This simple web app provides up-to-date weather forecasts and observations for the Melbourne metro area. At the moment, that’s it. You load the app and you can see the current forecast for the next seven days, and the most recent observations (temperature, wind speed, etc.). Here are some screen caps from the app:

As you can see it is pretty simple, but that’s the idea. I wanted something on my phone, that didn’t make me wait half a minute or more just to get the weather forecast.

As a web app, you have to visit the site (http://melbourneweather.eeoh.com.au/) on your iPhone, then click the plus button in the bottom toolbar, and then choose “Add to Home Screen.” This will save the app for quick and easy, full-screen access when you need it.

What’s good about it now?

• It’s fast, about 5-6 seconds to load the current conditions.
• I got “fixed positioning” to work in a web app.
• It’s clean, quick and simple.

What’s coming?

• Use phone’s GPS to get observations from the closest station.
• Add more iPhone-like momentum to the scrolling.
• Add the ability to see the rain radar.

After that I’ll probably focus on the App-app, but this seems like a good way to get feedback while I’m learning.

Please take five minutes to install the app and try it out over a few days. I’d love to get you’re thoughts.

Thanks.

Note: The app may well work on Andriod or other good webkit mobile browsers, but I don’t have anything to test this with…

The first monthly movie night will happen on Monday 7 June at Horse Bazaar in the CBD, with Jon Kolko’s keynote from Interaction 10, My Heart is in The Work, presented in Savannah earlier this year. The evening kicks off from around 5:30 with the keynote screening at 6:30 PM.

The event is free, and there are lots more details here: http://uxmelbourne.org and of course there is a Twitter account to follow @uxmelbourne.

I hope to see you there!

For some context, I did quite a bit of work with some diabetes meters and recording systems about a year back. People managing diabetes take their readings several times a day, and recording these readings is a difficult habit to maintain. What I love about Bant is that it makes the task of recording three points of data for every reading into a single efficient interaction. With a single drag on the phone, you have entered the meal, the time and the reading. It’s such a quick and efficient way of entering and tracking data, much faster than writing in a diary or using a mouse & keyboard could be.

One final nice touch is the use of the yellow line which represents now. This is makes it very easy to enter a record right now, because you can’t drag any further down than the yellow line.

I think this is the first time I have seen this specific interaction – noting that it should work just as well with a mouse – has anyone else seen something similar before?

This represents about two days work wire framing a web site and various other activities. From what I can tell the black dots happen when the mouse is left to rest in one spot, and the white dots happen when you click.

(MousePath is from Anatoly Zenkov)

Unfortunately there is no way I could ever run the software now as it was written for the days of System 6, with black and white monitors, and Motorola 68000 processors (that’s pre-PowerPC Macs, let alone pre-Intel Macs). I will try and find the disks and an old Mac to run them on, but that’s for another day.

Luckily there was some marketing material and manuals in with the software, so I have some screen shots from what I think is version 1.0, and some from version 1.5 beta (see below). It was great to look back at the screen caps and see how bad the design was. Not that bad considering I had no real software design training.

Two things really struck me about the screens. Firstly, just how small the screens are. These are full size screen captures at 512 x 384 pixels. It’s amazing I got any work done on such a small screen, but I recall being quite productive. Secondly, how cramped the interface was trying to fit all that information onto a small screen. Each seat is represented by a button 11 pixels square. I wonder if it was easier to hit such a small target when the overall screen size was so small?

Version 1.0 Screen Shots – early 1992

Version 1.5 Screen Shots – around 1994

Marketing Images

In short, I have over seventeen years experience as a designer, with proven interaction design, user experience and visual design skills for a variety of clients. This is backed with significant design research and usability evaluation experience. As well I’m a capable front end programmer, allowing me to build and test prototypes as well as less complex web sites.

Thank you.

Jason links to the making of video, which shows Michel Gondry experimenting with the score, and using fruit and cutlery to simulate the effect he was looking to create. This took me right back to my experiments with the Visual Score, and my experiments trying to build a relationship between the vision and the music (see this post).

Now in writing this I’ve noticed that my project was a few years after the music video was made. Looking back I wish I had of found the video back then, I might have gone in a different direction.

Star Guitar video

The Making of Star Guitar Music Video

My final Visual Score

Hey dad! i’m making a club. Can you make a blog for it? this is what is needs:

• book comment and photo box
• hand code ideas / teaching box
• rating box (add photo)
  • pages instead of stars
  • rating out of 5

love Gene

ps: thanks

Wow.

a) my son is in year two and he wants a blog;

b) he wrote a pretty clear brief (better than many I’ve received in my career).

I’m pretty impressed, and he’ll get his blog once I can find a good domain :-)

Tomorrow I start work with Symplicit down in Docklands, Melbourne. Symplicit is a small research and design agency run by Stephen Moule and Jodie Moule. To quote their own web site, “Symplicit is a Customer Intelligence and User Centred Design consultancy, that offer services that help clients understand their customers, and in turn, design effective interfaces.” I’ve enjoyed working with both Jodie and Stephen on a couple of projects in the past, so I’m really looking forward to working with them on lots more.

In many ways the job at Symplicit is very similar to the work I was hired to do at Sensis, just agency side – lot’s more projects and lot’s of different clients. From what I know so far these clients include Telstra, NAB, Bendigo Bank, and a whole bunch more.

For now all contact details remain the same, just a new work email address to add to the mix – chris@symplicit.com.au.

There was a range of wonderful presentations from a very diverse group of people. The two stand out presentations for me were Rod Farmer’s talking about his experiences in bringing better user experiences to 3 Mobile through better UX management, and Glenn Williams talking about how he brought a user-centred approach to the design of LotteryWest’s intranet.

In my own presentation I tried to expand beyond “straight” usability testing to show the broader value of involving users in the design process of online products and of other products. Overall I think this went down well, but I think I needed to cater for the very broad audience more specifically to really achieve this aim.

I’ve attached a PDF of the presentation below for anyone who is interested.

Working With Users Presentation (5.2MB PDF file)