Impressions Scholarcast

Just for my own record this is the YouTube video showing some of the presentation animations of my first attempt at using Prezi. [See earlier post.]

It certainly has been a new user interface experience diving the depths of the Flash-based Prezi.com. I was due to give a talk about Twitter to the class of a colleague and decided Prezi might add a wow factor. Thus I started a period of self-training which strangely was delightful and frustrating at the same time.

A presentation done with Prezi asks you to choose a template up front which they freely admit can’t be changed later – 1st hurdle. Once a template is chosen there are only 3 fonts for headings, emphasis and body text – 2nd hurdle. There is no menu to change the font size – 3rd hurdle. Different pieces of text can’t be automatically aligned – 4th hurdle. Eventually the penny drops, every object including a block of text is manipulated by the innovative Prezi transformation zebra:

Change orientation with the outer circle, change size with the rings and change position by dragging the vertical bars. Thus all hurdles are solved except for alignment where you have a grid and your own hand-eye coordination to help you. As the Prezi guys point out, beautifully aligned text/objects usually make for boring presentations.

The Prezi menu uses animated circles of decreasing size and seems obvious at first glance. However, each circle forces you into its own mode, and although the mode is well highlighted you have to move into the correct mode before a certain action is available.

I started doing my Twitter presentation in Prezi only to discover I couldn’t find how to insert links, crucial for my talk as I needed to flit between several web pages. This stopped me in my tracks, and with time running short I headed back to trusty PowerPoint.

Nevertheless after the talk the attraction of Prezi was still strong and an email to the beta testers fired my enthusiasm once again and showed how to make a Prezi public. The link to the forum allowed me soon to discover that as long as you close and reopen your Prezi then all URLs become links automatically. I only had to learn how to introduce interesting orientation changes and define a path through the presentation surface to produce a workable presentation derived from my Twitter slides. I am a little disappointed with the quality of the images but hopefully that will be improved. Being able to insert a YouTube video player in a Prezi would be good too.

I will certainly use Prezi again, and it lends itself to just throwing together text representing ideas, remarks, comments and snippets from other sources, then arranging them in a more sensible order. People will recognise mind-mapping behaviour here. Idea arrangement can be done by just defining a path through the text objects without having to go to the trouble of moving them or having to define a hierarchy. Another approach is to drag related objects into vague clusters. Zooming in and out and panning are easy once you are in the correct mode.

Now Prezi allow you to download your presentations in a Zip file containing a free standing player, at least on Windows and Mac. You then don’t need an Internet connection and a browser with the correct Flash player to use your Prezi presentations.

I recommend you to try Prezi as soon as you can get an invitation.

Via his blog post one of my students, Peter Schliehe-Diecks, alerted the class to an awesome use of the Wii mote by Jonney Chung. On his site Jonney not only shows the YouTube video below but gives us a link to his software.

Everyone interested in designing and creating simple and effective user experiences should watch this video about user interaction hardware capable of revolutionising our use of desktops, laptops and projectors.

Yes, I want one! Cool!

Thanks for the heads-up to MaximumPC.

We now have a demo video below of some of the early features of multi-touch coming to Windows 7. There is little that is new in terms of multi-touch itself, although the on-screen piano keyboard is cute.

Of more significance will be the new hardware that is needed. Even today’s tablet PCs aren’t useful since they don’t use touch screens but rely on wireless pens. Thus we will need to see a whole new series of laptops with touch-sensitive screens before mutli-touch becomes a reality on Windows.

Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Via Mary Jo Foley.

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a couple of overseas speakers as well this year. The whole event is organised by this loosely coupled group of software developers themselves, although we do have some sponsorship from Microsoft, CSU and some of the leading .NET consulting companies like Readify, Solid Q, SSW and Avanade.

To the chagrin of several instant messaging diehards CodeCampOz 2008 was well covered on Twitter and with the hashtag #ccoz, becoming the most used hashtag during the weekend.  Social media was definitely at the forefront with a whole talk by Tom Gao from EuroRSCG (huge advertising company) on how to build Facebook applications with the .NET Facebook Developer Toolkit. He showed us the Sony Facebook app his company has just deployed.

Other impressive technologies covered in one or more talks were:

• SQL Server Compact Edition: originally designed for Windows Mobile devices SSCE is now the .NET managed code competition to SQLite (used in Google Gears) for lightweight desktop and mobile apps. A second talk showed how very easy it is to use SSCE for true disconnected apps because it has built-in synchronisation with SQL Server databases when the app becomes Internet connected again.
• Silverlight 2.0 and WPF: as expected several talks covered the benefits of Silverlight for rich Internet and browser-based apps in .NET. Silverlight now has the long-awaited ui controls that also bind to data sources. The toolset around WPF and XAML in the Expression suite are much improved, and our Norwegian speaker, Jonas Folleso, built a complex Silverlight app from scratch during his talk.
• LINQ to Entities: ORM was another technology on many lips; one talk attempted a very one-sided playoff of LINQ to Entities/ASP.NET Dynamic Data extensions versus the nHibernate ORM. Even though it is in beta still LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2008 really rocks
• BI extensions to SQL Server: not being a db person I was surprised how attractive from the ease of development perspective the data mining features of SQL Server seem to be.
• Team Foundation Server: the new version of TFS was demoed by CodeCampOz co-organiser Mitch Denny who always gives brilliant talks. He showed us every step of creating and auto deploying an ASP.NET web app. Every build is deployed to clients automatically for their immediate feedback – this is the way all apps should be developed.

The standout talk for me though was a totally innovative and hugely useful application of bindable and reactive .NET managed code given by Paul Stovell. Basically reactive code classes report automatically all changes to their data members and collections. This allows all UIs displaying the data for example  to be updated in real-time with virtually no extra code, just the hooking up of events. Paul has extended his ideas to changes in databases and many other data sources in a technique he calls SyncLINQ. Basically this is syndication (like RSS) brought to object oriented programming. Mind blowing!

There were other interesting talks tool. I now know much more about database performance from the presentation by Fernando Guerrero, founder of Solid Q. I should also mention the talk by Shane Morris, Microsoft UX Evangelist, who gave developers very useful and applicable advice on working with UI designers. I know Shane from HCI conferences in years past. I can’t wait for Shane’s slides to be available.

All in all the best CodeCampOz for me. Lots of inspiration and lots to follow up.