Design O’The Times
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Font, Design, Windows 7, visualisation, Web browser, Microsoft on
You might think it’s just a font, but it’s not really. It’s a statement of who you are, what you mean, and why you’re doing something.
Pretentious?
Perhaps - but it’s still true. There’s an underlying meaning and message in the shape of the type face you’re using. Serif fonts can be serious, with plenty of gravitas just like The Times used to have, while sans serif are direct, quick to deliver a message. Bold fonts emphasise, while italics rush you along. Then there are the many millions of speciality fonts, which give your message a spin that only they can. And then, of course, there’s Comic Sans - but there’s always a runt of the litter (or in this case, a runt of the letter).
It’s a matter of semiotics. There’s meaning to the symbols we use, meaning that we all interpret in slightly different ways. Some if it comes from the way those symbols are used in a cultural context, while other comes from the very shape grammar of the symbol - angular shapes are disturbing, while smooth lines are pleasing. We can go on: circles encompass, arrows point, while lines join things together. The meanings in symbols touch users and viewers in visceral ways, and a poor choice can be the difference between a customer saved and a customer lost.
Last week there was a disturbance in the force, as if a million designers had suddenly cried out in shock and anger. Ikea had changed the font used in its catalogue. It wasn’t a big change, a switch from Futura to Verdana. Both were similar sans serif fonts, though with one big difference: Futura had been designed as a modernist font, with distinct political intentions - while Verdana, well it had been designed by Microsoft to look good on screen and on print. To most of us it wasn’t much of a change - and one we barely noticed. Even so, there’s a change. Ikea’s edginess has become replaced with a comfortable, everyday look. It’s part of the background now,no longer out on the cutting edge. What’s more, it’s also cheap.
That’s the sort of message we need to consider in the fonts we use on our web sites and in our applications. Design is important in conveying the message behind a brand - just look at how the fonts BP uses have evolved over the years to carry the company’s corporate message. It’s a subtle process, but one that works well, and one that can increase user engagement with applications and services as well as with online properties. Yes, it’s easy to use one of the default fonts in Windows or OS X - but is that the message you really want to give?
One thing that’s changing are the limitations of screen fonts. Complex ligatures and the like just don’t work well when you’re laying out a page on screen. Computing the positions of letters is hard enough, let alone trying to deal with flying lines and curves.
If you’re running Windows 7 (and Office 2010), why not play with Gabriola. It’s a new font with a difference - now you’re able to use those complex design type effects no matter what you’re doing. It’s the first font with the hints needed to build on new screen layout features that come with the latest version of ClearType. It’s an impressive feat - and something we hope that other fonts will support soon.
After all, good design really does matter.
–Simon
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ScreenCams made easy (for fun and profit)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, visualisation, Applications, Windows on
DEMO09’s consumer focus slid over into the business world in more than one place. We’ve already looked at AppZero’s cloud computing tools - but there was one area of business computing that got quite a lot of attention: the screencam.
Often thought of as a training tool, screencams let you capture what’s on screen - with narration and captions where necessary. There are plenty of screencam tools out there, but they’re expensive and awkward to use. The result is that something that could be a quick and useful collaboration tool is relegated to specialised projects and careful authoring.
Two products unveiled at DEMO are aiming to change all that. The first, Pixetell, lets you quickly voice annotate content that’s sent by email. While its annotations aren’t the full screencam experience, they mean that you can quickly describe what needs to be done to a document or a diagram, without having to spend time writing long involved descriptions.
The second, Citrix’s GoView, is much more the traditional screencam - but this time with built-in sharing. You sign up for the free service, download a small application, and you can quickly capture all your on-screen actions, along with your narration. The resulting movie can be edited online, and then hosted on the GoView service. All you need to do is email or embed a link, and everyone who needs to see the screencam is able to view it in a Flash player.
There’s a lot of scope for this type of tool. Support staff can get a view of just what a user’s doing when a repeatable problem reoccurs, while instructions for a new application can be enhanced with real-world screencams showing just how users can get the most from their new tool. They can even become a tool for sharing results and showing how Excel spreadsheets can be explored.
Bringing screencams out of the training ghetto is an important move. It means that a useful tool is now ready for prime time, and for a much wider class of user. There’s a lot of promise here, and a lot that can be done - and (we suspect) much more than we’ve thought about…
–Simon
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
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CPU vs GPU, mythbusted or mythdirected?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in visualisation, Processors, Silicon on
The folk from Mythbusters were on hand at NVision08 to show the audience the difference between CPU and GPU computing. In true Mythbusters fashion they did it with vast amounts of paint, and what must have been one of the world’s largest paintball guns.
First they began with a simple (for them) demonstration of serial operations - using a paintball gun wielding robot to draw a smiley face on a whiteboard. A hundred or so blue dots made the robot one of the slowest (and loudest) dot matrix printers we’ve seen.
Parallel operations would take something a little larger, and their 1100 paintball inkjet printer filled much of the stage. Powered up it would create a picture of the Mona Lisa in glorious 8-bit colour in a fraction of second. Huge air tanks held the compressed air the device needed to simultaneously launch all the paintballs in all the tubes.
The demonstration was certainly impressive, but it was more than a little misleading.
The type of data-centric work that CUDA GPUs handle is more about using parallel processes to handle lots of small pieces of data, not about building complex images from small pieces of data. With a parallel architecture like that you develop algorithms that break down big problems and big data sets into smaller, easier to work with, pieces. Farmed out across tens and hundreds of processors in a GPU, each data block can be processed, before being reassembled and the results delivered.
They’re not new techniques, either, for one thing the approach is at the heart of computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis. The parallel techniques used in GPU computing are certainly impressive, and are already delivering supercomputing to the desktops of the scientists and engineers who need the power (an Nvision session on using GPU-based supercomputers to model the plasma dynamics around neutron stars and the black hole at the centre of the galaxy was particularly impressive). Low-cost high-performance computing is the GPU’s strength, especially when compared to the hefty power requirements of an equicalent array of traditional CPUs.
The Mythbusters’ demonstration was good (and an enjoyable piece of theatre), but it really told a different story. So how could the intrepid special effects team have told the real story of GPU computing?
How about one robot carrying a large, heavy cube across the stage? Suddenly it’s joined and over-taken by a swarm of smaller machines, all carrying smaller cubes - cubes that weigh as much as the single cube on the struggling robot. Or if paint is the preferred metaphor, a can of paint slowly emptying through a single pipe. Meanwhile another can empties through hundreds of holes in much less time.
So, how would you demonstrate it?
–S
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Wildfire!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in visualisation, FiRe, Google on
Driving from San Diego to Silicon Valley up the 101, we passed an airfield where helicopters were loading up with water and fire retardants. They were helping to control a wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains, where dry bush had been burning for nearly six days. I knew what they were doing, and why, as I’d just had a crash course in California’s fire problems.
Back in San Diego, at FiRe, I spent some time listening in to a group of CTOs and other tech luminaries trying to come up with an improved IT architecture for fire fighters dealing with wildfires. Inspired by the response to 2007’s disastrous fire season, science fiction author and TV presenter David Brin presented a panel from all sides of the tech industry with a challenge from the local supervisor.
The panel included Larry Smarr, the head of UCSD’s super computuing visualisation lab. He had experience of helping coordinate volunteer imaging specialists during the fires, and of using the university’s IT resources to help disseminate information. The panel was joined by two local subject matter experts - one of whom was a fire chief who’d had to put his own men in the path of the fire to help track the source of the flames.
It turns out that San Diego has a lot of the basic infrastructure needed to build an effective fire detection and warning system - including sensors on mountain tops in risky areas. What’s really needed are a way of increasing sensor coverage at times of maximum risk - and of pinpointing fires directly. Information also needs to be routed to help support decisions that need to be made quickly - and presented in a manner that makes sense. Visualisation tools are important here, as they can bring information from multiple sensors and display it in an easy to understand manner alongside appropriate geographic information.
Two days weren’t enough to solve the problem, but plenty of good ideas made their way into an overall system diagram. FiRe’s brains trust may not have prevented the next round of fires, but some of its ideas will go back to the team at UCSD - as well as to the local fire departments. San Diego may not yet use airships to spot fires, but better image processing and improved sensors could go a long way to saving lives and property.
San Diego’s fires also made it to this week’s Google IO (our San Francisco destination). In a presentation on Google Earth, it tutned out that a local radio station used Google’s tools to create an impromptu early warning system on its web sites. Fire reports were plotted on a map, and used to help predict the likely trajectory of the wildfire.
Imaging and visualisation are critical technologies. We’re visual animals, and a well designed image can compress huge amounts of information into very few lines. Appropriate imaging (if it’s on UCSD’s super computers, or on Google Earth) is a powerful decision support tool - and one that in the face of wildfires most certainly saves lives.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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