Next, Bruno Afonso with “Why should I bother” as a self purposed session. Ok i knew it was about web-design - he told me -, he talked about why should be a designer, design a site and not a programmer and why this doesn’t occurs as often as it should. By the end the audience started participating and shown their different insights on the subject.

Headed over to Tiago Forjaz’s presentation, he talk about the need a to focus and differentiate that exists in almost everything (like in a social network), but people still need to have a common denominator sothey can relate to each other share, an affinity. By beliving in this he started the project, with Leo Xavier - futher down - called “The Star Tracker” which intends to create a Diaspora.

Mike Stenhouse just blew my mind and showed to me how should you approach the construction of a social network by show how human tend to behave. The ideia social proof, reciprocity, rapport, which and must be implemented on a network to benefit from the full potential of the community. He showed also common mistakes and some of the best examples that exists out there.

Nick Cristea & Sanky - “Designing with common sense” was about the common mistakes made in design and how people interact with. They showed also their work, really impressive!

Multitouch Barcelona “Gutten Touch to Natural Interaction”, show how the mouse and keyboard have stayed almost unaltered over the years and how it’s not a natural interface. Then they showed us their amazing work and spiced up your minds to make low-budget multitouch interfaces.

Leo Xavier “Global Portuguese Talent-Social Networking for a better country”, told is experience on creating The Star Tracker community, it’s ups and downs, problems that he and is team encounter.

On the third day, I started by attending to the Brian Suda’s presentation, where he how can semantics bring more “juice” to web apps, and how Microformats can help us achieve this.

After it, I headed over to Eduardo Manchon (one of the guys behind Panoramio) session, about the Rise of the GeoWeb, well I must say I expected more, but I agree with him on how the Web, made maps more common to people and helped the development of new ways to use digital maps. He criticized some social networks and other sites that have bad implementations of web maps, some of them to the point where they don’t actually need them. I expected a bit more from him, but 90% of the audience were programmers, so in a way I understood his lite session about the Geoweb.

Manuel Lima, “Visual Complexity: A visual exploration on mapping complex networks”, was more than I expected. he showed how huge sets of data can be processed and create from them visual information which can be easily comprehensive. But the site Visual Complexity speaks for it’s self.

Before the coffee break, I did a coffee break, then I went to the Stowe Boyd presentation (although I think should had heard the Fred Oliveira presentation). He talked about why and how the Web converged to what it is today and it will tend to evolve in the near future.

The final presentation i went was Tara Hunt’s “Making Whuffie: the power of social capital and online communities”, was a really good presentation where she explained at the heck is wuffie, and also how can raising up users on a online community, by growing your wuffie.

Where’s the flickr photostream and some of the presentations.

 A big thanks all of the Shift’s team, it really was awesome! See you all on 2009.

The workshop also pointed out, that most of the times you don’t need to be on the front row of tech to make an impact. You can still make a differenve with low-end tech, keeping it simple and intuitive and let every one interact with it, by using everyday wireless objects pointing to the ubiquitous computing concept.

Tijmen also talked about the locative media concept and that was what really caught my eye. Mainly because it involves GIS. Basically, the concept goes into the locally aware technology, like beneficit from the GPS capable products, could supply users with specific content or media about the place the user is on. But it can be applied in many situations.

Sadly, I missed the Andy Budd’s workshop about “Guerrilla Usability Testing”, because it was crowded. I was told they had wine testing on it, offered by Cortes de Cima…didn’t get any, damn!

The next workshop I went “Proximity Services”. It just wasn’t for me, but maybe more for the advertising area, where they could use mobile devices to basically locally send media through bluetooth enable mobile devices and by proximity to an object a user would receive content about that particular object.

]]> http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/15/shift-day-one/feed/ http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/09/the-distorted-world-we-live-in/ http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/09/the-distorted-world-we-live-in/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:18:52 +0000 admin http://ulmii.com/blog/?p=106 Some bizarre images of the globe are presented on the picture gallerie of the Telegraph.co.uk site which goes by the name Atlas of the Real World, yet after putting the maps into to context, they make lots of sense. 

The top image shows the countries and areas of the globe that contributed substantially to reduce the Carbon emissions between 1980 and 2000, as you can see US is not helping at all!

The next image shows us the predicted wealth on the world by the year 2015, Europe seems to be fading out and Asia shows a huge a gain.

This one shows the Alcohol consumption around the globe, i can see Portugal…so proud!

These maps and more here.

We station at the Ermida on Vila Velha de Rodão, the activity consisted on the release of a juvenile griffon vulture to the wild just over the wonderful Portas de Rodão and on the observation of bird life. During the morning we were able to see many griffon vultures, a red kite, grey heron and eared blue tits (yeah tits). The event was promoted in Portugal by Spea, a Bird Life partner on 25 spots.

The journey to the viewing spot allow to map some roads that aren’t on the openstreetmap project, will upload it soon.

]]> http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/04/eurobirdwatch-08/feed/ http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/03/shift-08-im-there/ http://ulmii.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/03/shift-08-im-there/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:21:01 +0000 admin http://ulmii.com/blog/?p=68 This year’s theme will be about Transient Technologies, meaning the way we use technology nowadays and how it became a part of our daily lives. The speakers will try to cover a number of different fields like, Education, History, Genetics, Economics, Accessibility, Transportation, Mobile Technologies, User Experience, Energy and Architecture, Art and Open Technologies.

Really interested on how technology will shape the way we interact with it, mainly on the web and specially on how GIS will adapt to it and try to benefit from it.

See you at Shift.

Just noticed that Tim Sutton posted first preview of QGIS for a bunch of platforms, other suppressing app, that went from a lightweight and almost featureless GIS app to a full-grown GIS application. And it’s finally reaching version 1.0 after six years! My special thanks to the team kept developing QGIS.

Well even though I didn’t do much this past few days, I installed today the latest release of uDig, which can be downloaded here. Installed also JGrass plugin on to uDig and so far I’m really diggin’it, some problems with the interface on leopard, but running fine on xp.

Will post more thoughts about it, after using it at work.