Andy Kaiser reviews HTC Incredible | Digital Bits 06/09/2010
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i3 Business Solutions’ own Andy Kaiser has a great review up on this new Android smartphone.
In his words:
“Let’s move on to the fun parts about the HTC Incredible: just about everything.”
Read it all at Andy’s Digital Bits blog: HTC Incredible review.
HTC Incredible
PDF = Pretty Dangerous Format? The Rising Trend of PDF Attacks | Channel Insider 06/08/2010
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Once upon a time, there was a real need for PDFs. And as a lowest common denominator kind of thing, PDFs still work as a quick & dirty way to “freeze” a document, print it, and/or email it off. But Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) monopoly is quickly becoming a security liability, as this slide show points out:
“Once considered one of the safest attachments around, the PDF format is becoming a fan favorite among cybercriminals lookingto spread their malcode, infect machines and beef up their botnets. We take a look new data that shows just how dangerous the PDF format has become, how hackers are using malicious PDFs to perpetrate attacks and what you can do to protect against them.”
And for a web geek’s perspective, click over to Jakob Nielsen’s PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption .
via Pretty Dangerous Format: The Rising Trend of PDF Attacks – Security news from Channel Insider.
Andy Kaiser gives two thumbs up to new Motorola Droid | Digital Bits 10/31/2009
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Andy Kaiser and I and a few more of us at i3 Business Solutions have been patiently waiting for the first smartphone based on the Google “Android” platform to hit the streets, and compete head-on with Apple’s excellent iPhone.
Andy likes the iPhone. Andy really likes the new Droid from Motorola.
Read his excellent review written at his Digital Bits technology column. Here’s an excerpt:
“The Droid is an excellent phone. Google, Motorola and Verizon really knocked this one out of the park. I don’t even like baseball, and I’m using a baseball euphemism. That’s how impressed I am.
As of this writing, you can visit “DroidDoes”, Verizon’s promotional site for the Droid. The site starts you off with a few blurbs about all the things the Droid does that the iPhone can’t do or doesn’t have like having a removable battery, physical keyboard, multitasking, and open app store, etc. To my knowledge, this is the first cellphone that has had the guts to directly criticize the mighty Apple iPhone.
It can criticize Apple all it wants. The Droid holds its own. Easily.”
Find out why Andy likes this phone so much, as he fully describes its features and capabilities at his website AndyBrain.com.
Why Doctors Hate Electronic Medical Records | The Healthcare IT Guy 09/10/2009
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We work with an increasing number of physician practices in Michigan, and a few have EMR systems. But most don’t– yet.
This article by a physician challenges EMR vendors to make their software products better before EMR goes mainstream. From Dr. Bill Cast:
“Physicians know that better exists. They have experienced Google, Amazon and e-Bay. Game lovers know that Electronic Arts’ “Tiberium,” now 15 years old, exceeds the capabilities of their professional health care software. They know from Yahoo and MSN the value of configuring a home page suited to delivering niche-information of their own preference. They know from using Word and Word Perfect that they can create precision documents merely by tweaking a template. They know they can use voice commands to make a phone call on their Blackberry. They know that they can find drug information more easily on Google than proprietary software. They suspect that if their EHRs and EMRs had physician-specific home page functionality, that they could drop and drag orders, answer FAQs, dictate letters, and save time with templates with many fewer clicks. Ordering medications should be as safe and uncomplicated as using E*Trade.
Today most EHRs and EMRs are invasive both to workflow and finances. While high cost is a significant barrier to physician adoption, workflow disruption remains the killer deterrent.”
via Guest Article: Why Doctors Hate Electronic Medical Records | The Healthcare IT Guy.
Microsoft 2019 scenario: everything I want except the flying car | The Industry Standard 03/04/2009
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Now this is more like it!
The five punchy two-minute video excerpt says a lot about where we are going:
“The super-slim and easy-to-use handheld gadgets and wall-sized transparent displays handled by the video’s shoppers, students and office workers make Tom Cruise’s setup in Minority Report seem obsolete. More important than whizzy interfaces, the videos promise much more extensive collaboration, instant information retrieval, and multimedia communication.”
via Microsoft’s 2019 scenario has everything but Windows | The Industry Standard.
NOTE: The original five-minute version (much higher quality) can be viewed at Microsoft Office Labs.
Website Magazine : Eye Tracking for Better Creative 01/17/2008
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Website Magazine : Eye Tracking for Better Creative
Nice service for web usability from OneUpWeb:
“OneUpWeb today announced the launch of their eye tracking service. For those not familiar with eye tracking, it is a process of measuring where users look or the motion of an eye relative to the head and essentially measure eye positions and movements.
Eye tracking technologies are used often in the tech environment to track the effectiveness of different advertising media – from web pages to banner ads and pretty much everything in between. What those utilizing eye tracking learn about are the visual behaviors of consumers while interacting with “creative”.”
The Ward-O-Matic | The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck 01/19/2005
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The Ward-O-Matic: The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck (conclusion): “In my opinion it’s always been a fallacy, the notion that human characters have to look photo-realistic in CG. You can do so much more with stylized human characters. Audiences innately know how humans move and gravity works, so if a human character doesn’t feel right, they’ll feel something’s wrong. But if the weight works for stylized characters, the audience doesn’t question it – like the Dwarfs in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, which were so cartoony and stylized. In THE INCREDIBLES, the characters are cartoony heroes but they can be hurt and they have this family dynamic that makes them believable.’ Ralph Eggleston, Artistic Director for THE INCREDIBLES”
Abracadabra… ��� Map it!��� 01/05/2005
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Abracadabra… ��� Map it!���: “at memory from this basic and survival point of view, we quickly realise that memory is not just a matter of recalling shopping lists and information for exams – it is literally a matter of life and death. It is for this reason that all cultures throughout history have devoted large amounts of their time and energy to making sure that there �memory systems� were both excellent and improving.
From simple color-codings and marks on rocks, to rhymes that helped people remember the location of things that were important, the memory systems of planet Earth grew.”
news@nature.com | Celebrity shots probe face recogognition 12/14/2004
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news@nature.com | Celebrity shots probe face recognition:
“Neuroscientists already know that certain spots in the brain play a vital role for recognizing a familiar face, even as it changes with age or a new hairstyle. But they have not been clear precisely what each area does.”
Slashdot | 3D User Interfaces 12/13/2004
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Slashdot | 3D User Interfaces:
“This book contains a lot of information and is probably the most comprehensive book on 3D user interfaces I have seen to date. Pretty much every aspect of 3D UIs is covered in the book somewhere, with some topics being covered in more detail than others. If you’re not familiar with 3D UIs at all, this book gives you an excellent introduction to this active field of research. “
The Need for Web Design Standards | Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox 10/11/2004
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The Need for Web Design Standards (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox): “Interestingly, despite investigating two different subfields of Web design, the two studies came up with almost identical numbers. I’m thus only reporting the average of the two sets of numbers here.
Following are the extent to which websites have standardized on the fifty-seven design approaches studied:
Standard: 37% of design elements were done the same way by at least four-fifths of the sites. Standard design elements included:
A logo in the upper left corner of the page
A search box on the homepage
An absence of splash pages
Breadcrumbs listed horizontally (when they were used)
Convention: 40% of design elements were done the same way by at least half the sites (but less than four-fifths of the sites). Conventional design elements included:
Using the label ‘site map’ for the site map (which is recommended from user research on site map usability)
Changing the color of visited links (recommended to help navigation)
Placing the shopping cart link in the upper right corner of page
Placing links to sibling areas (neighboring topics at the same information architecture level as the current location) in the left-hand column
Confusion: 23% of design elements were done in so many ways that no single approach dominated. Confusion reigned in several areas, including:
The main navigation schemes, which included left-hand menu, tabs across the top, navbar across the top, Yahoo-style directory in the middle, and so on
Placement of the search feature, which included upper right, upper left, middle, and elsewhere on the page
The sign-in process
Placement of Help “
Gain insights into Web-viewing patterns 10/11/2004
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Gain insights into Web-viewing patterns:
And the study says…
“Most of the results of the Eyetrack study reinforce conventional wisdom about the viewing patterns of Web site visitors, but with some interesting twists.
For example, the study confirms that visitors start in the upper-left quadrant of a typical page and then proceed to the right and down. The study confirms that observation by plotting the path of visitors’ eye movements and how long their gaze stayed in each area.”
Yahoo’s Redesign Embraces RSS 10/06/2004
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Yahoo’s Redesign Embraces RSS:
“As part of its site revamp launched on Tuesday, Yahoo Inc. further embraced XML syndication technology by mixing feeds from Weblogs and other sites more prominently into its My Yahoo service.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., company unveiled a beta of the next generation of its personalized home-page service that includes RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds as part of a search and directory feature for finding content to add to My Yahoo. “
Boing Boing | WTF is an interrobang? 09/28/2004
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Boing Boing: WTF is an interrobang?
“WTF is an interrobang?
Marc Laidlaw sez: I have a new favorite obscure puncutation mark:
In 1962, the interrobang (?), was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as ‘a twentieth century punctuation mark’. The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards. Link “
Scotsman.com News | Everyone loves a pretty face 09/11/2004
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Scotsman.com News – Top Stories – Everyone loves a pretty face: “Scientific tests with new-born babies have revealed that they have an instinctive fascination for men and women who look like Hollywood film stars – and an in-built prejudice against more ‘ordinary’-looking adults.
Babies of both sexes were shown photographs of a selection of faces taken from glamorous magazines – interspersed with pictures of office workers judged to be ‘plain’ or ‘ugly’.
The results showed that the babies invariably spent longer looking at the good-looking faces. “
John Battelle’s Searchblog | The Web Time Axis 08/13/2004
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John Battelle’s Searchblog | The Web Time Axis: “If the web had a time axis, you could search constrained by webdate. You could ask questions like ‘show me all results for my query from this time period…’ or ‘Tell me what was the most popular results for XYZ during the 3rd of May in 20XX.’ How about ‘show me every reference to my great grandfather, born in 2050,’ asked by a great grandson in 2150? Impossible? Yeah, seems that way, but…so did a free gig of mail and the concept of the entire Internet in RAM. “
"Ideas are like children… 08/13/2004
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“Ideas are like children; your own are always wonderful.”
-Anonymous
Microsoft Research | A Slice of Time and Space 08/13/2004
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A Slice of Time and Space: “Cohen and his colleagues have invented a way to turn digital video into an animated cartoon. They’ve also developed techniques to combine animation with a still picture, which is what allowed Cohen’s daughter to ‘play’ in her painting.
Though others have turned a still image into a cartoon, turning a video into a cartoon is more challenging. ‘Some people say it’s easy,’ said Cohen. ‘They use the technique for still images and apply it frame-by-frame. The problem is, if you do this, the images jump all over the place. The background shakes around a lot, and each frame looks like a different drawing. We want to make the video look like a normal cartoon where the motion is smooth.’ “
The Industry Standard | JD Lasica | The visual Web 08/11/2004
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The Industry Standard: Guest Blog: JD Lasica: Ready for the visual Web?
The Undead Zone | Why realistic graphics make huma… 06/10/2004
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The Undead Zone | Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy | Clive Thompson: “Consider Alias, the new title based on the TV show. It’s a reasonably fun action-and-puzzle game, where you maneuver Sydney Bristow through a series of spy missions. But whenever the camera zooms in on her face, you’re staring at a Jennifer Garner death mask. I nearly shrieked out loud at one point. And whenever other characters speak to you– particularly during cut-scenes, those supposedly ‘cinematic’ narrative moments– they’re even more ghastly. Mouths and eyes don’t move in synch. It’s as if all the characters have been shot up with some ungodly amount of Botox and are no longer able to make Earthlike expressions.”
