Typography Exercise

Here's a typography exercise I did for my design skills class. Together, we had to animate the title of Der Lauf Der Dinge, or The Way Things Go. I had L and A.

Turing Project Reflections

Last Thursday, Aram and I gave our final presentation for our first class here at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. We had spent the preceeding four weeks creating a Java applet that introduces people to the Turing machine, a simple mathematical model of computers. This week, we're supposed to reflect on the process and what we learned (a lot, in my case).

After we decided on a concept, Aram and I retreated to our areas of expertise and started working: Aram on the design, and I on the coding. Two weeks later, two days before the presentation, our program was nearly done and we felt good. Then we tried it out on a few people from the non-Turing machine half of the class. That half-hour taught me more than the previous three weeks. No one could use the program without our help, and the initial tutorial felt too long and boring. I wanted to redo a good portion of the interface. It was a shame that our class didn't talk about prototyping, or allow us to use a language that facilates it (like Flash). We would have ended up with a better-designed program, though not necessarily one that was as functional.

That trade-off between design and implementation is another of the main lessons I'm learning here. As a software developer, my job was to get a program to work. Now, that's not always the primary goal. If you have a good enough idea and present it well, someone else can handle the implementation. Not that I don't want to build working projects, but I'm starting to understand that it takes a long time to build a system, and I'm better off with a finished design and prototype code than half of the production code. It gets other people more excited about your idea.

Two More Reasons Why the Dock Sucks

To add to Tog's nine:

• Hovering over a dock icon while dragging-and-dropping will not bring an application to the front or open a folder. (So when I use exposé to show my desktop, I have nowhere to drag the files.)
• The dock icons bounce forever when a program throws up an alert dialog, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything without first switching to the offending program. The last thing a computer needs is more needless distractions.

Anyone know any way to fix these? I'd appreciate it.