Product Management UX/UI & Interacion Blog — Frank derFrankie Neulichedl

Frank Neulichedl

Frank Neulichedl

Project Google Glass - everybody mocks it, so it will happen

The augmented reality glasses from Google have made waves in  a sense that everyone is mocking them - which means that they are on the right path. Just think about all the bluetooth guys talking to the air or everybody with  headphones on - they are normal today but have been mocked before. Reshared post from +Project Glass

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

+Babak Parviz +Steve Lee +Sebastian Thrun

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European Mobile Apps Contest - aka Hackaton

Luxembourg has launched some campaigns to gather geeks and talent into the small state. They want to become the Silicon Valley of Europe, next to London and Berlin. This App Contest is part of these campaign. It's a 36 hours coding and design challenge attached to a conference. The program looks promising and I will follow up with more news from good old Europe.

#challenge #app #mobile #europe #luxembourg

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Apps Foundry Contest CODE, GRAPHIC AND UX DESIGN

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6500 Plus Ones in a couple of hours - welcome Instagram for Android

The Gorilla has landed and all social media outlets will be dominated by Instagram for the next few hours, days, weeks. Instagram shows that you can have instant success in Google Play if you have already a brand, and even if there are enough similar apps.

It also shows that you can get thousands of prositive reviews even if you don't optimize the experience for Android - or do we see some market manipulation here?

What i need now is a way to filter my Google+, Twitter and RSS feed to avoid to see hundreds of the same posts. Any suggestions?

#android #instagram #photography #branding

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Instagram Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun! 

 Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun!

Pick from ...

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E-Book on Wordpress Multi Site Installation

I would have loved to have this guide when I started moving all the sites I own to one single installation. Not just download, but donate a small amount ) "Setting up Multisite requires just a little more savvy, and the information is all over the place. This ebook strives to pull it all together, explain you what skills you need to get started, and move you to the next step: running your own Network."

#wordpress #multisite #ebooks

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WordPress Multisite 101 - Ipstenu on Tech If you only knew how many times Andrea and I sat and complained “There should be an (updated) ebook!” you'd wonder why it took us so long. Setting up a new WordPress install is pretty easy. Settin...

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Do we need human readable HTML and CSS?

The lack of visual design tools for web designer brings some strange side effects - like morecss.org "MORE simplifies CSS to make it more intuitive, allowing you to write human readable code that fits with the way you think. MORE runs on both the client-side and server-side (Node.js)"

I'm not a friend of adding functionality to the markup through an additional library. Why? Because it renders the code completely reliant on the library and it breaks if the library is not present. If I need to move the site to a new CMS or want to reuse some of the code, I need to make sure that the library works. I would prefer that it would compile to standard CSS, much like other approaches do.

The advantage of human readable CSS on the other hand is not really an advantage. You have to know CSS anyway, so reading CSS is not solved by this solution. Writing "more" CSS is in this case not an advantage, let's write LESS instead.

As for human readable HTML - or Marksdown as it is called. I like the idea but still find it not really user friendly to write - no really, I know HTML and Markdown seams forced.

What I do like about Markdown is, other than morecss, is that it should remain readable many years from now. Text files are the most stable file format and marking up text as little as possible is a good idea. HTML will be readable as well, so I there is no real need to use Markdown, but if you life in the text editor, it might be an option for you.

#markdown #css #morecss #workflow #compatibility #coding

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More CSS #header colour: cmyk(one-hundred-and-eight, eighteen, zero, forty-five) !unimportant; #header width: twenty-five-and-three-quarters percent !unimportant; #about h2 span background-attachment: scroll !...

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Edding850 by Büro Destruct - Interesting font and interesting way to get it

Edding850 by Büro Destruct - Interesting font and interesting way to get itTo get this bold display font you need to write something on a virtual wall - and just like the real Edding (or sharpy as you might call it in north america) it cannot be deleted.

More Information on the project here: http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/edding-850-font-by-buro-destruct-collaborative-realtime-text-editor/

#font #creative #free #download #idea

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An edding can write anywhere I just wrote this on type-fortype.com. For every post on the collaborative text document, you’ll get something in return: the edding850 typeface.

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Gmail Tap, or how even old technology can look like a innovation

I like Google's April Fools Day jokes. There are many and they are often not so easy too spot. I like this one especially because it pranks Apple's presentation videos and how Apple tries to upsell small innovations with limited features as the holy grail of simplicity.

"A dash and a dot, to communicate with the world, what could be easier"

Right, so have a good one and start improving your morse skills right now.

PS: It's not a complete aprilfools - you can download the Keyboard for your Android here http://goo.gl/IZN16

#satire #aprilfools #google #gmail #android

Reshared post from +Gmail

Tap into the future of productivity with Gmail Tap for Android and iOS. Double your typing speed with this revolutionary new keyboard. #gmailtap

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/introducing-gmail-tap.html

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Translation Software used to be expensive, not anymore

Many firms operate internationally and need translations not just for their documents, but also for their apps, websites, documentation etc. New tools from Google and other small firms help small business for their basic translation needs. The trickiest part of translations are industry specific translations that a firm want to keep consistent. This is where Translation Memories come into place.

This software keeps track of the translations and automates the translation of recurring text paragraphs and words. Useful and expensive (talk about 100.000s of Dollars).

Not all firms want or can spend this kind of money. The tools from Google and services like getlocalization.com can help here. They are not super easy to use and lack sometimes some functionality (Google for example doesn't support sharing the document through an URL, or updating a current file), but they are a great tool anyways because they have built in translation memories.

#localization #tool #Google #free

Reshared post from +Google Developers

Google Translator Toolkit now supports more formats.

http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/03/localize-your-apps-and-content-more.html

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Localize your apps and content more easily – new formats in Translator Toolkit - Google Developers Blog

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Everybody loves fresh free fonts - if they are high quality

Now what does high quality mean? For me it means rich character set for international use, suitable for print and web and that they have something that makes them individual. Also check out their older posts, totally worth it.

#typography #font #free #webfont

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14 Free and Fresh High-Quality Fonts (No.3 – 2012) | gonzoblog.nl In this last month there have been a lot of new and fresh high-quality fonts published, again. I have made a selection of fonts that are designed to be well suited for web as well for print, in partic...

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Great visualization of winds in the US

There is not much to add - beautiful #visualization #maps #dynamic

Reshared post from +Mark Harrison

Completely mesmerized by this map... via +Noah G

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Wind Map If the map is missing or seems slow, we recommend the latest Chrome browser. Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database. (For those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum ...

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Is it to late for a small business to start a blog now?

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We designers & developers live somewhat in the future and in the past at the same time. We try out the latest web app and social network, talk about responsive design and mobile first and advise our small business clients that they might not need a twitter account after all - because their target audience isn't there. Our clients on the other side are experiencing just the same. Many use social networks and modern smartphones, but have no idea what to make of a website or what services would be a great value added to their business if present on the website.

We can advise them with services we know - but how effective are those? More than one client I worked for now wants to get into blogging. Their heard it improves their "Google" - or that people visit the website more often. And I can only say that it make sense - as an SEO technique and if their audience/clients need to be educated. But do all businesses have clients that need to be educated? Yes.

Basically every business owner has information about their product on the website - but not many have background stories or content about the reasoning for certain business decision. So it's not to late to blog, as long as it lives on the main websites.

Last but not least. If you have a blog on the website show it. Not just a link on the side, show some content. And if after a while you see that more and more people "land" on a blog page and not on the home page, make sure that the visitors find the content you wanted to show gets some attention as well.

#blogging #smallbusiness #client #website

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User friendly Google Analytics Reports - aka Dashboards

Dashboards are used in many CRM (Customer Relation Management) Solutions to give a quick overview over the most important Data on one page. Often also called "Scorecards" these Dashboard give you broad indicators and detailed information at the same time.

Google Analytics has some Dashboard functionality, but the standard reports are too detailed for the normal user (=your client), and the important information is not often visible at first. The famous "what does this mean" is basically transforming these reports into meaningful ones.

Dashthis helps with this process. Even the Google Analytics Blog writes about them, so have a read and check them out.

http://dashthis.com

#analytics #dashboard

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Google Analytics Blog: Sharing Personalized Dashboards using the Analytics API Web agencies often rely on Excel and Word to create analytics reports for clients. It's a manual process that involves a lot of copy and pasting. Yet an agency's main value-add isn't repor...

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Layered font for old style appeal

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I like this concept of creating a separate font for each style element. It helps to achieve a sophisticated look with a couple of easy steps. Nice - and the outline is available for free, almost you pay with a tweet.

#font #free #idea

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Frontage Typeface +freefont on the Behance Network Frontage is a charming layered type system with endless design possibilities.

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Will we use 3D for interaction on our websites?

I like technology demos - I like this one very much, especially the Michael Bay Clouds. But I try also to figure out if there is some immediate use for "normal" web interfaces, not just games. While I can see that cool animations would make a website more desirable, it would also make it slower to use - and if overdone maybe gimmicky.

Not to mention the whole mobile aspect ... yeah I know progressive enhancement - but should I recommend one of my clients to have a website using this technologies? Probably not.

#3d #CSS3 #UX

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CSS3D Clouds An experiment on creating volumetric 3d-like clouds with CSS3 3D Transforms and a bit of Javascript. Move the mouse to rotate around and mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Hit space to generate a new clo...

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Brainstorming done right - again

Brainstorming is the most popular creativity tool - and most people do it completely wrong. Some do it partly wrong and other s get the idea and evolve the tool to fit the culture of the team. The title of this article is misleading, because it's about the evolution of Brainstorming and a specific use case, but still worth reading.

#creativity #brainstorming #ideasworthspreading #teamwork

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Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming. Here’s How To Argue Productively Turns out that brainstorming--that go-to approach to generating new ideas since the 1940s--isn’t the golden ticket to innovation after all. Both Jonah Lehrer, in a recent article in The New Yorker, an...

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Finally an easy way to get Kindle Format E-Books on your Android Tablet

I like it that e-book publishers offer their books in multiple formats. A Book Apart for example offers also the Kindle Format. Nice, but if you just used the Kindle Apps on iPhone and Android you had no way to use these files. Now you can - the updated Android App can access files you send to it via email (or the sent to Kindle App).

Great, I'm just wondering what took them so long.

#amazon #kindle #android #workflow

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Amazon's Kindle App For Android Gets Updated To Support Kindle Format 8, Cloud Backup Of Email-To-Kindle Files Amazon updated their Kindle app for Android today, bringing about two changes that add a significant amount of functionality to the app. Perhaps the most... by Liam Spradlin in Applications, News

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Optical Kerning for Webfonts - TypeButter

I'm happy to see that optical kerning has arrived for webfonts. I still see many designers avoiding optical kerning in print design and I wondered why that is. One reason could be lack of education, but then I discovered another thing. Bad fonts. Cheap fonts often lack the proper kerning pairs and are made in a way that freaks out the optical kerning algorithms so beware of cheap fonts and use optical kerning whenever it fits.

#font #webfont #kerning

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TypeButter | Optical Kerning FTW! TypeButter |  TypeButter allows you to set optical kerning for any font on your website. If you’re longing for beautifully laid out text that today’s browsers just don’t provide, this is the plugin for you! Downloa...

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