Here is how crazy last week was — there was something even better than seeing the Pogues live in concert.
And that was the launch of the IQ MAX, the new turret (a specialized financial trading-floor communication system) from IPC. I was lucky enough to be part of the team of industrial and interaction designers at frog who spent most of 2005 working with IPC to understand and design for the intense communication needs of financial traders. The whole frog team was invited to the launch party, which was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner building, and everyone who we’d worked with on the IPC side was there as well. (Missing in action were the extremely flattering David, who was lured west by the call of the open road and new information visualization problems to solve, and Ian, who was en route to a meeting on another continent.)
It’s a rush to finish a project and see the final result go live. It turns out that it’s even more of a rush to see a final physical product: the difference between an appearance model and the final object is so much stronger. It’s three times the rush to be at a fancy party, listening to salespeople touting the improved user interface as a sales point.
(The Hats reading this will be amused to know that one of the sample names on the prototypes we produced was Ewan Kirk, Goldman Sachs. Which reminds me, I owe him an email.)
IPC’s user-centered development process, and their work with frog, is already getting press: Businessweek Online interviewed Michael Speranza from IPC and frog creative director Robert Fabricant for a piece that went live the day the turret launched. A white paper on our internal process is, I know, being written, and if it’s made public I’ll post the URL here as well.
Ajax all over
I had this post half-written in my head about how Daily Kos’s implementation of an Ajax-based commenting system was proof that the typical knock on Ajax technology — that it’s not yet ready for heavy-volume commercial sites — was totally wrong. Daily Kos isn’t a commercial site per se, but it’s hugely high-traffic, so if they’re doing it, that means it works, right?
Unfortunately, the new commenting code is slow and ugly. So, uh, perhaps not ready for prime-time yet after all.
This isn’t the technopr0n you’re looking for.
From the iChat logs:
Friend: so, I tried to look at your blog.
Friend: It is blocked from my work network as pornography
Misha: ?
Misha: !
Friend: yeah.
Misha: ROCK ON
Friend: ahahaha
Friend: I thought you might appreciate that
Friend: of course this is the company that blocked linked in because it was a dating site
We are all cyborgs now
Last week, I went to the dentist, and he suggested that instead of living through a lot more not-necessarily-successful dental work on two dodgy back molars, I “proactively” decide to pull the suckers and get implants.
I will admit, I was kind of freaked out by the idea of it — both the thought of undergoing the removal, and the thought of walking around for the rest of my life with prosthetic teeth. Then, after about half an hour, I calmed down enough to realize that I was having this freakout while wearing glasses on my eyes, an iPod around my neck with its earphones in my ears, a partial denture in my mouth, a brace on my right wrist, and my cellphone in my pocket, where I could be certain to feel it if it rang. I am already living my life with a whole mess of detachable artificial parts I either can’t or wouldn’t want to do without*: adding a few that would at least consistently be where I left them would be a nice change of pace.
* allow me to add to this list my work notebooks, which are my outboard brain in the office. I briefly misplaced the current one and was twitchy for hours till I found it.
They know us too well
Seen on one of those “interactive” taxi ads: “Multitaskers ♥ robots.”
It was, of course, an ad for Roomba.