This week I'll be starting another new stage in my career, as I take on the role of Director of User Experience at Traction Software, Inc, marking my return to the subjects you've read me blogging about in the past: design of information retrieval and content management systems, knowledge management, and social networking and social software for the enterprise.
It's with great pleasure that I return to work on the application I used as a client, and to the team that I contributed some interface design work to over a year ago as a consultant. You'll be reading me return to blogging about the topics I mentioned above, but this time from the design and product development end of the conversation. Previously I wrote mainly about grassroots needs for social software and km and how blog/wiki tools meet these needs. In addition, I expect to show details of the application and its use for various forms of personal and enterprise knowledge management. I've used this tool in the past on a range of needs, including serving as a tracking system for usability testing issues, documenting project information (wiki style), and simply for logging my own projects and todo lists (personal km style wiki).
There will be more to come. I look forward to sharing with you.
This is pretty cool. Tina pointed to Vector Magic so I ran an old notebook sketch through it and it produced this as a vectorized drawing in EPS, SVG and PNG formats.
This is pretty excellent. Check out the demo. This is a new flash-based contextual help app. When you click a tool, you see two tabs--one is an Adobe tab that shows related Help topics, the second is a del.icio.us tab that shows helpful links (e.g. Tutorials) from delicious. They're using a single del.icio.us account to feed this tab.
To check this out in Illustrator CS3, go to Window > Adobe Labs > knowhow.
I can't wait to try Scrybe. Best DOM scripting/AJAX I've seen on personal information management software. Google should buy these guys because they really seem to have gotten the interaction right.
Ryan Stewart provided a look into Adobe's forthcoming Apollo product which will let developers deploy rich applications on Windows/Mac/Linux desktops using Flash. The interesting thing is that you will be able to add AJAX features to your applications. More info available via the Adobe Labs Apollo page.
Dabble DB is the most practical business-related Web 2.0 application I've seen this year. It allows you to copy data from MS Excel into the web application and manipulate that data in ways you can't do easily in Excel, including turning that data into a more easily managed relational database. Furthermore, the service makes it possible to share the data easily with others via RSS and iCal.
If you use Excel a lot, you'll want to check out the demo video. Note that this is not a free service.
A few new interesting labs projects were announced at a Google Press Day. What caught my eye:
Google Notebook (to be released at http://google.com/notebook) uses the familiar Gmail UI to give you an easy to use text editor application. Seems to take cues from the wiki-hybrid text app http://www.writeboard.com/. It seems to integrate with Search somehow so you can take notes while sifting through results. Screenshots of the app are available via EricaJoy's photos at flickr.
Google Trends provides simple graphing of search and news reference volume around search terms. The UI is similar to the Finance timeline, without the slider controls. See for example this search for ajax or even more interesting is this search on several different content management systems.
Google Gadgets are little apps that can be floated on your desktop similar to Konfabulator's widgets or the Mac's Dashboard. Gadgets will be most interesting when used for showing stuff like changing data in stock quotes or weather, but I presume will be created for nearly any type of information Google retrieves.
A native Mac OS X application for thesaurus construction.
A simple PHP-based weblog application that uses flat files rather than an SQL database.
Photo synchronization software that works with iPhoto or iView Media Pro to upload photos by FTP or with popular photo services including flickr.