Welcome to Ideum Labs
If you’ve read Ideum Blog and you’ve been keeping up with GestureWorks and Open Exhibits, you know that we’re fast moving and productive group. The unfortunate thing about being this productive is that we often don’t get the chance to share all the cool ideas, experiments, and discoveries we’ve made along the way.
Enter Ideum Labs, our new Tumblr blog. Labs was conceived as a high output, low production value home for Ideum and GestureWorks Staff to share raw ideas, UX experiments, project snippets, random acts of science, and interesting HCI + multitouch news.
What have we shared thus far? How about wood-paneled multitouch tables, unpainted touch walls, multitouch solitaire (a la Windows XP), Windows 8 beta, and multitouch Van Gogh.
Learn more about Ideum Labs at Multitouch-Labs.tumblr.com, or read all the Labs posts on the Ideum facebook page.
New Features Added to ExhibitFiles
ExhibitFiles is an NSF-sponsored community site for exhibit designers and developers. Together with Project Directors Wendy Pollock and Kathleen McLean, as well as a dedicated group of advisors, Ideum has helped develop and operate the site. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the community site grow from a couple dozen people to nearly 1,600 members and there are now over 200 member-contributed exhibit case studies and reviews.
Last week, we rolled out some new features, including improvements to the Members section, greater visibility for the ‘Bits feature, and major improvements to the search function. Individual profiles pages were also redesigned. A new tab navigation system makes it easier to browse individuals’ contributions to the site and connect to social networking and file sharing sites. Check out my profile on the ExhibitFiles site to view the new functionalities. We will be rolling out a few other features and improvements to the site in the next month.
In other news, new research findings from a study of the ExhibitFiles community was posted on the ExhibitFiles blog today(see ExhibitFiles: a growing community). The study was conducted by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting. More research will be posted in the coming weeks.
Multitouch Tutorials Abound
. . . on the GestureWorks site. Today, we’ve posted a tutorial on how to make a multitouch twitter application in Flash. Not your cup of tea? Maybe you’d like to make a multitouch Google Maps/flickr mashup or just learn the basics on how to create multitouch applications in Flash & Flex.
Our tutorials have been some of the most visited pages on the GestureWorks support site and and we’re looking to expand the list even further. We’d love to hear suggestions on what kinds of tutorials you’d like to see on the site. Tweet us @gestureworks or comment on this post.
American Association of Museums and the Society for Information Design Conferences
Next week will be a busy one as we will be exhibiting at the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference in LA and attending the Society for Information Design (SID) in Seattle.
If you’re attending AAM please stop by booth #1219 and check out our MT-50 Multitouch Table with a clear plexi-glass front panel. We’re also showing off some of our custom applications on the new 3M 22″ multitouch display. On Sunday night, we will attend the AAM MUSE Awards and find out if our EM Spectrum exhibit 100″ Multitouch Table we developed with Adventure Science Center is a winner.
If you’re attending the AAM Monday night party, you can check out our multitouch table in action at The Getty! They developed a custom exhibit using our own GestureWorks framework for Flash. The Getty’s Iris blog has a story about the exhibit, see: Exploring Los Angeles on a Multitouch Table.
On Wednesday night, off to Seattle for the SID annual conference. Thursday is The Future of Touch & Interactivity Conference, with keynotes from multitouch “rock stars” Bill Buxton, Principle Researcher from Microsoft and Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel. It should be an interesting day.
We will be tweeting from both GestureWorks and Ideum and using #AAM10 and #SID2010, if you’d like to follow. If you’re attending either of these conferences and would like to meet up, let us know.
GestureWorks – Multitouch Framework for Flash
After months of development, we have set the release date for our multitouch framework and development environment for Adobe Flash. A free public alpha version will be available on July 15th. You can learn more about GestureWorks at gestureworks.com.
We built GestureWorks to speed the development of our own multitouch and multiuser exhibits, but soon realized it this would be of value to others Flash developers.
GestureWorks provides a single solution for the HP TouchSmart and Dell Studio One multitouch enabled computers. We include optimized drivers for the NextWindow (multitouch overlay) that comes with each of these systems. The framework greatly speeds development in Flash. It is also extremely efficient: multitouch enabled applications created with GestureWorks run faster, using significantly less CPU than those using other authoring approaches. GestureWorks will be available for Mac OS X and Windows and will work with Adobe Flash CS3 and CS4.
Additionally, GestureWorks will ship free with our multitouch table, and it works in conjunction with NUI’s Snowflake software. You can see a full list of features and performance information on the GestureWorks site.
To be notified of the free public Alpha, you can join the mailing list on the GestureWorks site. You can also follow GestureWorks on Twitter.
Ten Twitter Tools – Helpful Utilities
Twitter continues to rise in popularity and dozens of museums now use this micro-blogging service. While we have yet to employ Twitter with one of our museum clients, there are a diverse group of museums large and small already using Twitter. Just search for “museum” on Twitter and you’ll find a number of examples (such as the Discovery Center from Springfield Missouri below). It seems likely many more museums will follow in the coming months.
Though we’ve just begun to build our own Twitter presence for Ideum and have personally been on Twitter since 2006 (www.twitter.com/jims), although I barely used the service at first. Recently, I’ve been more interested in the service, and I’ve come across a number of utilities that make Twitter much more useful and easier to integrate into other site. Here’s a round up of some of the better ones:
1. TwitterFeed. Last month, I blogged about TwitterFeed and mentioned how I’ve set this to send our latest blog posts from Ideum and featured mixes from RSS Mixer to Twitter.
2. TweetLater. This site allows you to schedule posts to Twitter. You can even set up automated thank you notes to new followers.
3. Ping.fm. You can update Twitter along with other social networking and microblogging sites like; Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Yahoo! 360, WordPress, and others. An alternative service is Hellotxt.
4. Twitter on Facebook. The Facebook application for Twitter.
5. Twitt.icio.us. A simple barebones utility that lets you import links from your Twitter account into your del.icio.us account.
6. Twitter Tools. A plug-in that integrates Twitter and WordPress.
7. Twitterbar. A Firefox tool bar for posting Websites to Twitter from your browser’s address bar.
8. Tweetr. A desktop utility for Mac and Windows that let’s you update your Twitter status. You can post photos, check updates, and more. Built with Adobe Air.
9. Twitteroo. Send messages to your Twitter account from your desktop for PC.
10. Twitterpost. A Mac-based desktop Twitter tool.
Another point to remember is that your Twitter presence has an RSS feed associated with it. This allows you to add your Twitter stream to any readers or RSS enabled widgets. Finally, to learn more about Twitter and microblogging in general, you might want to take a look at TweetCrunch which is dedicated to the subject. If you know of any other useful utilities, feel free to add them to the comments.
Using TwitterFeed to Update Twitter
If you have a Twitter account, you probably already have blog, a Facebook page, a Flickr account, a YouTube account along with other points of presence on the Web. For many of our museum clients, managing this extended presence with limited resources is a constant challenge. So anything that comes along that makes this process easier is of great interest.
This week we created a Twitter site for RSS Mixer. I wanted to find a way to help keep this Twitter site up-to-date without having to manually enter every update. I came across TwitterFeed which takes your RSS Feed and automatically posts updates to Twitter. It is simple to use and while it isn’t a replacement for manually adding updates, it certainly helps and saves you having to manually update every blog post to Twitter.
