I have been using Adobes products for more than 12 years. But recently, probably the last two years or something, their products just looks great. This is a simple splash-screen. Just perfectly laidout. Really impressive how their corporate or rather product design makes an impact in all their products, sites etc. I’ve just seen one really awful example, in their downloadmanager, that makes it a small step from perfect.

The total productdesign pushed through every aspect that I as a consumer have contact with is impressive. I have actually never considered all the places you can make a mark with your productdesign in software. Apple is just a whole experience and I just assume that it should look great. But it just strikes me sometimes, like when installing a demo from Adobe, how subtle and just very nicely laid out it all is. Impressive and it seems like the management realises the power of the graphic design in their case.

To visualise the data from this software makes the visualisation process speed up quite dramatically. It more or less cuts the “classic” visualisation process in half.

Having this fortune I can focus more intense on the representation and interaction than the ordinary visualiser can. It also liberates me from rough questions like how does these bit of data or information connect and relate. It is more or less just a matter of giving it a face. To simply show it. Wonderful.

But this also puts me in a rather new situation where I can start thinking about things that might be considered a bit more profound. Like where and how could we show truly invisible structures, like the enterprises business logic. And we can also go a bit further when it comes to decision-support systems. We will be able to “calculate” consequences and thereby also have the possibility to give recommendations depending on a certain consequence. Rulebased in natrue, but still, when you have a global enterprise of 20 000 people or more, it gets kind of hard to have utter control of the enterprise. Our little software could actually give you that. And with a decent visualisation connected to it, present information on a level that we have never seen before.

As the old saying goes:

“A person with a watch knows the time; a person with two watches is never sure.”

The single view of data is crucial in today’s rapid business, but data quality is essential and it has big problems right now. So many different sources. So many systems. It makes it hard to get decent decision-support even if you use a really good decision support tool.  These decision-support tools don’t really care about the quality of data. They just assume that the source is the correct one. Too bad everyone doesn’t use our software. The world of data would truly become a much simpler one.

I just love that. So true.

It comes from David Bolinsky from his talk at TED.

I was invited to this small visualisation meeting at the Ingvar Kamprad Design Center at LTH in Lund. I thought we were going to be maybe 20 people discussing how we could interact more together. But there was more than 90 people there so the interest was quite big.

It was quite nice and alot of fun to see the Virtual Reality lab live and all the other projects they are working on. Really nice people all of them and the informal sense gave a nice atmosphere that allowed for new contacts as well. I hope this new network of professionals could take off and become the backbone of visualisation community in the southern part of Sweden.

Originally posted December 5 2008

Today I moved from the Processing IDE to Eclipse as an environment for the 3D demo development. Hopefully this will mean a bit leaner development with better support from the IDE. There should be no apparent difference for the user.
I do this primarily because the processing IDE is nice for small sketches, but becomes cumbersome when the classes grow in numbers. But another important reason is that since I don’t see any real start for the ”real” java-demo in the Evolver-project I might as well take the demo seriously.

Entropy is a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of energy.
See below reflection on this term.

Could this be valuable to the analysis of a enterprises information state?

A measure like Information Entropy could suggest:
- ”the measure of the uniformity of the distribution of information”.
- ”measures the dispersal of information: how much information is spread out in a particular process, or how widely spread out it becomes”.

Strikes me that we could describe Business Logic Entropy as well…

Should get this into experimentation as soon as possible.

Reflection (quoted from chemistry student blog)

In second-semester college chemistry, just this year, I learned about the concept of entropy. Entropy, I was told, measures the tendency of a system to fall into disorder. And that’s probably what my instructor – a caring, competent, and well-educated person — thought correct, no doubt because that was what he himself learned as a college student. Entropy, we learned, is a measure of chaos.

This is a familiar concept, since culturally we speak of messiness (messy desks, messy rooms) as demonstrations of an increase in entropy.

I was completely fascinated by the concept of entropy, and had to learn more. I looked it up on the internet, and was most surprised by what I found. My teacher, along with generations of other scientists and educators, had been misled.

What we had all been taught (we students and my teacher as well) was wrong.  Thermodynamic entropy is not a measure of chaos. It is not a measure of the tendency of systems to fall into disorder and decay. The most current view of entropy states that entropy “measures the dispersal of energy: how much energy is spread out in a particular process, or how widely spread out it becomes.”

I just love this article from McKinsey. It ends like this:

“Companies seeking high rates of income and consumption growth will increasingly look to Asia. The fundamental drivers of Asian growth—productivity gains, technology adoption, and cultural and institutional changes—did not halt as a result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. And Asian economies—though they have rapidly deteriorated in recent months—are unlikely to be stopped by this one. The big unknown is whether the temptation to blame Western-style capitalism for current troubles will lead to backlash and self-destructive policies. If this can be avoided, the world’s economic center of gravity will continue to shift eastward.

Through it all, technological innovation will continue, and the value of increasing human knowledge will remain undiminished. For talented contrarians and technologists, the next few years may prove especially fruitful as investors looking for high-risk, high-reward opportunities shift their attention from financial engineering to genetic engineering, software, and clean energy.

This much is certain: when we finally enter into the post-crisis period, the business and economic context will not have returned to its pre-crisis state. Executives preparing their organizations to succeed in the new normal must focus on what has changed and what remains basically the same for their customers, companies, and industries. The result will be an environment that, while different from the past, is no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared.”

I sent an idea I had for a while to a contest at Yahoo for their BOSS mashup in october 2008. And I got honorable mentions! Yay. It was a really early sketch but I took it away immediately after the contest. It came out pretty nice given the time. Yet another spare-time project.

Base Data

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/base/

Maps

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/maps/

Mapplets

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/

Financial

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/finance/

Financial gadgets

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/finance/docs/finance-gadgets.html

Charts

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/chart/types.html

Visualisation

http://code.google.com/intl/sv-SE/apis/visualization/