Patrick Hansen.com

This was passed around the office lately and thought I’d write a post on it. Gizmodo recently published a post about Microsoft’s secret new tablet project Courier.

This approach on the tablet really targets practical usage with a great blend and connection of the analogue and digital worlds. The interactions demonstrated in the video (on Gizmodo) look very smooth, although there appears to be some complexity behind some of them, they appear to be very comprehensive. I would say it’s not much more complicated then some newer touch screen cell phones and even mobile mp3 players.

The two screen approach makes this concept really adaptable to various life tasks and uses. It seems like they are really allowing life to help drive UI/UX on hardware rather than trying to develop something that is “thought” to be what users want and trying to cram it into users’ lifestyles.

visit the full post here:
Gizmodo

The Photobucket Visual Search application we (EffectiveUI) designed and developed won the Web Marketing Association Outstanding Achievement in Web Development award for 2009!

This is a great acknowledgment as we faced several challenges working on this application and also developed it in a fairly young technology, Microsoft’s Silverlight! I was the lead UX Designer on the application working with a very talented team. It was a great experience to get into Microsoft Expression Blend & Design to implement the styling of the application and being exposed to XAML and how scalable it is to work with, especially when collaborating with development.

I have written a post previously about this application, you can catch up on it here:
My Visual Search Post

Here is WMA’s post about it:

http://www.webaward.org/winner.asp?eid=13855

Visit Photobucket’s Visual Search Application:

http://photobucket.com/visualsearch/

Several coworkers and industry friends have been tweeting about the new JQuerey Sparkline plugin.

This looks like a great resource to add some very dynamic and robust sparkline charting elements to your website with very minimal implementation efforts and code.

For more info, visit:
http://www.omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

What is a sparkline?
I first heard of this term while attending one of Tufte’s conferences in Colorado a couple years ago. If you are familiar with Tufte’s work, you know his skills with data visualization and charting. He referred to the graph types that have vertical and horizontal units of measurement which create a line that resembles a “spark” as it represents the specified data types across the graph.

My boy Path One (who I recently shared an art show with) will be bringing another element of Hip Hop to the city of Denver. I’ll be providing some cuts on the vinyl and back up vocals on the mic as well.

This is Path One’s premier Hip Hop show demonstrating his lyrical skills on the mic, so come down and enjoy a sick-ass hip hop show!

We will be opening, so come down a bit early – about 8:00pm!

Visit PathOne’s site: www.seventhcolor.com to check out his music:

We’ll be opening up for ManeLine, Neurologiks, Tetra, and the headliners Qwel (Typical Cats) & Maker (of Glue).

Date: September 10, Thursday
Time: 8:00pm – Don’t miss Path One!
Where: The Walnut Room – 3131 Walnut Street, Denver, CO 80205