No changes, no chances

My HTC Touch Diamond phone just got more fun! I am totally addicted to Pocket Gravity .. Since the phone has an accelerometer (it detects when it's tilted) there are heaps of new fun games being programmed for it ..

Pocket Gravity is one of those .. By drawing cubes and circles, which you can interconnect you can play with gravity and build things that fall, roll, collide, etc .. The longer you play with it, the more ideas you get, and you start building chain reactions .. here's some images of saved scenes (by others):





Great fun! Highly addictive ..

I hadn't visited Webmonkey in quite a while but today I did .. I wanted to use the site search and was happily surprised with a neat usability/design improvement ..



Apart from prettyness, nothing special seems about this everyday web thingy .. But wait! Hover over it with your mouse and a little bit of neat magic happens:



The section-filter pops up as little tabs above it - nice! The good thing about this design choice is that having it in view permanently might very well clutter the screen(design) and I think (especially considering Webmonkey's target user group) no one is scared sh*tless with a feature popping up like this after an action - future feedback is not always needed if you ask me, if it is replaced by a happy surprise :)

I myself would maybe have left the selected tab visible .. Also it could be an option to make the tabs pop up when you hover over the area where they appear, other than when I hover over the search field itself .. But still, I love this thingy :)

Photos deserve to be printed on tangible matter .. and when that tangible matter is part of a magazine, it is even better!

Lucky was I, that the next issue of Digiphoto Pro would be all about reviewing lenses .. Adding lens tags pays off! The editor of Digifoto Pro (Dutch magazine) found my image on Flickr, by searching for a lens tag .. So they asked if they could use my photo to be placed with the review of the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 .. :) .. Not my sharpest shot, but they liked enough nevertheless ..

Here's the photo of the little bugger in my photostream .. Thank you for being so cute little fella! ;)

Sometimes, you see interesting things on twitter .. This one was interesting in a sense that I personally think the site is really, really, REALLY .. uh - I can not find the right word for it .. let's just say I don't think it is a particularly good product ..

Check this out; AUTOmated eye tracking .. I'll repeat that for you: AU-TO-MA-TED eye tracking: "Feng-GUI service is an automatic alternative to eye-tracking" .. Eye-tracking, a method/tool that is used for the testing of HUMAN-Computer-Interaction design, is being conducted by a computer itself .. I mean .. is this serious? This must be some kind of a hoax ..

I myself have problems with eye tracking for starters, it feels a bit like an outdated marketing tool for selling other user centered design services to me .. I have not yet really seen the need for using the method, but I could be proven wrong about this ..

My entire Master thesis was about interpretation of images by people versus the non-ability for computers to do that, creating the semantic gap .. In other words, computers are unable to properly retrieve images that we are looking for, without us first telling the computer exactly what is in the images in its database, and what we are looking for, and even for what reason - for better results ..

What I am trying to say is that computers can not act, react interpret, interact, think, consider, [fill in more words that are typical to human behaviour here], like people can .. so they certainly can not scan a page like we would .. I am a perfectionist and when a tool like this only provides us with some so-so results, based on mathematics and statistics, I am not convinced of its use .. Unless we adopt to the computer's way of interpreting by thinking in strict algorithms, these kind of tools will never work the way they should ..

Oh yeah - FYI - the site does not work in Firefox ..

Oh yess! New photo toys!

Via an auction site in the Netherlands I payed Eur 21,50 including postage (approx. US$ 34) for these babies :) .. It's a Lomo Lubitel 166B twin lens reflex (to accompany my Lomo Smena 8M and my Lomo LC-A :p) and a Polaroid Land Camera 1000 .. Now I hope to find some reasonably priced Polaroid film for the Polaroid 1000 .. The film for the Lubitel should not be that much of a problem I reckon ..