Web pages in Firefox are getting a Bluetooth API for pairing and sharing data directly between devices and web apps. GeoTrelis is a tool for doing fast queries against geospatial raster data. The demo I saw was priocessing several GB in a few sseconds on a standard laptop. GeoGig is distributed versioning of geospatial data. Matrix a distibuted comms system, but looks like it could also be used as a distributed immutable datastore.
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Signing in & composite services
Usernames and passwords are on borrowed time as a design pattern. Examples of the damage it does are everywhere. The only thing keeping it credible is two factor authentication via SMS or a mobile app, and that can’t reasonably survive the switch to mobile as the dominant way of accessing the web (because it’s not really two factor if it’s on the same device, right?).
The future, probably looks something like this from the FIDO Alliance, which sets out specifications for the use of hardware dongles for strong 2-factor authentication in association with a pin or password.
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Democracy at the point of use?
I went to hear Vernon Bogdanor talk about the (first) 1974 General Election the other day. It’s part of a seris about post-war elections that is well worth a watch.
In passing he used a phrase that stuck in my head:
Democracy is government by explanation
Apparently it comes from Prime Minister A.J. Balfour and/or Geoffrey Howe.
What I think it is saying is this: it is a characteristic of a democratic system that people have clear opportunities to be able to understand the workings of that system, and that one of the ways you build trust in government and health in the system is by actively exposing how it works and why things are how they are, be it planning permission, taxation or hospitals.
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The challenge for web designers in 2015 (or how to cheat at the future)
This is a second attempt at articulating this issue, and was inspired by a conversation with @psd who also pointed me at a TEDx talk entitled A time traveller’s primer. The first attempt is here.
It took 4 or 5 years of ajax / XMLHTTP being a thing for it to change almost everything about the sort of things that were built on the web. That was 4 or 5 years when lots of amazing things didn’t get built, not because it wasn’t possible, but because people just, didn’t.
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Abundantly useful
It’s nice when things just become quietly, abundantly useful.
QR codes have gone from something people plastered over business cards and adverts in failed attempts to appear cutting-edge, to the default pattern for moving information along the following interaction:
a web transaction → time passes → queuing up for something → human interaction → scan → some sort of change of state.
Quickly thinking back over the past year I’ve:
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Time to start designing and demoing mobile first?
I’ve always had a bit of a problem with responsive design. It too easy to assume the most important context is the size of the screen, too easy to fall into the habit that the way you build a mobile version of a service is to change the presentation layer - just shuffle the same content about the page in a different order and hide a couple of things *.
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co-op v2?
There’s a quote in this O’Reilly Radar trailer for a talk about the bitcoin blockchain that has slightly melted my brain:
I think 10 years from now we’re going to see that these types of semi-decentralized companies are going to be replaced by fully decentralized companies, where the company itself just runs in an automated way on some kind of cryptocurrency.
Imagine a co-operative or mutual, setup in a few lines of code, able to programmatically distribute shares in itself at point of sale, the purchase being the proof of work.
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Product Land (Part 1)
You can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place.
This is the first of a couple of posts about why I think we need better ways for thinking about the design of digital products.
Thinking in a linear way, in simple hierarchies or in timelines, is pretty simple for us; our brains evolved in a world with 3 dimensions (plus an additional one for time), but for more complex systems, systems with many dimensions, we tend to need tools and concepts to help us.
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Music notes: September
Real Lies - Dab Housing Benji Boko - No.1 Sound - Beta Hector Remix - feat. Ricky Rankin Brother culture - Sound Killer Half Man Half Buscuit - National Shite day - if only for the lyric “A man with a mullet went mad with a mallet in Millets”. You could build a great passphrase generator from HMHB lyrics. Spotify link
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OpenStreetMap as infrastructure - a localgov map?
The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.
I got to experiment with some of the OpenStreetMap tool-chain at bit during recent work at the Land Registry and, now in its 10th year, the OSM tools are really impressive:
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Info-buildings
Image derived from (cc) martin allen
Lambeth Council are asking residents with digital skills to help them improve the services they provide. As part of this, that they are holding a hack evening (which, annoyingly, I can’t make, hence this blog post).
One of the challenges is:
how can we make it easier for people to engage with the council in decision making online, particularly those who aren’t that comfortable using the internet?
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Music notes: August 2014
Baxter Dury - Pleasure. Walking south towards Bedlam? Original members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Glastonbury. I was at this and it wasn’t being pro-filmed, so I assume this is from a bunch of fans with GoPros. The Human League - 4JG, from The Golden Hour of the Future. Cristobal Tapia de Veer - Utopia Finale
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MOO.COM UX rules - circa 2008
I wrote these up just before I left MOO I think.
== General principals ==
=== Optimise for the common case ===
Adding something to satisfy the needs of a small number of users confuses the rest. The tools we build should satisfy the needs of the majority of users.
=== Build tools that on meeting one simple need ===
Tools should focus on solving one problem e.g. “Signing up for a newsletter”, “Previewing a pack”.
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A recipe for starting & prototyping new projects
1) Know your history. Whatever you are making, someone will have done it before, using the tools and thinking of their time.
Start with Wikipedia and work out from there. If the Wikipedia page doesn’t exist, create it. Search for old literature and design assets. Be on the look out for useful quotes and concepts.
2) Read the legislation. Read the legislation.
Even if it’s long and boring, read it all.
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Notes - elements and self hosting
The BBC World Service series Elements uses the elements of the periodic table to look at the world economy. Well worth a listen. Ark OS goes into beta and owncloud hits version 7. Self hosting is growing up.
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Where are the dedicated writing devices?
For some reason, I seem to be thinking a lot about input at the moment.
Something specifically that feels lacking - dedicated, internet enabled, writing devices.
A reverse Kindle.
How long before you can buy a Ghost or Wordpress device that is just a keyboard, small display and a big publish button? Will they be open, or a new way people get locked into a platform like Medium?
The image above is of an [AlphaSmart Neo])(https://en.
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Cards
Who has done this before? Who are your users? What are their needs? What is the right metaphor? What tools do you need as a team? What does the law say? What new technology means you can solve the problem better? How will you test the concept quickly? Can you draw it?
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Cucumber tests for regulatory data?
This is a write up of an idea that came out of the Environment Agency hackday.
How do we know software is working?
We can run the software and look out for bugs. For an open-source project, we can inspect the code.
We can also write and run automated tests against the software, so if it’s broken we know. Something like this:
GIVEN a user is logged in WHEN they click on the 'my account' link THEN they can view their billing history That example is written in a format called Cucumber or Gerkin syntax.
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Notes: 2034, OSM mapping, triangulation
Programming Perl in 2034 by Charlie Stross is just brilliant - he covers what causes things to change, to stay the same and the reality distorting change the awaits us in the coming decades (and the place of programming languages in 100 years time). The whole thing is quotable, but this about sums it up:
“we can reasonably assume that any object more durable than a bar of soap and with a retail value of over $5 probably has as much computing power as your laptop today”
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Local government
Sarah Prag has written a great shopping list of things a ‘GDS for local government’ might need, and points out that some would be controversial.
Part of the reason some might be controversial is because, I think, there are some seemingly contradictory problems that need addressing.
Rather than offering my own view on what a ‘local GDS’ should be, I thought I’d have a go at stating what the I hard things are, in the hope it makes evaluating the shopping a bit easier.
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