Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Feedback: Thanks!

I received a metric ton of feedback from IE users that they weren't able to guest into Ogoglio spaces in a variety of painful ways, so I pointed a few hundred variations of Windows and IE at it and now they seem happy.

If you have a moment try out The Solar System, please let me know (in comments or email) what you see.

After the support you've shown this week I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to developing behind an intellectual firewall. You truly do rock out with your cupcake out.

links for 2007-03-29

• Multi Touch UI
  Jeff Han shows us that imagination, not computation or graphics, is the bottleneck for today's interface designer.
  (tags: multitouch jeffhan)

No Areae Announcement

Raph didn't pull back the veil during his ETech talk, which is too bad.

I'm not seeing the frantic, multimodal ETech blog coverage as in past years. Has it jumped the shark or am I just unsubscribed?

links for 2007-03-28

• 3pointD on Lifecrawler
  A Second Life service company, including plans for an automated cameraman for hire which streams to the 2D web.
  (tags: secondlife 3pointD)

The Lounge's Avatars

Something about the avatars in The Lounge was tickling the back of my brain and re-reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" brought it to the front. The simple cell shaded avatars are excellent examples of cartoon techniques used to make room for viewer identification in an otherwise detailed world. In other words, the simple avatars encourage users to fill in the details with their imagined selves.

In the extreme I wonder about avatars presented as human shaped voids of a custom color moving through a realistic environment. These rendered blind spots would present a single dimension of choice with the rest of the information completed by our imagination.

Late night astronomy

The kid decided to have a party at 2AM and afterwards I couldn't sleep, so I whipped up a fun test of the Ogoglio motion system:

Click To Play

A test of the Ogoglio astronomy system.

(jaggies courtesy of Blip.tv)

Mercury is just booking it down there next to the Sun while Neptune just chills out on the edge. Before you ask, Pluto is not a planet and we're all just going to have to deal with it in our own way.

Ogoglio Screencast #9

Click To Play

A short demo of pushing images onto a virtual whiteboard in my online office.

Just to be clear, the whiteboard is showing screengrabs, not rendering HTML.

Office

I ignored the list of things to do for the upcoming demo and instead spent way too much time today building items for my online office. It wasn't a complete waste of time, since I found a couple of flaws that only become clear during an extended session.

I imported my Memex and whipped up a simple sun room to house it:

Then I made a desk toy referencing a certain other platform's build system:

Until today I really haven't felt the fondness for an online space which I see in people like Chance Takashi as she describes her Observatory. But it is pleasing to build a place that will be with me on the road, that I can take to new platforms when this one goes to the great platform in the sky.

I don't pretend to understand why we evolved to have this sort of emotion for a space made of bits, but it's pleasant and I hope to make it easy for others to feel this way.

links for 2007-03-23

• KML and GeoRSS Support Added to the Google Maps API
  The little geo standard that could.
  (tags: georss google)

PSA

If you like podcasts, go Bum Rush the Charts!