Personal UX {Events}

(Play associated slideshow )
Presentation for Pimp my UI at Fabelier, 9th of February

Proposed by @cybunk/@mazieres after AIW03

#fabelier on Twitter, identi.ca, Live Cast, TwitterStreamGraphs, Collecta, flickr

Attended activities

• Orgmode by Clemence
• mutt, awesome and Vimperator by Raphael
• Personal UX by Fabien

Orgmode by Clemence

• Orgmode
  • ordering tasks, tagging task, managing the calendar, TODO, timestamps, ...
  • cf #orgmode on freenode
• Ion

Shared the existing Vim edition VimOrganizer, Worg, MobileOrg for iPhone, android-orgmode Org-mode on android platform

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mutt, awesome and vimperator by Raphael Fournier

• code walk config mutt
• introduction to vimperator
• awesome
  • explanation on tilling
  • tagged consoles being directly moved to the right workspace
  • Awesome configuration files soon available on Fabelier wiki
• useful command line
  • !*
  • !!:gs/danglar/bar
• locally cached RATP map
• mention of Terminator
• differences with Ion, especially on tags and tiling

Shared muttator and commandlinefu

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Personal UX by Fabien

Slides : PersonalUX

• critics on the possibility to estimate your future most complex usage of a tool
  • but also problem of limiting your own creativity by being biased by what you consider impossible
  • cf Wikipedia:Learned helplessness
• own goal of maximizing Heuristics#ExpressivePower
  • which should let to selecting tools with specific requirements
    • API/hooks/scripts/macro/...
• quick note about coherence (e.g. Vi* shortcuts) to minimize the learning costs
• Q&A
  • limits/problems
    • it is not entirely programmable, as admitted later on on twitter
    • primitives should be more clearly defined, e.g. is UNIX philosophy enough?
  • why is it all public
    • WhyDoIPutAllThisContentOnline

Preparation and mindset

• visualization of expressive power of different interfaces
  • 
  • the green color does not mean that it is always the right solution
    • i.e. when one has no interest in creativity and knows his usage will be limited to low complexity of results, the red curve is a most efficient solution
    • the colors are used mainly to argue for results aiming at facilitating creativity rather than pure short-term execution
  • visual interface, mouse or even multitouch, can only do so much
  • curve to illustrate that, showing that for simple tasks it is great but it quickly get bounded
  • e.g.
    • selecting 5 consecutive file with the mouse is great
    • but for example file*this.v{1,2,3}that or selecting 1000 files is impossible
  • note that this could also be cumulative between different tools
  • down pits with distraction (hence the cuteness factor)
• bounded complexity, incited to think in simple ways, thus bounded in usage too
  • Alonzo Bodden-iPad 2010

Forgot to mention

• handling interruption with several ways
  • first and foremost trying not to get interrupted
    • else minimized "swapping" thus saving context
      • Windows-F11 to paste the buffer in a new Vim instance
      • /echo in irssi in screen (gives a timestamp)
      • shortcut to edit internal wiki buffer (gives a timestamp)

18:19 -!- also gives a timestamp

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Overall remarks and conclusions

• interesting to see what others are using
• sometimes hard to argue (or to refrain from arguing) based on the different usages thus needs
• rather personal (especially with demos) so probably nice restricted to a group of positive trusted peers
• based on the limitations noticed after my presentation, a solution could be to start curating tools that do meet those new specification with others interested participants
  • at first individually I could start applying categories to Tools e.g. [[!MEP_ViLikeInterface]], [[!MEP_HasAPI]], [[!MEP_SupportsHooks]], [[!MEP_SupportDaemon]], ...
    • this way I could list tools that are most likely to lower the global optimum
  • note the time to select a tool can also be integrated to the effort
    • consequently the time allocated to select such a tool could be proportional (not necessarily linearly) to its importance in the workflow
      • e.g. a tool related to a core task would have to meet all the requirements proposed while a tool for a peripheral task would be picked without much consideration beside popularity
  • maintain Wikipedia:Homoiconicity so that every new realization can become a tool to combine and be combined with other
• it is very hard to explain and justify what has become a natural habit
• lack of theoretical framework
  • philosophy of technology
  • design and cognition

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Other reviews or coverage

• here

To do

1. share for AIW
   1. Christophe Heintz's Web Epistemology
      1. email sent and redirected to http://nitens.org/taraborelli/home
      2. see also Cognitive History and Cultural Epidemiology
   2. Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition, Cognitive Systems Research 2008
   3. study Quora in the through Folk Epistemology, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2010
2. explore
   1. Wikipedia:Cognitive dimensions of notations#Viscosity as suggested by TheSheep
   2. ruby-wmii Ruby configuration/scripting for the wmii window manager, eigenclass
   3. MyColorscreen Where Technology meets Art
3. clarify the way to handle connectivity
   1. local mirrors with automatic updates
   2. configuration taking into account localhost values
   3. locally defined DNS
      1. switching to local mirrors when offline