LonelyStreets.com

iMix

My team presented our iPhone application design in Shelly Evanson’s Basic Interaction course on Tuesday. I think that we were a spectacular success, and hopefully impressed Freddy Azures (one of the iPhone’s original designers), who attended by video-chat from California.

Our application, iMix, is a simple song-mixing toy for the iPhone. It is, however, designed as a native application, and so isn’t actually functional on the phone.
Here’s our full presentation, including a video and link to a functional prototype: iMix Presentation

Some things to note about the presentation:
Use your arrow keys to move forward and back through it.
When you see the “Scenarios and Flow” diagram, you can click on the boxes to zoom and see more detail.
When you get to the screen with just an iPhone showing it’s home screen, click on the iMix icon (the blue one in the lower right) to proceed.
The video isn’t ass well compressed as it might be for the web, so give it some time to load if you don’t want it to be choppy.

I was extremely lucky to have an awesome team who all worked extremely hard and were each integral to our ultimate success. So thanks to Wiebke Poerschke, Gabe Clapper, Allison Gallant, and Dave Hora. Personally, I am most proud of the demo video portion. Wiebke designed the pictured interface and put together the assets in Photoshop, and I animated them all into the video.

October 17th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Process, Flash, CMU | No Comments »  

Podcasting Starts Now

I recently began DJing with Ableton Live, the music sequencing software I like, and realized that it is perfect for putting together beautiful DJ mixes. So, I’ve decided to start podcasting a DJ mix. I hope to do this weekly, but we’ll see how much time I have. For now I’m only promising ’semi-weekly’ (whatever that means). Anyway, here’s the first installment:

Friday Night DJ Set (sorry I’ve taken this link down).

And the tracklist:

Fort Knox Five - Blowing Up The Spot
DJ Sneak - Sneak’s a Freak
Bob Sinclair - World Hold On (David Guetta and Joachim Garrard Remix)
Dee - She’s Expensive (Kid Loco’s Pocket Full of Green Disco Mix)
Karmatronic - Sweetest Girl (Wyklef Jean Club Mix)
Robert Babicz - Weekend
The Green Men - Blink (Main Mix)
Zoot Woman - Gem
Silver City - Shiver (Ewan Pearson Remix)
The Sad Piano - Justin Martin
Flykkiller - Flykkiller
Alex Metric - Whatshewants
Dave Spoon - Bad Girl (At Night)(Club Mix)
Andy Caldwell - Warrior (Andy Caldwell’s Electric Re-Dub)

Also, in order to allow folk to download the podcast the way they would any other, I’ve switched my RSS feed to FeedBurner. You can get the feed here. If I’ve screwed anything up, please let me know - RSS is not one of my strong points. To have iTunes download my podcasts whenever I put them out, go the the “Advanced” menu in iTunes and select “Subscribe to Podcast…” and put the following (minus the quotations) in the window that pops up: “http://feeds.feedburner.com/lonelystreetscom” Enjoy the mix!

October 10th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Music and Movies | 1 Comment »  

Reading like a Grad

I remember how on the first day of our seminar with Dick Buchanan, Dick told us that he hated teaching grad students because they think they know something and they really don’t.  He also told us that he was going to teach us a new way to read.  That as undergrads we learned to talk about our reactions to texts, but that this would no longer cut it.  At the time I considered what Dick said something of an affront.  Don’t get me wrong, Dick is a brilliant man (a philosopher and rhetorician  by trade, rather than a designer), but I just thought he was a bit of an intellectual bully.  I continued to feel this way for some time.  (only in class though - I also work as a TA for Dick, and he’s quite nice outside of class).

We had a class last week where I found myself getting so frustrated that I almost got up and walked out.  We were discussing a selection from “Time and Free Will” by Henri Bergson, and it simply didn’t make sense.  Bergson’s writing is so out there that I simply couldn’t wrap my head around any part of it, and having Dick sit there and tell us all that we were wrong (again) in our interpretations was pushing me over the edge.

It was the next day that things started to come together.  All of the second years said that this would happen, and they were right.  I realized that Dick has been correct from the beginning.  While discussing our reactions was fine at age 20, I am now old enough and experienced enough to see the value in truly understanding a text as the author meant it to be understood.  That is, there is great value in empathizing with an author and understanding their view of the world, even if it is not a view that I plan to make my own in the long run.  There have been a lot of people in history who were much smarter than me, and they wrote some great stuff.  If I am to learn the most, I must understand what they wanted to communicate.  Only then can I allow myself the luxury of a reaction.  This is also why Dick said we don’ know anything - because we haven’t previously understood the world views of history’s most important thinkers, and yet we have over-firm beliefs that are necessarily informed by these same thinkers.  We must understand the why of our own concept of existence before we can begin to understand interaction.

For the record though, I still don’t particularly enjoy philosophy.  But I am learning after all.

October 8th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, CMU | No Comments »  

Explosion

The following is just plain funny.  It came inserted with a pair of headphones:

But lets look at it from a design perspective, shall we?  Clearly we don’t want our headphones exploding and so will do everything possible to avoid it.  We know from the diagram that the we should use a AAA battery - but is that a type?  Is the brand of battery a type?  The headphones came with a Phillips brand battery, do I need to find another one of those?  Will extended life batteries work, or will a Duracel Ultra result in my head exploding?  It seems to me that these are legitimate concerns.  If there’s any risk whatsoever of my headphones exploding, I think I would really appreciate more specific instructions rather than a vague warning that by using these headphones I’m putting my life in danger…

On the other hand, I’d really like to see a pair of headphones explode. 

October 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking, Humor | No Comments »  

Lonely Streets

Got some neat shots of Pittsburgh’s Lonely Streets last night on the way home, and thought I’d share:

October 2nd, 2007
Posted by Paul in Pittsburgh, Photography | No Comments »