strayorange

Today I finally had a couple of hours available to work on ImageTweak and I decided to start by adding some new feature (way more interesting than fixing bugs!). The result is that now ImageTweak can work its magic (this word is severely abused lately) on videos as well. Mind you, only for native video (i.e. those supported by the HTML5 <video> element) and not for plugin videos (flash-based as well).

Right now it’s nowhere near an usable state because the user controls where thought for images and obviously video has different needs. I’ll need to try to figure this out well before pushing a beta. The good news is that most of the functionalities work out of the box just by adding a couple of abstractions. For example, zooming and rotations work already, and so does resizing.

Now a new problem arises… since it won’t work on just images anymore, should I change the name ImageTweak? If yes, how should I call it?

For a site I’ve been working on I’m developing a PHP module that allows to display page suggestions based not on the page content but rather on which pages past visitors requested.

The rationale for this is – intuitively – that the pages visited by the majority of  past visitors probably are the pages that the majority of future visitors could be interested in. It actually may sound more complicated than it really is: what it means is that when a user requests a certain page, the module extracts from the server log which other pages have been visited the most by past visitors of the current page.

Starting from this simple idea I’ve been adding a bunch of refinements, such as filtering out pages already linked by the current page, that try to improve the quality of the suggestions. As a bonus, I implemented a (rather basic) visualization of the scores as computed by the module. This can be a quite handy way to spot immediately if there are pages that are not performing really well. This is an early screenshot of this visualization (the column on the left contains the name of all the pages on the site and the column on the right contains the corresponding number of page views) that already highlights some problems, namely that the two top visited pages are poorly linked to the rest of the site (the corresponding row is completely red almost everywhere).

Obviously this approach is far from perfect, but I think is an interesting concept nonetheless. I already have some ideas about how to further improve this method – for example by taking into account not only the current page that the user is viewing but rather all pages the user has visited up to now. Also, since the website has (for now) very low traffic, scalability is not (yet) a problem but obviously for this to be really useful it should be made as scalable as possible.

Hello everybody, this is my first post on this blog. Actually I think it’s my first serious post on a blog.

During the last months I had to do with context-aware applications, social networks, user experience and this kind of stuff for my master thesis in Media engineering. I still haven’t choose any project to work on but I came out with some considerations on the actual social networks.

At the moment Facebook seems to be the best network for number of users, features and API. Google Friend has much less users but gives useful informations about the friends geolocation. Is this so revolutionary? Is this all we could ever have?

For sure I’m able to find my old schoolmates, to keep in contact with some friends living far away, to write my short notes on Twitter and to recall the face of the girl I met last night. But I think we could have much more!

Imagine a service that could manage the relations between people. A service that let the user control his personal data and choose who have the permit to see these data. I’m not thinking about an ethical Facebook but an innovative platform that could be used as the base layer to build applications like Facebook, a pervasive game, a restaurant app that consider my friends preferences to give better suggestions, a tool for keeping my contact list always updated and much more.

Imagine a social network open, free and distributed.

I’d like to know what you think about this idea.

A completely different logo for the upcoming Espressiva.
Made in Illustrator using this tutorial for the design of the patterns.

After Dubai and Lausanne (Switzerland), strayorange will also be in Helsinki (Finland) as I’m going to go there to attend – as an Erasmus student at the TKK university – the fifth year of my engineering degree. As such I’m starting to close many of the open issues I have open… Damn, time flies by!

The default header of the SimpleX theme we’re using was kinda flat, so I decided to rework it. There it is…

The first test for the gears that will be given away at Rock the Pine 2009. Everything has been done in PS.

Yep, strayorange has now an official blog.

Cool, ain’t it?