Four short links: 10 May 2017
Indie Finances, Fog UI, Push on Green, and Scratch for Distributed Systems
- Indie Band Finances — Pomplamoose shed light on the economics of their recent tour and how they’ve not so much “made it” as “are making it every day.” We’re entering a new era in history: the space between “starving artist” and “rich and famous” is beginning to collapse. Interesting for those tracking the gig economy and how people make money with digital creativity.
- MistForm: Adaptive Shape-Changing Fog Screens — Mistform combines affordances from both shape-changing interfaces and mid-air displays. For example, a concave display can maintain content in comfortable reach for a single user, while a convex shape can support several users engaged on individual tasks. MistForm also enables unique interaction possibilities by exploiting the synergies between shape-changing interfaces and mid-air fog displays. For instance, moving the screen will affect the brightness and blurriness of the screen at specific locations around the display, creating spaces with similar (collaboration) or different visibility (personalized content). Neat tech, but if you thought it wasn’t fun sitting beside someone using their laptop on the bus, wait until their display is basically a sneeze.
- Push on Green (PDF) — overview of the DevOps approach that Google takes. The nine steps of feature flags was a great a-ha for me.
- NetsBlox — NetsBlox is a visual programming language and cloud-based environment that enables novice programmers to create networked programs such as multi-player games. Its visual notation is based on Scratch, and it uses the open source JavaScript code base of Snap! NetsBlox opens up the internet with its vast array of public domain scientific and other data sources, making it possible to create STEM projects, such as displaying seismic activity anywhere on Earth using an interactive Google Maps background. Similarly, weather, air pollution, and many other data sources such as the Open Movie Database and the Sloan Digital Sky Server are available. NetsBlox supports collaborative program editing similar to how Google Docs work.
