Great Geographic Visualization prototype at Université de Montréal

June 19th, 2008 | Under UI, montreal, research | No Comments


Prototype, geographic visualization from Rodolphe G. on Vimeo.

This is the work of my friend Rodolphe Gonzalès and his team at Université de Montréal.

This prototype connect heterogenous data about forests in Canada, and make them easy to browse geographically, through time, and hierarchically.

Endangered OS specie: Microsoft Windows

June 4th, 2008 | Under UI, method, opinion | No Comments

After watching this video, I felt sad. Windows bashing leaves a bitter taste in my mouth now, I’d like to help.

Come on Microsoft, what are you doing? What we see on the video is just a lame copy of an Apple demo, the passage with the piano is so embarrassing. Your engineers are brilliant — and numerous — people who can do much better than that.

I have a simple suggestion for you (yes, I know, I am actually talking to Microsoft…): develop something entirely new without backward compatibility whatsoever. Impose us your vision, if you have one. Leave the Apple way of thinking UXP. It’s a brilliant way, but it is not the only one, by far. Never forget that Mac OS X is a good looking and very smart version of paradigms invented in the early 70s.

First hint: we all remember the freaky talking paperclip in early versions of MS Office. That was a miserable failure, because the little guy faked intelligence with constant blabber, which is absolutely insulting. But I think it is time now to work again on day-to-day usable artificial intelligence. I think our computer are powerful enough now to support humbly intelligent OS’s, that really start to understand what human users are doing with their machines, so they can help (but without ever raising their voice in front of adults).

Second hint: it is time to impose the distributed model of the web into our plastic boxes. A new OS should allow (force) applications to fuse with the OS, core services and other apps.
To take a simple metaphor, installing an application is now like adding a stone in a bowl, it should be like pouring water into the same bowl — next step : get rid of the bowl, but we’ll see that later.

Anyway, I’d like to have a new kind of OS on my computer. My Mac OS is beautiful, but it is still blind, deaf and plain stupid.

Findloo is absolutely cool

June 4th, 2008 | Under UI | Comments (2)

Logo findloo.com

Findloo.com is a niffty meta search engine. It gathers and organizes search results by obvious categories (web, images, videos, items for sale, dictionaries, etc.) and by popular providers (Google, YouTube, Ebay, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.).

I’ve added it to my default search tool in Firefox, and I’m happy because it works all right.

Standoutjobs.com is out and it rocks

January 28th, 2008 | Under UI, announcements, clients, montreal, web 2.0 | No Comments

soj.jpgOne of the rising stars of Montreal startups scene is out this week at DEMO 08

They announce RECEPTION, a web based tool that offers a completely new angle to the recruiting and online job market space.

The team, led by Ben Yoskowitz and Fred Ngo, gathers nice individuals with audacious coding skills. I personally had the pleasure to modelize tricky UXP issues into simple stories for some nifty features included into RECEPTION. I won’t say more, of course.

… and, by the way, they also raised 2M$, which is good for the long road to come.