Yes, it’s that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all…

Social networking for your Gran
Spotted by Gavin

This is from a research project created by Middlesex University. In their words the project - known as Jive - is ‘a range of devices that you buy your grandparents. To let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you.’

An intriguing idea linking physical objects and digital communication and one that could clearly be adapted for museums and galleries. One to watch!

‘I’m looking for the mouse’
Spotted by Tristan

According to the always interesting Clay Shirky, that’s what one little girl said when asked by her father what she was doing rooting around behind the telly while watching Dora the Explorer.

Listen to this heartwarming - and thought provoking - story of a digital native, and other thoughts on the ‘cognitive surplus’ in this video from Web 2.0 Expo 08:

Web apps make anarchy easier
Spotted by Gavin

With the current petrol shortage (see how up to date we are?) what better way to find out where the juice is running low than this nifty Google Maps mash-up:

Social hysteria aside, it’s a good example of audience engagement and collaboration and at a very low cost.

And finally…

From Gizmodo, a good example of why you should always take your digital camera with you, spotted by Ian. It’s a twister!

http://gizmodo.com/5016814/why-you-should-carry-a-digital-camera-at-all-times

That’s it for this time. We’ll be back soon with more winning tickets from the Cogapp raffle.

The BBC’s new home page has recently come out of beta and is available for all to see. It’s great to see an organisation like the BBC moving forward with this approach but I think it raises some questions:

1. It’s interesting to note which elements are customisable and which are not, most notably the large banner area near the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Whilst you can choose which news feeds you view, you can’t sort them in any meaningful way - I’d like to see this in a future release.

3. The BBC iPlayer widget seems redundant (on my poor Mac at any rate)

4. It is good to see search so prominently placed in the middle of the top navigation bar.

5. As potential downside to this approach: does it set users’ expectations too high about the rest of the site? Click on any link and you leave the whizzy customisable home page for a distinctly non-customisable destination.

Updating a site of this size is like painting the Forth Bridge (using old-fashioned paint) and it will never be completely uniform in terms of features and design, but I think it raises an interesting question of how much a home page should set the tone of all following pages.

Finally, as an old person I welcome the 1970s clock in the right hand corner. Completely unnecessary, a whimsical indulgence - but let’s hope the web always has room for these. I’m now waiting for the test card girl to make another appearance - as long as it’s not the scary one from Life on Mars…

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:
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This followed an email from Tim about the playful user interface at etsy, for instance the colour browser which is particularly interesting to us, as Tim wrote a prototype for a similar thing for the MoMA.Guide a year or so ago.

So it reminded me that when I was on holiday I was thinking we needed to start have a discussion on the current developments in user interface technology. Not only in terms of original methods of existing navigation, but also what people are doing to reinvent the way we interact with electronic media.

Click the link below the video to continue reading.

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The nice people that made the reactable have released the engine behind the table under the GPL.

As a multitouch interface used by musical artists including the legendary Bob Moog and Björk on her Volta world tour (Live Videos on Youtube Later with Jools Holland and at the Coachella Festival 2007 ) this user input technique gives real hands on approach to computer interaction.

The multitouch experience is genuinely play like and most importantly, very user friendly.

Behind the scenes computer vision blob detection algorithms facilitate multiple object detection and tracking, controlled through the ‘Tron’ like interface of the music table.

Away from the music table the engine itself recognises amoeba type objects called fiducial markers and can track their x+y coords, as well as the rotation around the z axis.

The reacTIVision app spews out this information using the TUIO protocol, which means that anything that uses OpenSound control can tap into it. It can also send messages as MIDI.

And they’ve got example code for use in most of the major ’software you use to display nice stuff’, including Flash and Quartz Composer.

So far Cogapp experiments with multitouch systems like reactable have proved a fun way to interact with technology, adapting the complexity behind the scenes to produce an engaging and intuitive natural user interface.