iPhone interface design

Ask E.T.: iPhone interface design

From Tufte's comments and criticisms on the iPhone interface: "To clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, fix the design."

Overall, he approves, but his comments have interesting applications to the reporting and data heavy interface I'm working on for my day job. The first step in "cleaning up" the interface may not be to throw everything out and start from zero, intending to make the simplest thing possible. That may have the benefit of producing a clean or attractive interface, but may not meet the goal of a more useful interface.

Hacker Spaces Everywhere

The Last HOPE - July 18-20, 2008 - Hotel Pennsylvania - New York City

Building Hacker Spaces Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid

Nick Farr and Friends

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Four people can start a sustainable hacker space. Whether you're in an urban area where space is expensive, in the middle of BFE where finding four people is hard, or just outside of an active war zone in Uganda, there are few excuses left for not joining the global hacker space movement with a place of your own. This talk will cover the ten most often heard excuses for not building a hacker space and how existing hacker spaces, fab labs, co-working spaces, and other tech-oriented "third spaces" have solved them.

All the talks from "The Last HOPE" conference. This one in particular caught my eye.

Ahem, Baltimore, I'm looking at you...

Building the scene in Baltimore

Nine Tips To Building A Local Tech Culture | How To Split An Atom

1. Meetups with local entrepreneurs. They don’t have to be big, elaborate affairs. Never forget that the focus in the beginning should just be on getting everyone in the “same room.” Like any other sweeping change, everything begins at home.

I just got back from the Refresh Bmore meeting and wanted to take a second to finally post a link to an article that caught my eye a few months ago.

Baltimore is a small town, but there are passionate people.  The more I dig in, the more I run across small companies doing interesting work.  I suppose more important than companies doing work (which happens everywhere), I'm finding people who are fired up to create software.  Since that's what occupies most of my day, I know I'm in the right place for now.

One thing to like about the whole Refresh "movement" is that there's no end goal.  From what I can tell, this is true of most semi-structured meetups and gatherings in the tech world.  We have on the one hand people who want to share a passion for creating.  They could be carpenters, writers, or quilters, the hobby doesn't matter.  On the other hand you have geography defining where meetings can take place and how they must be scheduled to allow people access.  The nature and quality of the people you are near will dictate the community that will grow.  Guess I'm just trying to say Baltimore has good people, and I'm glad I got to meet some of them tonight.

Now we keep it up and see how far we can go.