Sorry for not sharing what’s going on with our product. It’s getting close!
2.19.2012 A short course on Processing.js on mobile
As long as you disable device zooming, and set the size of the Processing.js canvas smaller than the screen size, the performance is surprisingly good.
<meta name = “viewport” content = “width=device-height, height=device-height”>
If you don’t set the height/width, iPhone defaults to 980px across, which could make your sketch unnecessarily large (if you size it 100% of body).
2.9.2012
1.23.2012
Sorry that I haven’t posted at all since I defended my thesis last week. I’ve been finishing up my tenure at Etsy, packing for my move, and trying to get some rest.
Here is my thesis paper, and I also uploaded pictures to Flickr.
1.21.2012
A short video from my awesome New Year’s Eve party. A little kinect projection installation, also a light sculpture that reacts to music (a collaboration I did with Jiayuan Peng, the LED sculpture was her work, I borrowed it and re-programmed it for my party).
1.21.2012
Avoid pixel-pushing at all costs – your job is to solve problems. View your work through that lens at all times. Always know what problems you are trying to solve while in the process of designing (e.g., people are having a hard time knowing where to go next in a flow, or, the current visual design does not reflect the mood of our brand). Good designers solve problems, great ones ensure they are solving the right ones. Accurately defining the problem goes a long way towards solving it.
1.18.2012
I feel empowered. (Taken with instagram)
1.17.2012
100 ways of doing the same thing
1.17.2012
paper prototyping like a boss.
1.17.2012
a simple sign in flow has suddenly 12 edge cases, considering Facebook sign in, and different email addresses. we got it all covered!
1.15.2012
1.2.2012
Just wanted to let my 5 tumblr followers know that I’m moving to San Francisco.
12.28.2011 Arduino Firmata and Processing: AnalogWrite causes flickering
I’ve been pulling my hair out because using the simplest AnalogWrite over Processing’s Arduino library to my Arduino board would cause the LEDs to flicker like crazy.
The suspect: every time you send something to Arduino over the Serial port (such as changing LED brightness values), you distract the Arduino from PWM (responsible for AnalogWrite). That’s why even when you send the same values, you see a slight blink. The more frequently you send data, the more things flicker.
I noticed this more visibly when I set the frameRate to 1 in Processing. Then the flicker occured exactly once a second.
So the solution: if the brightness of your LED’s is not going to change, don’t send the same value over and over again to your Arduino.
This is as easy as:
int outputs[] = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};
int pins[] = {3,5,6,9,10,11};
void sendArduino(int id, int value) {
if (outputs[id] != value) {
outputs[id] = value;
arduino.analogWrite(pins[id], value);
}
}
12.27.2011 Paper
Sorry that I haven’t posted at all since I defended my thesis last week. I’ve been finishing up my tenure at Etsy, packing for my move, and trying to get some rest.
Here is my thesis paper, and I also uploaded some more pictures to Flickr.
12.5.2011
Fabricated version of yesterday’s idea
12.4.2011
Something that Engin told me a couple of weeks ago (“time you sit in a seat on a flight isn’t something of value, you should move away from the data you have towards the destinations themselves”) really stuck when Marius Watz re-iterated the same thing over an email conversation, when he called travel a “depersonalizing experience”. As all my initial samples were “air travel enthusiasts”, this is an obvious perspective I missed.
I know that this isn’t the time for new ideas, taking this into account, I tried a topography, where I map business-related travel to positive hills and leisure travel to negative valleys (and augment them for a combination of both, instead of them canceling each other out).
Since I couldn’t find an easy way to figure gradients in processing, I created the heightmap for this manually in illustrator. Then I used the BlobDetector processing library to extract the edges.
Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to produce this tomorrow from foamboard, so I can see if it works or not.
However cool it might turn out, since this is kind of similar to Fundament or Maya Lin’s work, I’m not inclined to make it my final product.
