01.17.09
Posted in literature, technology at 10:52 pm by rachel
No doubt by now you’ve seen Wordle.net, the awesome java app that creates lovely word clouds of whatever text you feed it? No? Well, you should check it out.
After talking about 1) Wordle and 2) Ender’s Game with my friend Sarah tonight over dinner, I decided to Wordle a few of the non-DRM’d ebooks I’ve collected over the years, starting with, you guessed it:
Our bets were on “Ender” “boys” “others” “battle” and “army” - looks like we didn’t do too badly. This could be a(n extremely dorky) fun new game! Guess the Wordle big words for your favorite book.
I did a few more, and they can be viewed here in my Wordle gallery.
This post is brought to you by my current obsession with books+technology, which is entirely the fault of the slick Sony PRS-505 that I bought off of craigslist yesterday.
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01.08.09
Posted in media, technology at 10:33 pm by rachel
No, it’s not a joke about lobbyists becoming better hackers! The NY Times announced today that they have developed a Congress API, which aims to expose Congressional data in a format that can easily be consumed by developers writing their own politics-related apps.
From the announcement:
The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes.
The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity.
The rest of the announcement goes on to detail which data sources they are pulling from, and ends with this call for feedback: “Just as it’s early in the 111th Congress, this API is in its beginning stages, and we have other types of information we plan on adding. Let us know what would be useful to you.”
If you are a political-junkie code-monkey (I know a couple of you read this) and you can think of some things that would be OMFGSOCOOL to have available via this API, you should totally comment. (Only 4 comments are up right now, so it looks like you have a good shot at being heard through the usual blog-comment noise on these kinds of things.)
I’m pretty happy that a major Old Media organization is stepping up to make this data more accessible via software - they’re both performing a public service and carving out a piece of the new media pie for themselves.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what people do with this API. I hope to see some slick webapps that make keeping up with US politics fun - maybe we can hold the attention of some of the millions of young people who turned out to vote for the first time in November.
Check it out: NY Times Congress API
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12.20.08
Posted in technology at 8:01 pm by rachel
Carrie just introduced me to a fun game: start typing “how to” on google and check out the popular searches that pop up. It’s like a little peek at the zeitgeist. The incredibly awkward, nerdy zeitgeist.
A relatively SFW example:
Have fun!
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12.04.08
Posted in technology at 10:30 pm by rachel
I recently acquired Lips for Xbox360. I expected to love this game because I enjoy doing vocals on Rock Band. And now that I’ve played it for about 2 hours - yes, it’s fun, but there are enough annoying little issues to prevent me from going ga-ga over it.
A word on delay: LCD HDTVs have lag, whereas receivers don’t so much, so the sound ends up ahead of the video. Rock Band provides a configuration tool that allows you to globally adjust for the lag and get everything synced up. Rock Band 2 can even do the configuration automatically if you one of the newer guitar with light and sound sensors. Lips also allows you to adjust for lag… on a per-song basis. What? I tried 9 different songs, and they all needed a -0.2 second adjustment to work right. Why do I have to set it in every song?
Also, these per-song settings are way too difficult to access. To adjust for lag, I have to select a song, select the video I want to use with the song, then hit start to break out of the flow and see settings, L stick to the delay page of settings, hit A, use the L stick to adjust, hit A again, L stick to another settings page, hit A, hit L stick to select “Yes, apply changes”, and hit A. Really?
There are a few other UX things that need polish. For example, once you’ve added a song to your instant playlist (what you’re about to sing), it seems the only way to get rid of it is to sing it all the way through. (I would love to be wrong about this - please correct me if I am.) Once the second mic joins the game, there is no way to remove it and get back to solo mode - and it’s easy to join the second mic by accident (knocking it off the couch does it pretty reliably).
That said, I did just play for two hours. I like the included song selection: out of the 40 songs, I knew 19 of them by name, which made for a good first experience with the game. It’s very clear how to buy new Lips songs from Xbox LIVE (though the selection is currently small), and not so clear how to add songs from your own collection, or what kind of experience they offer for plain ol’ mp3s the lack the karaoke lyrics/timing metadata that the Lips songs have.
I wish there were more quest-type things, a la Rock Band 2 (play this gig to get a Merch Girl!), but Lips does level you up as you amass more points, and the achievements flow freely.
In summary: great concept and great start on implementing it, UX needs some more love, and a more compelling story would really help.
In short, Lips 2 is really going to bring down the house.
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11.22.08
Posted in legitimate employable skills, productivity, technology at 10:06 pm by rachel
For those of you who are wondering what the heck I do all day at Microsoft, you can read about the upcoming launch of Windows Live Sync (the artist formerly known as FolderShare) over at the Windows Team Blog, ars technica, or over on our official announcement page.
Sync will roll out soon with the rest of the new Windows Live services. Stay tuned… I’m sure I’ll be posting more once everything’s out in the open.
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10.05.08
Posted in technology at 6:04 pm by rachel
iPhone applications are really starting to piss me off. I’m not talking about the good ones, that are actual client applications for their webservice counterparts (Facebook’s app is a good example) - those are great. I’m talking about the ones that are glorified shortcuts to mobile-formatted websites. (Yes, Bank of America, I am calling you out. What the hell is that about?) A lot of the iPhone apps that big companies have been launching quite frankly suck.
So when I heard about the “Obama ‘08″ application, my expectations were very low. I was expecting a mobile version of the website, maybe a streamlined donation interface, and probably some “go vote! go vote now!” nagging.
But the Obama campaign actually used this app to introduce completely new, phone-specific features. The one that blew me away was that the Obama ‘08 app tells you who you already know in battleground states by scanning the area codes of the numbers in your contacts list. Then it offers one-touch shortcuts to call them or text them.
It also displays upcoming local events based on your GPS (or tower location) information, some of which are immediately actionable (example: sign waiving today, 1 mile from here!), local campaign contacts, and provides quick access to talking points on major issues. Oh, and the UI is shiny and very consistent with the iPhone UX.
Apparently, it was developed very quickly by a self-organized group of volunteers.
In short, they did it right. Get this app on your phone, see where your disproportionately important friends are, then talk to them about Obama (and make sure they’re registered!)
Check it out: Obama ‘08 App for iPhone
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