Human Factors

Wellington City Libraries have redesigned their search function. Typing in a search term doesn’t only bring up a list of available resources anymore, but a mind map displaying Associations, Translations, Spelling Variaties and a Discovery Trail as well. Clicking on an item in the map carries you on to the next level of mapping. This is a very helpful tool in case you aren’t looking for a particular title or author and I find it quite addictive to stroll through their suggestions.

If you don’t like it, get confused or simply loved the old search function – it’s still available, so you have the choice which one you want to use. Well done, Library!

Over the weekend of 22/23 September, Information Architects and people working in related fields will be gathering in Sydney, Australia, at Oz IA 2007. Don’t miss this great opportunity to attend sessions, tech presentations, panels and workshops as well as chatting to other lovely geeks out there. Check out the presenters and their sessions; Early Bird Tickets will be available until 7th September.

This conference seems to be very interesting to attend – I’d love to be there :-). But sadly with just having returned from Web On The Piste and Adobe MAX 2007 to come in early October, I can’t justify the costs for going to another conference in between this trips. Hopefully James Breeze’s idea of broadcasting online becomes reality – that would be awesome!

I’ve spent the last week in Queenstown. Main reason for the trip was Web on the piste, but there was lot of fun and pleasure around the conference, too. On the first day ColdFusion and Flex user groups held a combined meeting at the bar of the Sofitel Hotel which I attended. After a little while I noticed that all the boys where smiling when they came back from the toilet and so I went to the loo myself. But the girl’s toilet was nothing special, so I sent some guy into the boy’s bathroom to check if no one’s in there and got a peek myself. And I got this picture:

Apparently men find it really interesting having women staring at them while they pee… hmmmm, strange. I wonder if they would show the same excitement if they had real girls watching them standing at the urinal… ;-)

New Zealand rules! The 24 hour FullCodePress is a series of web competitions, a kind of Geek Olympics. Before there will be an international competition in 2008, they started with a trans-tasman challenge between New Zealand and Australia and during 24 hours yesterday and this morning, two web development teams had to build a website for a non-profit organization from scratch.

For New Zealand Steve Dennis (Enlighten), Zef Fugaz (Provoke), Alison Green (Shift), Peter Johnston (Sorted), Mark Rickerby (Coretxt), Thomas Scovell (Shift) and Jeffrey Wegesin (Xero) started as the Code Blacks and during the last endless hours they kept the world updated about the progress on the project via their blog, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. The result is a really good website for the Grampians Disability Advocacy Association in Victoria, Australia. Which is brilliant enough to win this competition! But the Aussies did a good job as well, their website for the Ripple Effect a charity working with schools to deliver projects that change lives of children and their community, is pretty good as well. Congratulations, Code Blacks, you did a great job!

There’s a cool new feature in the google maps driving directions tool. Now you can drag and drop changes to the shortest route to get to see things on the way that you don’t want to miss. Watch the google video, explaining how it works. And the best thing is, that it’s even working for New Zealand!

A couple of weeks ago I was really excited about Air New Zealand’s little application How far can I go? and their google maps mashup to display travel routes. I still love both services, but in the meantime I was a little bit annoyed by Air New Zealand’s attitude towards Mac users. I stumbled across a little footer note about “Browser Compatibility” which states that the website is recommended for IE, and Mac users should use Firefox to get the best possible results, but should be aware that some parts of this site are not optimised for use with browsers running on Apple operating systems. To read more about this have a look at Philip Roy’s article on NZMac.com.
But it felt a little bit as if Air New Zealand knew that they had to deliver something to get me well-disposed again.

And they gave me Home sweet as, a competition to win one of 50 flights to Australia. Doesn’t sound too exciting? Have a look at the application and what you can do with it: If you know someone in Oz, simply write a message to him/her and Air New Zealand will display it on a large billboard (currently on Customs House in Sydney, but locations will vary during the promotion). As it is unlikely that your buddy is staring at the billboard the moment your message is on by chance, they’ll take a picture of it and send it to your friend or family member via email and you’ll get a copy, too. For me it worked out perfectly well, as Kai was in Sydney last week and I had the chance to remind him to bring some goodies home…;-)

Unlimited Potential is a Wellington networking organisation, who brings together interested people from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. Usually they hold networking meetings, expos and forums and tonight they hosted a free event called Gadgets, Games and Geeks. It was a mixture of social mingling, interesting speakers, a few exhibition tables and drinks & food. The first hour was a bit boring, as people just started to show up and there were just very few things to see and try in the exhibition room. Luckily Thomas from voeveo.com was there as well, so I had someone to talk to.

We had a glass of wine and a quick look around. We talked quite a while to a guy who presented a kind of social-communicating-and-team-building-game on a weird New-Age-Cloth with colorful cards which reveal you personal secrets. Definitely interesting from a social point of view, but I’m still not convinced that it works in an IT environment. Another exhibitor presented a software that lets you use you Blackberry for presentations by using the keyboard to switch between slides. Their second product was a wireless pen that transferred your handwriting directly to your notebook. I’m not sure if these both work on Mac, and the presenting lady was too busy to be asked when we were there. But Mac is a good keyword, because my personal favourite amongst the exhibitors was an Apple-guy called Lee Herbet. I know that some people in Wellington did fear this event to be too Apple focussed and discussions in some blogs were slightly anti-Apple, but I’m a huge Apple fan (mainly because of the usability aspects; the design is a cool bonus but secondarily for me) and so I was happy that he was there and presented Apple products with all due respect… :-)

After the talk-and-drink hour we changed the rooms and had the chance to listen to some more or less interesting speakers:
- Brian Sweeney from SweenyVesty, who talked about NZEdge.com
- Glynn Foster from Sun MicroSystems
- Mario Wynands from Sidhe Interaktive, an enormous game development studio on Willis Street (doing PS, PSP and Wii games)
- Denise Bach from Yaktivate, speaking about some web 2.0 stuff (she was a likable person, but apparently she was used to a bit more of applause and cheering during her presentations, which she didn’t get from the audience somehow)
- and again the Apple guy Lee Herbet, who presented the new iMac (which was released this morning), Apple TV (which seems to be the ultimate alternative to a huge entertainment system) and the developer’s community of Apple

Afterwards there were again drinks and nibbles, lots of vegetarian stuff, thumbs up for that! I thought that I might meet someone from the UPA meeting yesterday, and I really think I saw at least one, but at that time I was busy talking to someone, and when I wanted to go and say Hi afterwards, he had disappeared. But surely this time next year I will know a lot more people (hopefully) ;-) It was a good night, although I had wished for a couple of more cool new products to touch and try. But I’ll be there next year again.