We were so happy to hear that our friends at Ext JS have partnered up with JQtouch and Raphael to form Sencha Touch, our great new hope for a truly cross-mobile JavaScript/HTML5 frameworks. We have been partners with both Ext JS and have worked with JQuery for a long time, so when we got to play around with the Beta version of Sencha we had high hopes. So far it has lived up to everything we dreamed about and we have already begun a few projects built on the Sencha frameworks.
We really think that we have re-invented online travel planning. Go to voyavo.com to check it out.
About two and a half years ago we had the opportunity to do some consulting in Athens, Greece. We had a set budget from our customer and a time frame for work, but really didn’t want to travel across the Atlantic from the west coast of the US to just see just Athens. We decided to try some meta-search engines to see what we could come up with for other options for cities to visit before or after our visit to Athens. We instantly grew frustrated.
What we found was that there was no real way to create actionable work sheets of itineraries using any of the existing meta-engines, online travel agencies and/or travel planners. Mocking trips up was a combination of scribbling down prices, creating spreadsheets, and re-running searches for availability and pricing back on the originating site. Alternately we could store this information in a travel planner, but do nothing with it until it was time to travel. In many cases it was an after the fact travel planning process that we didn’t enjoy. In both cases, our intent was to simply mock-up some destination pricing scenarios, but we found that it wasn’t really possible.
We decided that this process was broken and that it was time to give it a shot on our own. This was a larger challenge than originally thought, as we needed it to cover both business and consumer travel planning as our original use case required. After a year of the project sitting on the shelf we finally started it back in October of 2008 and yesterday we soft launched it to the industry.
Voyavo.com is 1/4 meta-search, 1/4 travel planner, 1/4 geo-located logistics, and 1/4 collaboration.
While we know there a few usability issues that we need to over-come, we’d still love to hear your feedback.
Search, Add some items to a trip, and explore your destination.
Enjoy!
I’ve seen a lot of gesture UI lately that just seems to be less efficient than traditional touch or mouse- based mediums. This, however, changes the game. Straight outta Minority Report (literally from the guy who worked on the movie). We live in the future.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
The other day we got to hang out with robots. I know what you’re thinking, but these weren’t your average everyday robots, these were robots that could look, speak, listen, and move. Two out of our five senses wasn’t bad. And did I mention they were being operated from a real person thousands of miles away?
The “coolness” factor wore off after a bit, but what really shocked me was the “humanness” I started to feel after a while. It was sort of creepy. As it stared at me blankly from across the room I began to feel as if it was just another real life person with me in the conference room.
It occurred to me that the only difference was in its lack of physical and emotional expression. You know those subtle hints you get in a meeting such as someone staring down at their phone to check their email, or shifting their body in a nervous manner, or smiling, or raising their eyebrows. It had a screen with a person on it, but it didn’t feel like enough.
Then I started to realize that our emotional and physical expressions are kind of the ultimate forms of visual feedback. You know “visual feedback”, that term that you’re so tired of hearing at design conferences. These emotional and physical expressions are so instantly communicative and rich in data yet it seems like we have forgotten about them in modern interface design. We’ve known them almost subconsciously since we popped out of the womb and yet they’re hardly ever used for feedback.
Red warnings or green confirmations got nothing on a good ‘ole smile. And guess what, there’s no need for localization (that is, until we meet the aliens). It’s so limiting to pop an emoticon into the input field. I don’t want to try and make a tongue at you with text characters (:P), I’d rather the whole screen give you the tongue. I realize there are technical and hardware limitations, but nothing we can’t get past in the next ten, twenty years.
Why do you think Johnny 5 had those metal shades for eyebrows? Wall-E? So they could express themselves, beyond a simple glowing red light.
Is there a career field for robot interface design yet? Sign me up.
Revolution or evolution of the office phone? Either way, we’re proud to announce that the team at Cloud Telecomputers has unveiled their next generation office phone that will change the game. We love innovative projects and passionate teams, so this one turned out to be a smooth, collaborative ride. We worked closely with the visionary team at Cloud to come up with the best workflows and processes for the product and to decide on the visual eye-candy and interface usability that a touchscreen interface requires.
Not only are they pushing the conventions of industrial design of office phones, they’re building their app on the Android platform which will mean developers can get in the game and make some really useful apps for businesses.
San Francisco + New York
+1.866.542.7124
hello@momentumdesignlab.com
Request For Proposal
