maetl

Visualization

Domestic Robocop

The conflation of advertising and augmented reality.

The Seduction of Maps

Illustrations and musings on the unbuilt expressways of Manhattan, the ubiquity of Google maps and the legacy of Robert Moses.

Linking 2D maps and 3D reality

How can we close the perceptional gap that lies between two dimensional maps and the surrounding three dimensional reality? Enkin is a technology aimed at the Google Android platform that…

Building a Treemap Reporter for SimpleTest

Treemaps emerged in the mid 90's as a method of visualizing heirachies, and have since been widely used throughout the software design community. But very little work is out there exploring visualizations…

OGLE

Eyebeam R&D have just announced the release of OGLE, a graphics extractor that intercepts OpenGL messages, and allows users to capture and save 3D data dumps that can be repurposed in a variety…

Picture-driven programming

Treating the entire visual interface of a program as data input to another program that modifies the original behavior.

Robots & Visual Programmers

After recently discussing the widely underestimated importance of visual programming, it’s great to see research like Visual Programming Environments For Kids.

Webstock 08: Good Design Ain't Easy

Jason Santa Maria's Good Design Ain't Easy was one of the most interesting sessions for me, digging into a topic that I've been through so many arguments over in the past. It may have been old news…

The Promise of Perfect Symmetry

Via Infosthetics, this exceptionally simple Lie group could be the Mandelbrot set of our generation. The tie-ins to abstract physics are astounding - it forms a picture of what is generally thought…

Mapping the Global Shipping Network

Surprisingly, the global shipping network has never been mapped, despite estimates that 90% of the world's trade travels across the oceans.

Code is Not Inevitable

If crap code is an unavoidable problem for the software industry, maybe the solution lies in trying to change the nature of the code, rather than trying to change the people who write the code.

Introducing Historiographica

So I've started another website, a kind of ongoing accident, with the idea echoing so intensely during Webstock as I culled together my 8x5 presentation, it just seemed to burst out of my brain and…

Charting Change over Time

Grant has been doing some great stuff over at Xero, with an account balance view that enables fluid browsing of the time range by adjusting the width of the scroller control. This is a good technique …