mainframezen's posterous

sign up pages

Started this job by using the wonder wheel. From this I can pursuit popular sign up pages. Useful research tooling.

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Twitter

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Simple. Not as exciting as the fail whale page.

Vimeo

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Beautiful.

Google

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You need it or else you turn this down. I’m in. Also, you need some non-virtual confirmation like mobile phone verification.

MySpace

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Since I can sign in with Facebook, it gets easier.

Facebook

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This page is the reason I gave up on Facebook when I heard about it some years ago. But now I see it also as a simple way of communicating to the new user what Facebook is all about.

JP, next time, when you have time, post some sign up pages you hate or find irritating.

Google Facebook

The interesting part is that Google responds to huge amounts of facebook related searches and sends people to the place.

Don’t be evil and make a better world.

On the other hand, Alexa Search Analytics says that facebook searches drive traffic to google.

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This is something that defies logic or intuition.

Estúdio Ruim

Yesterday I spent some time looking at the remarkable project called EyeWriter. It’s an open source and open content research effort to give people suffering from ALS a simple way to communicate with their eyes.

The motivation came from an artist called TEMPT and therefore the project has this description “It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.”

Homepage: http://www.eyewriter.org/

Then I (re)came across a wonderful piece of software called openframeworks: “openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit

for creative coding.”

The galley provides awesome examples of the projects people are creating.

Watch what it can do on their website: http://www.openframeworks.cc/

I guess DISPLAX (by Edigma) uses this project, together with opencv.

There also some interesting work by Estúdio Ruim: http://ruim.pt/work/

JP, did you have a look at this subjects?

OpenFrameworks
Processing
Cinder
Computer Vision (OpenCV)
Generative animation
Computer graphics (OpenGL, shaders, etc..)

If not, do so.

(most) Forecasts are stupid

The top research companies are saying the Android will take close to 50% market share by 2015.

I don’t see it as a bold statement. Maybe I’m biased, but most people will buy Android to save hundreds of dollars and less vendor lock-in (hardware, DRM, marketplace, …).

It looks like Apple will be around with 20% market share.

But then they rushed to put Microsoft second place in 2015 (except ABI Research). There is no data on WP7, no market yet… More open source initiatives may take place and change things.

It was three years ago that I was talking to my managers at the time that Android would be a good business for application development.

So it has taken Google 4-5 years to get Android on the streets (and in my hand).

New development systems and workflows are out: Titanium, Rhodes, Phonegap.

No reference to Microsoft yet. In fact most sites I visit do not have a Windows mobile application, only iphone or android.

Nokia will always survive on the non-smartphone domain, this is common believe.

Microsoft old magic does not work nowadays. You cannot beat the competition arriving late with a marketing muscle and a few more colors. Not anymore.

What will people think when you have a platform with 50% market share? Yes, that’s right, people will believe that there is room for one more platform.

Microsoft may be the one, but it needs a totally different approach. The person that finds that path will get rich in the process (deservingly).

As a developer, there is the issue of platform development. What I see and like is that mobile development will be made possible with an intermediate API to abstract  vendor API and that did not succeed on the desktop until now. So both desktop and mobile development will benefit from this new development platforms and cloud deployment/build systems.

That leaves web development. Why is it out of these new platforms radar? Focus, maybe. On the other hand the web user experience should be close to the mobile user, if not the same (by 2015?).

This is my share of less stupid forecasts.