–Engage

I have been working hard for over 2 years to create a new organization dedicated to the advancement of both interaction design (IxD) and interaction designers. It’s now REAL. Go to http://ixda.org/ to learn more.

What is also very exciting to me is that I’ll be working with some great people. My fellow officers (I’m VP) are Robert Reimann as President, Greg Petroff as Tresurer, and Lada Gorlenko as Secretary. The rest of the board of directors are: Mauro Cavelleti, Josh Seiden, Lisa deBettencourt, Carrie Ritch, Luke Wroblewski, Micah Alpern, Frank Ramirez, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Kevin Narey, Dan Saffer.

In the “more” section of this entry, I’ve added the complete press release.

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Luke in one of his latest pieces talks about how Google is adding subtle clustering models to their results. I think it is all well and good, but what about the already good examples of clustering that are already out there?

• Clusty by Vivisimo
• Grokster

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For some AJAX is marketing speak for something that has been around for years. For others, it is the salvation they have been looking for, for seemingly centuries. I would tell the former group that the latter group finally caught up, and you should revel in the growth of your
new community and accept them with open arms. Snobbery really won’t help anyone.

Recently Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path wrote an article for the duo at Ok-Cancel called “Why AJAX Matters Now”. As usual Jesse is insightful and dead on about why AJAX has arrived. More aptly I would say that Jesse describes well why the world is now ready for
AJAX where earlier uses of the same technology had really no chance of taking off. Jesse does still speak of AJAX’s arrival in his article, and while it is not such an important distinction, I would like to correct him and say that AJAX (as our former group notes above) has been around for a while, and that other environmental variables have been put in place to make AJAX consumable.

That is just the opener and teaser to this article.

I just wanted to link to this very clear and well articulated article about the history of web product design and why now more than ever IxD needs to be brought to the forefront of product design.

Content is King No More: Web 2.0 Is About Interaction by Dirk Knemeyer, Principal @ Involution Studios.

Microsoft has released a beta version of its Max software for organizing and sharing photos. It is the first software I have seen so far that uses the new WinFX framework that is going to be standard with Windows Vista.

Max as noted is a photo organizing and sharing application. It is basically an extension of the desktop that brings all your photos into one location. In this article I’m going to go through a full screens and describe how it works. In a next article I’ll do a comparios between Max and Picasa 2–UI aparent strategy, and then critiques of both. Further discuss Flickr as a completely hosted solution.

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