David Mauro - Designer

Day 2 just wrapped up, though there is the after party later tonight. Until then I can recap the day.

I mentioned that yesterday there was a lot of talk about political memes and that I would like to hear more about it, and it turns out there was a panel this morning specifically about that titled “Lolitics: Memes and Politics.” Latoya Peterson did a really fantastic dissection of the “Shit X Says (to Y)” meme and gracefully described how these memes are the product of people trying to express their identities. She also talked a bit about the intersection of this meme and activism. She’s clearly a very intelligent and insightful person that was just very well spoken. Biella Coleman talked about Anonymous and what she sees as a big problem: their portrayal as this formless spectre/hobgoblin. Someone in the audience pointed out how this was a recurring theme in mass media portrayal of radical movements.

Although I wasn’t called on for a question, I got lucky and someone else asked the question for me about the role that humor plays in all this. Dan Sinker of @MayorEmanuel fame had a great, simple and straightforward response to this about that humor is needed both because it allows us to digest something so awful that we might otherwise avoid it, and that it simply helps it to spread and gain awareness.

I got to see Neil Cicierega talk, which I was excited about for obvious reasons. Not a lot of interest came out of it (a lot of Potter Puppet Pals fans asking questions about those shorts), but he did say something interesting along the lines of:

…and when I put that up on Newgrounds it got about 6 million hits, which is like 20 million hits in today’s currency.

And of course this was said very jokingly, but he very succinctly put forth what seems to be a topic of many of the panels here, the explosion of the size of internet culture. When it gets so big, when you look back at something from even only five years ago, you have to consider that ‘view count inflation.’ 

After that I headed over to the panel entitled ‘Adventures in Aca-mem-ia’ and had a great time hearing from a few academics about the how and why of their studies of internet culture in an academic environment. Internet culture is getting so prevalent that the word ‘internet culture’ encompasses almost too much for the word to even properly signify anything, so I think it’s really important that people are studying more closely what is going on behind the lulz. Why do we consume the things we consume, and what does that mean about us and our culture? I was particularly interested in Whitney Phillips’ topic of internet trolls. She probably knows more about the /b/tards and FB trolls than anyone else, and is clearly a very intelligent, motivated, and clever person. I’m really looking forward to see what she publishes on the subject.

After that, it was kind of a down-shift into the ‘Metameme’ panel. There were some really smart and interesting people on the panel, so it was kind of disappointing that they really didn’t talk about much of substance. The panel mostly consisted of the moderator showing the audience examples of various memes, but never really getting the question of why do memes spread and branch out, and how that ties into how internet memes got their name. It could have been a very interesting panel, but I think the right questions just weren’t being asked.

I suppose that’s it for ROFLCon. The Con is on indefinite hiatus, so we can’t plan on one in two years. That’s a bit of a shame because it was a lot of fun and seemed genuinely productive and interesting. If you’re out here, I’ll see you at the after party tonight!

Some panels about internet culture, a guy walking around with a boombox rickrolling everyone, photo ops with Tron Guy, and even a choose your own adventure program guide (props to Ashley Low). I didn’t quite know what to expect from my first ROFLCon, but this all seems about right. Having been to other more sub-culture-centric Cons in Boston such as AnimeCon, however, I can appreciate the level of discourse going on at the panels here. It’s much more of an actual conference than you might expect from the title.

Jonathan Zittrain (JZ) kicked things off with a great keynote about the authenticity of the web, and why groups do the things they do. I disagree with his point that memes are going mainstream because they have less artifice and that the core sympathetic truth is more exposed, I think that artifice of memes are simply becoming more mainstream. One of his favorite examples was the Bill O’Reilly “you can’t explain that” memes. He presented these as political memes that have less artifice than the more insular memes of the past. The Bill O’Reilly memes aren’t political (because the subject of the jokes is a pundit doesn’t make them themselves political, they are simply preying on his stupidity) and the artifice is simply much more accessible, but I think in fact has to be there for the jokes to be funny.

I really loved his comparison of Anonymous to the Ghostbusters: the ghosts are real (in the movie), and they are definitely being serious (their packs are charged), but they’re still having fun with it and making light of the situation throughout. I imagine any Anonymous hackers probably really appreciate a description like this because it acknowledges the combination of levity and sincerity. I think what JZ doesn’t quite hit on that always puts me off about the anonymous manifestos is the macho posturing that is a little too sincere, with lines like “you’ve brought this upon yourselves.”

JZ’s talk had a central message of “be your geek-self”, with a shout-out to Will Wheaton of course. It’s hard to argue with someone urging people to be themselves, but his evidence of internet culture becoming a part of mainstream culture seems loosely tied to this theme. I think being yourself is just as hard as it’s ever been. People still think you’re a little strange if you walk around dressed as a NyanCat, even if they have seen the video on youtube. He did a great job of lampooning the idea that one should “put away childish things” and that the desire to do so is in and of itself childish and motivated by fear, but I think the fact is that while mainstreamers do consume internet culture, mass media culture is still their bread and butter.

After the keynote, there was a great panel about memes in the international culture, Global Lulzes. Ethan Zuckerman moderated a panel of An Xiao Mina, Bia Granja, and Anas Qtiesh representing Chinese, Brazilian, and Syrian meme culture respectively. An and Anas talked a lot about the political ramifications of memes and the role they play. It was interesting to hear more about political memes after hearing JZ talk a bit about them as well. It would in fact make for a really interesting panel. The political cartoon has mostly gone away and been replaced with the political meme, and I would love to hear an expert on the subject talk about why humor is such a great motivator in the political arena. There’s also a lot of cross-over with mass-media with Comedy Central’s political offerings.

Perhaps the highlight of the day was Jason Scott’s (JS) panel “The Mysterious Mister Hoquim” which was about both the eponymous Mr. Hoquim that JS has extensively researched, and the theme of scams. JS raises an excellent question about tech scams: how do you recognize a scam when the essence of the industry is a perpetually growing technology with ever more bold, and even legitimate, claims made about its offerings? And where exactly is the line between exaggeration and scams? Also being a biography of an individual masterful scammer, he also asks the question “what made this man become a lifetime fugitive of justice?” JS’s presentation is fantastic as he has a way with giving life to a potentially dry subject and peppering it with humor. It’s a little sad they stuffed him into that scary zombie-proof building that is so reminiscent of a correctional facility, building 56.

I suppose I’ll get out of bed now and head out for Day 2.

My two year phone upgrade just kicked in recently. I would have probably upgraded to a new Android device, but they keep getting BIGGER. If anything I want a smaller mobile device; this thing needs to fit in my pocket. So instead I bought an iPhone 4S. Here’s a quick rundown of why I switched from Android:

• iOS development seems to be outpacing Android. Since I’ve had my HTC Incredible, I don’t know of any new and amazing developments for Android. iOS on the other hand has borrowed Android’s notifications, released Siri, majorly improved application switching, and took the OS from something I wouldn’t even want to use, to being a strong competitor.
• The white iPhone 4 is the best looking smartphone out there. In fact, it blows the competition out of the water. As much as I liked my HTC Incredible, it was not pretty.
• The camera on the 4S is pretty amazing. And with 32GB of internal memory, I’m hoping it can replace my point and click that I never bother to take anywhere.
• Games. I’m more likely to be reading on the Subway than playing games, but having Scribblenauts on my phone is so tempting.

So now I’m giving the iPhone 4S a test run (I have a 3rd gen iPod Touch so I’m familiar with the OS) to see if I can overcome the two major problems I have with the device. The first is that iOS does not have Swype (I could go on at length about how good it is at one-thumb input and why one-thumb input is such a better mobile experience, but that’s for another post), but the other problem I have is a major design flaw in iOS that is persistant throughout: it forces you to reach for everything if you’re right-handed.

First a quick look at how I’m holding my phone and why.

I’m cradling it between two fingers and the palm of my hand and keeping my pinky underneath to keep the phone from falling. This is a pretty-standard way to hold a phone. I’m using my thumb for input, which means I’m coming from the bottom right of the screen. Here’s an illustration of how easily my thumb can get to various areas of the screen (green is easy to reach, red is difficult):

Apple clearly recognizes this: the dock, recently used apps, and the single face button are all towards the bottom. But they’ve placed a very key button in the hardest to reach space: the back button. Drilling back out of a directory is something I’m doing a lot, probably as often as I’m using that single physical button to leave or switch apps. So why I am I shifting my hand to reach up to the top left every time I need to go back?

It’s not that the location doesn’t make sense: having navigation at the top of the screen is a long running standard, and if we’re navigating back, it makes sense for it to be on the left. But those are the easy answers. If Apple wants to give a one-button experience, other heavy use buttons shouldn’t suffer. Or maybe they should even rethink their one-button approach. Remember when all Apple mice were single click? Yeah…

I would call the placement of the back button in iOS lazy. It makes sense, but it doesn’t work well. And unfortunately this lazy design also creeps into how apps are displayed in the springboard. Everything is sorted left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Again, this makes sense, but is not usable as the first in a list of apps is the one that is the hardest to reach. This is all exacerbated by the fact that the list of apps are always being sorted in this order, so you can’t manually place the apps in easier to reach locations without filling the screen with apps. And if you do that, any shift in the order changes the order of everything below it.

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I wrote this post about a week ago and just sat on it. I found a Cydia store app that allows me to place icons anywhere on the screen which has majorly helped, but the back button is still kind of a problem. I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to it, but it will never be good. I’m waiting for the day when I drop my iPhone because I shifted the slippery phone in my hand to reach the back button.

canvas:

Drawcast is a rambunctious fun bundle of writers and artists who collaborate on Ustream to create drawings and stories. You can see some of their efforts in this podcast, playing around with Canvas shortly after we launched the private beta.  

They’re back hanging out on Canvas today at 3PM EDT, drawing and remixing in the Drawcast group. Come by and say hello! 

This is happening in an hour, come join in!

If you’re trying to log into OS X Lion and the login prompt doesn’t seem to be working, don’t keep trying to enter your password because you’re probably just posting it to the Skype chat that you’re in.

Yeah this happened. Everything was hidden behind the login prompt, the password input even had the blue outline indicating that it was taking the input and it appeared that my keyboard was just simply not working. What was actually happening was that Skype had focus somehow and I was posting my password, several times, into a chat room I was in.

I guess it was time for a new password anyways… ( -_-)

Recently I took on the challenging task of designing a color picker for the Canvas remix editor. The pre-fab color picker we had been using was clearly not working out (most users did not stray from the default #F00 red). The problem is that many of the people who are using the remix editor have never even touched a photo editing program before, while others are professional graphic designers. We needed to design for both novice and advanced users, and we needed to do it in a small enough space to fit into our remix editor’s toolbar.

To define any color in the full range of over 16 million colors your computer can reproduce, you need three values: either red/green/blue or hue/saturation/value. So while we can offer novices a color palette to choose from, the advanced users need fine control over at least three values to create any color they need.

Above is the default color picker in Photoshop. It’s a good example because it allows definition by HSV (also called HSB) and RGB, and it allows the values to be manipulated by entering values in a text field, or by dragging sliders.

Seeing as there are three vectors that need to be manipulated when selecting a color, you can give each it’s own slider, or you can combine two of the three to reduce the amount of clicks required by the user.

Photoshop allows you to adjust which two you combine, but the default as shown above is to combine saturation and value with hue off to the side. This is the best solution because saturation and value map at a much closer ratio. Here’s what MS Paint’s color picker looks like with hue combined with saturation and value pulled out:

The problem is that when selecting your color, you’re often left trying to drag carefully in one direction without deviating in the other. Hue packs a lot of information into it’s single vector, so ideally the user would have more precise control over hue than he has over saturation and value.

So if we combine saturation and value and separate out hue, we need to make the hue slider larger, but without taking up much more space. Deviant Art’s Muro image editor has an interesting solution to the problem:

Here they’ve given the hue selector as much space as the saturation and value combined. The problems with this approach is that now we’ve doubled the space the color picker is taking up, and we’re dragging in a circular motion, which is more cumbersome than a vertical or horizontal drag. They’ve significantly increased the space being taken up, but we’re not seeing a significant enough increase in precision of hue selection.

The solution I arrived at is similar in that the hue is being wrapped around in a loop, but it’s been wrapped around the saturation and value slider so that when dragging the hue slider you are simply making vertical and horizontal drags.

So now we have a color picker that satisfies all our needs. The color palette is immediately available for novice users. Advanced users can either type a hexadecimal RGB color into the text input (which doubles as the color preview), or click on it to open and use the advanced color picker which gives appropriately precise controls over hue, saturation and value. And it all sizes down to 150 pixels reasonably.

It could still stand to be prettied up, but I’m pretty happy to have created a color picker that I enjoy using more than Adobe’s.

Anonymous asked: dmauro, I love you. You're one of my favorite canvians. Question mark.

Love you too, Anonymous. Exclamation mark.

The conversation around metrics and design seems a little silly. As a designer my job is to make something that people will use. If something can give me a yes/no answer to the question of “does this design work better?” then why would I not be psyched to have that answer?

If we’re talking about a question as precise as “which shade of blue do users prefer,” then the problem is that you need to A/B a new design that gets results that dwarf any gains made from changing a single hue.