes. "


http://alternativeto.net/

World's Smallest Bodybuilder

Derrick's boy from back in the day :)

Did you Know Video

For all you data junkies like myself, this is a great fix.

Windowshop.com, go window shopping at Amazon

windowshop.com let's you see Amazon.com's best selling products in a virtual window type interface. I know it's in flash, so I shouldn't be surprised by what they've setup, but it's still impressive at first look. Take a look, it might be a small peek into the future of shopping :)

devthought: The four stages of programming competence

Great blog post about the 4 stages of a programmer's competence and levels they can achieve. Take a look at the site too, it's really beautifully designed.

Here's a sample of the post:

One of the basic pillars of the study of human psychology is the analysis of the subconscious and conscious mind. Sigmund Freud was one of the first to clearly identify and characterize the ‘areas’ where our psychic energy flows. During the first part of his notable life he stated that these were the ’subconscious’, ‘preconscious’ and ‘conscious’ mind.

If we wanted to get an idea of how each of them is involved in our ideas, feelings, thoughts, decisions and motivation (which are key in our daily and professional lives), we should picture ourselves as an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, the only part we see from the surface, is the conscious mind. It’s logical, organized, and we can control it, but still small. The vast and voluminous underlying mass is the unconscious mind. It’s disorganized, illogical, irrational, but defining in how we act.

Modern psychology has attempted to classify how good we are at a certain skill by observing how deep it perforates that iceberg. It thus describes four stages of competence an individual can achieve. In this article I’ll try to apply this simple scheme to the skill we practice everyday: programming.

Read rest here

Smarterware.org, great site to uncomplicate your life!!!

Put together by the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and personal productivity.

Has great posts on how to use software to cut things out of your life and make more time for yourself.

http://smarterware.org/

Sample of a post:

One of the lesser-known aspects of Gmail Labs’ useful Canned Responses feature is that it’s available as a filter action. This means you can auto-reply to messages that match criteria you set up with a canned response. For example, you can say that any message from Aunt Bertha with “Fwd” in the subject line should automatically get the response: “I love you Aunt Bertha, but please stop forwarding me chain letters.”

Top Global Macrotrends Impacting all Brands

Unveiling the brand new Cappuccino IDE 'Atlas' at FOWA Miami 2009 by Francisco Tolmasky

I was there for this, was amazing!

Francisco Tolmasky - FOWA Maimi 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Surge protectors that have remotes to conserve standby power

Found these at the Home Depot the other day and thought, damn another idea I had(only a few months ago though) that I didn't share with the company that makes these things!!!

I guess I should be happy my ideas are good ones, otherwise they wouldn't actually produce them :) They're about $40 retail.

Check them out here

Gary Vaynerchuk SxSW 2009

Gary Panel at SxSW 2009

This is what we're going to get RJay for his birthday

Pleasant things work better

In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

This is exactly why we want to make our websites fun, delightful, and pleasurable.




Don, says the three ways that good designs make us happy

Visceral Level - deep in inward subconscious feelings

Behavioral - the feeling of control

Reflective - the voice in your head that lets you know how to feel

Cube Dolls of your favortie people/ characters!

Cubeecraft (pronounced “kyoob-ee”) papercraft toys are FREE to download.

Each toy features interlocking tabs for construction - eliminating the need for tape, glue or other messy adhesives. To download click on the model you would like then save the template image.

Each toy is designed to be printed on a standard piece of 8 1/2 X 11 A4 letter paper.

Simply print, cut and fold your model into a cute and fun paper toy.

http://www.cubeecraft.com/

Donate other people's rice!

Every correct answer donates 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program in any of these categories:
- English
- Math
- Language Learning
- Geography
- Chemistry
- Art

www.freerice.com

Whoa, Skittles.com is aactually a Twitter Search

So we're not the only one trying to let other people update our homepage (ok, that's coming soon).

Check out Skittles.com, if you can get past the annoying age verification or the floating ad banner like navigation. It is an interesting experience.

Visions of 2019 Future by Microsoft

You gotta love the visions of the future. This is a very inspirational video by Microsoft. I'll be 41, Miya will be 19, and Lucas will be 10!

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>


This video was unveiled at Wharton Business Technology Conference on Febuary 29th. Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop unveiled the latest production from Microsoft Office Labs called “2019″, starring stock photo men, women and children playing with the next-generation of communication, collaboration and production technologies.

Yellow Sticky Notes

After realizing that yellow sticky note "to do" lists were consuming his life, animation filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns decided to visually self-reflect on his filmmaking journey by animating on the same sticky notes that caused him to ignore major world events for the last nine years. Animation meditation is blended with image, text, and an original musical score by Genevieve Vincent through the creation of a classically animated experimental film that was drawn straight ahead with only a black ink pen on over 2300 yellow sticky notes.

Gary Vaynerchuck at the Future of Web Apps

Gary gave a super charged and inspirational speech. Go Jersey!



Gary Vaynerchuk at FOWA Miami 09 from DamianVoltes.com on Vimeo.

Ubiquity is BIG!

We met Aza Raskin from Mozilla the other day, this guy is amazing... he gave his first talk on user experience for SIGCHI at the age of 10.

A couple of months ago he launched Ubiquity, this is a game changer.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Distraction Free Writing

You might have heard of WriteRoom, a distraction free writing system. Its for people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen writing environment for Mac. Unlike the cluttered word processors you're used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

I became very intrigued by this program as writing requires focus on words while document editors add all these features that are great, but distract us from the words. I found myself being distracted by the font, the size, the decoration, orphan words, call caps, small caps, etc. I am a designer so yes, its inherent that documents are well designed. This leaves my brain exhausted. We all know that multitasking is great for computers, but sucky for humans.

Being that the screen is so minimal it might take a second or two longer to learn the software and the simple things like opening and saving files. But once you get the hang of it, its pretty nifty.

I do recommend WriteRoom for writers. With one caveat. It costs $25. I understand the brilliance of simplicity and whatnot, but $25 for a text editor? So I found JDarkRoom (thanks to robrohan.com). JDarkRoom is presty much the same application, build on Java and FREE.

This is probably part of a bigger topic of the trend of simple applications that have a price attached to them are being reprogrammed and offered for free. This makes your brand the only differentiator... but thats another post.

Enjoy.

Amazing timetracking tool

TSheets is an online time and labor management service that saves you time and money while providing an easy and effective time tracking solution.

This is the tool used at LW for our time tracking needs. It can be used from your iPhone, regular mobile, Jott, SMS text and of course from a web browser. Great tool and recommended to all. Here is their newest commercial, try it out for free

Mobile Blood Bus

Just in case u didn't believe my last post

Giving Blood at work

Literally! At LW HQ a NJ Blood Center mobile truck came by. Give if
u can, there's a shortage right now.

Behind the Scenes of Multiplex. An Interview With David Martorana.

An LW Family friend is launching his product, check it out:

"When I first saw the Multiplex demo back in September, I was totally wow’ed. The Indyhall team had shown us just a sneak peak of a user interface so fluid, so animated, that it made your movie catalog come to life. Now my mom has told me repeatedly not to make attempts at poetry, so I will stop now. Instead, I give you, David Martorana, one of the brains behind this whole screenplay."

Read the rest here

For all your Photographers Out There...

Check out this link: http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/. The first panoramic slide show is amazing and tells a great story. Shout out to Nigel Storey for sending this my way.

Njoy :)

Had a thought I had to post....

Carlito Brigante :)

Predictions on the future of mobile

The Trend Spotting Blog has posted several presentations on the future.

Here is the influencers on mobile 2009-2020 predictions.

Influencers On Mobile 2009 2020 Predictions By Trendsspotting

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: trendsspotting spotting)

ELS American Eduation Center (ELS-AEC.com) is Live!

Today we officially launched ELS American Education Centers Website (ELS-AEC.com).

The ELS American Education Centers support international students in pursuing their higher education studies in the USA. We programmed page transitions onto the site so pages don't have to reload and site visitors are wooed by transitions of content adding to the site's memorability and experience. Portions of the website are also being fed by the AEC blog making the frequently updated portions of the site a breeze.

Big congratulations to the project team.

Michael Alfaro – Account Manager
Christine Robinson – Project Manager
Barry Jabloner – Developer
Pinaki Kathiari – Web Designer

Check out Papervision

While surfing the web this morning I came across the Papervision website its truely a unique experience. Very interesting to see the types of content that we'll be able to serve up over the Internet very soon.

Papervision3D.org


For more information check out:
the Papervision blog

Papervision is open source 3D flash components.

Scientists doubt inventor's global cooling idea _ but what if it works?

Very out of the box thinking to curb global warming. Works in simulations so why not do it...

Start reading, it's a very intersting physics story:

Story Click Here

oh, if you didn't know....

The originators of the MP3:

http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/EN/bf/amm/index.jsp

Great looking site with good jQuery use

http://www.arcinspirations.com/kobe/

AJAX Slider effect for websites

Recently used this jQuery plugin for sliding in html from a bunch of panels stacked on each other. It works easily and is an pretty amazing little effect...

http://jqueryfordesigners.com/coda-slider-effect/

the plugin uses Ariel Flesler's scrollto jQuery plugin to work:
http://demos.flesler.com/jquery/scrollTo/

and of course the jQuery platform:
http://jquery.com/

Good article on jQuery from a programmers perspective:

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Aug/15/jquery/

Interaction Designer Paul Neave

I just ran acros Paul Neave's website. Some amazing, multi-dimensional, multi-sensory interaction design.

The work is so brilliant I felt the need to replicate and annotate his main navigation.

http://www.neave.com/ - main site
http://www.flashearth.com/ - play with satellite imagery
http://www.neave.com/planetarium/ - play with the night sky
http://www.neave.com/games/ - play 80's arcade games
http://www.neave.com/imagination/ - ok, this is trippy
http://www.neave.com/fractal/ - reminds my how fractals are math
http://www.neave.com/television/ - click through channels
http://www.neave.com/strobe/ - play with your eyes
http://www.neave.com/anaglyph/ - sketch in 3D
http://www.neave.com/bounce/ - balls that bounce to your mic
http://www.neave.com/light/ - light orbs
http://www.neave.com/webcam/ - see yourself in a few different lights

Fantastic Wedding Photographers

Our Labor Of Love does excellent wedding photography.



I can see how their clever design eye, use of designer tools, and fantastic company focus makes their customers fall in love with them.

Robert Burden's Voltron Timelapse

Lifehacker.com

What's this all about?

Lifehacker, the software and productivity guide, is a blog that covers tips and tricks for streamlining your life with computers (and sometimes without). Updated several times daily, Lifehacker points out software downloads, web sites, do-it-yourself projects, howto's, tutorials, shortcuts and tips for going beyond the default settings and getting things done in the most clever, unexpected and efficient ways. Think of Lifehacker as self-help for power users.

Check it out: http://www.lifehacker.com

Daddy for the weekend again!

London playing with Kingston, so cute!

LocalWisdom.com Coming Soon Launched

I am so happy to say that the LocalWisdom.com version 4 is almost there.

The COMING SOON SITE has launched today. Check it out.

Thank you to the team:
Barry Jabloner
Shawn Venkat
Michael Alfaro
and yours truly

The full site is going to be taking things to the next level.

For all you iPhone/iPode cats, here are the slides for the coming soon site made to fit your iPhone or iPod video.

Download the movie LWSiteSlides.mov

Coating helps solar panels soak up more of the sun

A new type of reflective coating can make solar panels far more efficient, soaking up nearly all available sunlight from nearly any angle, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Current solar panels -- which convert energy from the sun into electricity -- absorb only about two-thirds of available sunlight.

But surfaces treated with a coating developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, can harvest 96.2 percent of sunlight.

"That is a tremendous savings," Rensselaer's Shawn-Yu Lin, whose study appears in the journal Optics Letters, said in a telephone interview.

Lin said the technology addresses two main problems in current solar cells. It captures more colors of solar spectrum and it captures light from all angles.

"If you look at a solar panel, it looks a bit bluish," Lin said. That is "telling you not all of the blue color is being absorbed. It should look totally dark."

The other problem is that solar panels work best when sun shines directly on them. To solve this, large solar arrays mechanically shift position throughout the day -- much like sunbathers on a beach.

Lin and colleagues think they have found a better solution. Their coating is made up of seven layers of porous material stacked in such a way that each enhances the antireflective properties of the layer below.

Together they act as a buffer zone, trapping light from all angles. "Your efficiency increases by 30 percent," Lin said.

He thinks the material could be applied to all types of solar cells.
"It's not going to require many added instruments too adopted this technology," he said.

click here for full article

Use of Technology in Toys!

We bought a toy for our niece yesterday and it had a USB connection for flashing the memory with the name of the child you will giving the toy to! It's amazing that the price of components have come down so much that they can afford to put them in a $10 toy.

So you plug the USB into your computer and go to the site below. You pick the child's name and it creates an Executable for you which Flashes the toy with the child's name. Thus Elmo can say the proper name when they're playing with the toy. Awesome use, can't wait to see the next Big Kid's toy, the Iphone!!!

http://knowsyourname.fisher-price.com/phones/

Electronics recycling, could make you money!

http://econewonline.com/

They accept your old electronics and depending on it's condition, they'll give you a give card for it. Plus we can keep that stuff out of landfills!

Spread the word!

Happy Halloween

It being October and stuff, I figured I would put this link of this fantastic article about a GIANT SPIDER so enjoy.

Happy Spookyween

Ron Howard, this is funny

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Design a homepage! LocalWisdom.com 4.0 is almost here

We're making some major traction on the new LocalWisdom.com website. This is going to be exciting!


As you all recall the homepage of the new website will be editable by all employees. We will be able to upload pics and post to the homepage from our cell phones or from the LW blog.

Download the template psd and design away! (23MB - right click to download)

With the template you'll be able to really create curated and well designed imagery for the homepage. You really only need to know Photoshop basics to work with this.

Download the template demo (19MB - right click to download)... there's no excuse, I smell a contest coming around.

Call me if you have any questions. Email me questions and/or designs: pkathiari@localwisdom.com

;p

A Great Article About Fear in Business

Click here and tell me what you think.

Earthrace boat

http://www.earthrace.net/
Awesome boat has world record, and is environmently friendly!

The future of Desktop Applications

http://280slides.com

This is what we're all waiting for, good version of power point on the web, take a look, pretty amazing!!!

Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world. With 280 Slides, there's no software to download and nothing to pay for – and when you're done building your presentation you can share it any way you like.

The Logos of Social Websites

Here is a link to a bunch of logos from the design trend they call "Web 2.0". Enjoy.

Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library), Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape

This is what I'm talking about! At LW we are 2 people away from him as per the Kevin Bacon game rules. Can't wait to meet him in person once day!

He's absolutely amazing and funny! Completely inspired after this!

Stanford Engineering Launches Free Computer Science Classes

Another one from Kevin Rose's Twitter

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

http://see.stanford.edu/

Jason Fried - Things We’ve Learned at 37Signals

Got this off of twitter from a Kevin Rose Tweet http://kevinrose.com/

This is a great read, from a guy at 37Signals discussing projects at the Web 2.0 conference, link at bottom, here's a preview:

Going to range from collaboration to design, hiring, lots of things without diving into too much detail. 20-25 minutes of talking and then Q&A.

1. Momentum - Has its hands in just about everything and is incredibly important. Esp for morale. Most typical projects are really exciting at the beginning and then people tend to lose interest and fade out. Long projects eat at you and you’re not even looking to do good stuff you just want to finish things and they don’t turn out well. Create a situation where projects are short and there’s excitement and it’s a short 2 week project and it leaves people in excited mode. Break big projects into as many small projects. 2 week rule.

http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/17/jason-fried-10-things-weve-learned-at-37signals/

Evernote!

Evernote available on the Iphone, now I'll use it!!!

http://www.evernote.com/

On your phone
Take snapshots, read to-do lists, record audio whenever and wherever you like

On the web
Create, clip, and share notes on the web and see them everywhere

On your desktop
Search through all your notes, even find text within images, whether online or off

Behold the new Local Wisdom Brand!

For 10 years we've lasted with the current logo. Created originally in 1998, the logo has been our mark stating that wisdom is key.

Today, we've refocused our company and brand. Its all about the website! (and yea, we do other things as well)

Download the new brand guidelines and pop some comments with your thoughts.

Solar plane's 3-day flight

Found this on Yahoo, the fact that the guy can pick up a portion of the wing (looks like 4 to 5 feet of it), is amazing!!! Want one to get to work!

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9425888

Let's put a effin' post up

Yey! We are here!