The Tel Aviv Geek Dinner

A few nights ago I was invited to the Geek Dinner with Stowe Boyd and was happy to come. As always, I came with my two cameras- the Nikon and my cameraphone. Here are some photos and videos I took, just click them to open.

you can see more photos on my Flicker and on Yaniv Golan’s dinner album on Facebook

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwPLp6AgXUA

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F5U1kv3xWY

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi50kwJKlf8

אוקטובר 30, 2007 | Filed Under Video Log | 2 Comments

A New Word Suggestion for Bilingual Keyboard Users

My friend Gilad asked me recently to think about a word that would mean what happens when you type words in the wrong language into your computer. We as Israelis who speak Hebrew but type Hebrew and English in our PC’s often miss type and need to delete and retype. Many times it’s the web address that comes as Gibrish.

For instance, i'll show you what this blog’s address- www.nivcalderon.com looks like in Hebrew : ”'ץמןהבשךגקרםמץבםצ .

www becomes ”' and .com becomes ץבםצ.

So, I thought of a word. First, I thought of words that link to the error:

word, language, miss, error, type, keyboard, user. I chose three words to combine them in one, more would make the word too long and less would be not intuitive enough, in my opinion. I chose "miss", "type" and "language", and merged them into one: "misstyplang"- which'll be pronounced "MISS-TYP-LANG". So, when you type in the wrong language you misstyplang, and you can misstyplang if you don't left Alt Shift in the right moment, and why not tell all those browser programmers to program the browsers they build to only get English in the address bar even if it’s in the wrong language?! Firefox has an add-on for it, but why not have it built in already? and what about Explorer and the rest of them hi-tech browsers…

To be honnest, I don't know if it’s a good word. Anyway, only time will tell if people will find it and find it useful to themselves. I think an open debate about it would be good here.

Technorati Tags: word , suggestion , miss , type , language , bilingual , misstyplang

Technorati Tags: a new word , keyboard , users , error in language

אוקטובר 30, 2007 | Filed Under User Experience | 8 Comments

It’s all in the Interface

To tell you the truth, in all my ten years being a cellular user, I never went out of the Nokia family of phones except for the short time i worked in Tapuz People, of whom the mother company called Sunny brings employees the real shitty Samsung devices you feel like you're back in the Soviet Union where it is known the soviet engineers didn't have the phrase "User Experience" in their lexicon while sending men to space (or to sit in a car or whatever).

Anyway, after a long phone talk with a technology reporter yesterday I realized not everyone customize their cell phones to fit their needs and wishes. I never thought about it before but i'll give you my two cents about personal customization of your cell phone.

I'm talking about the Profiles you have. Forgive me other brands users, I just don't know how it goes on other devices so I'll speak in the Nokia language for now.

A profile, if you dont know what I'm talking about, is the family of customable ring / light / vibrate settings you can change at will.

So, one of my most important changes I do when I get a new phone is to choose my ring tone naturally, but the second thing I do is change the profiles settings, including their names, if possible. My favorite example for this is my "Sleep No Vibe" profileI invented for myself. You know how you hate waking up from a ring or from sms? me too. I wanted to create a profile where if I choose it I will have a ring that will wake me up, but in a nice way. I saw that when I forget to change my phone from it’s everyday general profile the rings wake me up and I'm all scared and act and feel like "what, what, what happened?!". The "Sleep No Vibe" I created has a nice slow ring, the sms beeps muted and the vibe option shut. It changed my life. No, really, I was at a job , as a photojournalist always "on call", that they could wake me and did wake me at odd hours, I needed something to protect my sanity.

Anyway, this was just one example of it. You can take it to other areas… like you know how it’s irritating when you're in a meeting, with your cell phone is on the table at mute (cause you're a good guy) and than it starts brake-dance vibrating ? Change your "Meeting" profile, see for yourself and decide if you put your cell phone in your bag, on the table or in your pocket. Most times you'll act as before… going to meetings and touching our phones is something we do mechanically and automatically in our heads.

The interface creates and navigates your experience in life. I'm not talking about graphical user interface, I'm talking about interface in general. You interface with the city, the UX (user experience in short is UX) people there are called architectures, you interface inside your home, where most of the times you're the UX guy, you go to personal UX mechanic called a psychologist or to friends or to your mom… everything is interfaced and it’s always about the interface, and if we're talking about cell phones, it’s the small bits of time you use it as an alarm clock that'll light your day, one way or the other.

אוקטובר 29, 2007 | Filed Under User Experience | Leave a Comment

The Blocking Game on Facebook

I have a new game in Facebook, it’s called Blocking and it’s all about my user experience.
How many of you just hate getting those notifications from "so called" friends that use those dumb applications such as potatos, tomatos, causes, flowers, beers, maps and so on?

I mean, le'ts face it, we'd prefer if we didnt got all those apps, and we'd prefer if we saw an app on a friend’s profile, loved it and went to look for it. Like in Firefox for example. And also, why do we have to send this app to everyone even before we got to see if we like it or not? Why not test it, and than send it to friends to evaluate?
Those apps became the modern (Facebook) era junk mail.

So, as my time in this so called "Social Utility" is precious to me, first, I'd rather not deal with junk and second- i'd rather have fun. So I thought of a game. All you need for it is a tab enabled browser.

This game has two play options:

1- You wait till a friend sends you an invitation to add an app, you click on the app link instead of the ignore button, go to the down right corner of the app page and click Block This Appliction link.

The Block- Click to enlarge

2- You go to the apps page on http://www.facebook.com/apps/, choose the apps you want to block, opens them in new tabs and block'em one after the other.
It’s a fun game I play every few days. I play it for 2 minutes each time and block around ten apps each time. Than I get bored with it. But it works… as you'll start payng the Blocking Game on facebook you'll see you dont block everything, you'll probably want to block the apps you statistically get most emails about. You'll feel very good about it because it'll be like doing a good search engine optimization (SEO) to yourself only without any search engine involved. You'll automatically have more fun on Facebook, not futilly ignoring new apps but sofisticatedly blocking them, because Resistance Is not Futile.

אוקטובר 28, 2007 | Filed Under User Experience | 1 Comment

Wordcamp video log

My laptop died so I couldnt uplad new materials to the blog since Wordcamp was finished. But now, thanks to…whatever… I bring you one of the video logs I made during the convention, and it’s in English. Well, actually it’s bilingual… you'll get the nothion.
Have fun

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhjeOwjbjAk

אוקטובר 27, 2007 | Filed Under Wordpress, Video Log | 3 Comments

Wordcamp 2007: The Conclusion

These, in points, are the things that influenced me the most:

1- Kfir Pravda explaining in detail about how to organize Facebok, LinkedIn and the blog to your advantage as tools you work with, making me understand there are some more things I can learn on social media influence.

2- Maya Marom introducing the FireBug addon for Firefox making me understand css is B-shit when I want to redesign my blog.

3- Fire Uploader, that as a Firefox addon succeded in the task of uploading photos to my Flickr (though it’s GUI isnt ready yet) even though the original Flickr uploader API failed.

4- Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer which was also able to work even though we had the bandwidth limitation of a room full of live blogging bloggers, and get the job done for me when the browser failed.

5- Yosi Taguri for saying: "A woman who can write css, I need to shoot photo of her", and making me laugh so much.

6- Gadi Shimshon for explaining to the room that "Paris Hilton is public domain".

Technorati Tags: wordcamp2007israel, wordcamp, wordpress, kfir pravda, maya marom, firebug, firefox, fire uploader, windows live writer, yosi taguri, sgadi shimshon

del.icio.us Tags: wordcamp2007israel, yosi taguri, windows live writer, kfir pravda, paris hilton, public domain, fire uploader

אוקטובר 25, 2007 | Filed Under Wordpress | 4 Comments