User-Interface on Jean-Etienne's blog

How to redesign a numeric keypad?

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 22:09:10 +0000

In an interesting blog post on Smashing Magazine, C.Y. Gopinath explained the design choices he made to build a new calculator for smartphones (iPhones more specifically). He started with an interesting summary of the reasons and origins of the numerical keypads of phones and calculators (keyboards, ATM, etc.). This is what drove me to read his post. Indeed I posted a photo on Flickr that showed the difference, a few years ago.

Any free solution for the demise of Google Reader?

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:56:09 +0000

Last week Google announced it will shut down its Reader service. It is a web-based RSS reader. It therefore allows to be kept updated of news from around the net in a central location. I liked the service for 3 reasons (on top of the fact it’s free, 0$, to use):

It’s web-based, accessible from anywhere/everywhere with a simple browser;
It’s text-based, you can quickly scan headlines and use the powerful search function from Google;
It’s backed by an API so you can use it via different apps on different platforms and they all stay synchronised (the web/mobile version of Reader is not as efficient as the web/desktop version; hence the proliferation of apps using Reader as a backbone).

Of course it frustrated a lot of people, from scientists to consultants … to name a few only. People are looking for alternative ( you can do a search on Google while the Search service is still working). Feedly is cited very often as the next best alternative. However its nice, graphical interface conflicts with my second reason to like Google Reader: it’s text-based. The Old Reader looks also interesting, it is text-based but no apps on different platforms yet. But both are also proprietary and can be turned off (or changed to a pay-for-use model) at any moment :-(

Visualizing categorical data in mosaic with R

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:46:25 +0000

A few posts ago I wrote about my discomfort about stacked bar graphs and the fact I prefer to use simple table with gradients as background. My only regret then was that the table was built in a spreadsheet. I would have liked to keep the data as it is but also have a nice representation of these categorical data.

This evening I spent some time analysing results from a survey and took the opportunity to buid these representations in R.

No more Read More!

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:52:55 +0000

Just a little post to write how I hate those “Read More” sentences in blog post!

[caption id=“attachment_1152” align=“aligncenter” width=“497” caption=“Grrr, again a disguised “Read More”! This post has a very low information content as presented.”] [/caption]

“Read More” is a way to cut your blog post in two: one part that will be shown in your blog RSS flux, on your front page and another part that will only be read by those who click on the “Read More”. A variant of this is the […] (as shown above).

Wearable electronics/communication

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:41:55 +0000

I became recently interested in wearable electronics and wearable communication. I think we usually don’t need a computer at home. But I also think that electronics, sensory / storage / communication / helper devices will invade our world (privacy) at one point.

A few months ago, I liked Phillip Torrone’s retrospective collection of wearable electronic devices (for Make:). It will be quite fun to wear some of the stuff he showed. However most of the current applications shown are mostly designed to collect information from the body they are attached to or to communicate with this body. This is very much self-centered.

Google+ API started

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:19:34 +0000

Google+ (G+) is a social networking and identity service operated by Google. It started a few months ago like a closed service from where you can’t get out any data and where the only possible interaction (read/write/play) is only possible via the official interfaces (i.e. the web and android clients). Google promised to release a public API and it partly did so tonight, here.

As they stated, “this initial API release is focused on public data only — it lets you read information that people have shared publicly on Google+” (emphasis is mine). So you can already take most of your data out of G+ (note that it was already possible to download your G+ stream with Takeout from the Google Data Liberation Front). As usual, it’s a RESTful API with OAuth authorization. It comes with its own rules and terms (it could be interesting to add to GooDiff). The next step would be to be able to directly write something on Google+.

We don't need a computer at home

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:03:00 +0000

Historically, computers were invented to solve issues in the factory or the office (university office or company office) but recently invaded home and are becoming ubiquitous.

At the beginning of this invasion, computers for home were (and are still) very similar to the ones for the industry/office: a CPU, a keyboard to enter data or commands and a screen to see what was happening. Artifacts to be attached to the computer were first invented for the corporate world and then progressively entered into homes. I still remember the first mouse we had at home: it was like a mini-revolution. After years there were still some software that could not take advantage of it or its usage was implemented but in a rudimentary way. Idem for the first webcam we acquired: only the provided software was able to use it. Now it comes embedded in most computer screen and can be used for various purposes (video chat, take pictures, read bar codes, art, …).

Two annoying issues with Firefox 4 (and their solutions)

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:52:28 +0000

The Mozilla Foundation updated Firefox to its version 4 last month and it has lots of interesting features. So I upgraded and although I initially criticized the new interface (when looking at screenshot from beta releases), I now quite like it: it gives more space to the actual content (web pages) to keep the “container” (the Firefox GUI in itself) to a minimum.

But … (because there always is a “but”). But I found 2 annoying issues with the new version …

Google and the bottom search box

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:07:12 +0000

When Google rolled out " Instant", they also removed the bottom search box. Bad idea.

Google Instant is a nice, web 2.0 improvement to Google “classic” where results appear as soon as you type them in the ad hoc text box. Google claims that Instant can save 2 to 5 seconds per search. Maybe.

But, at the same time, they removed the bottom search box. I extensively used this search box: when you enter your search criteria and look at the results, you may want to refine your search, add some terms, remove or exclude others, etc. With a second search box at the bottom, you can directly do it after having browsed the first bunch of results. Without this box at the bottom, you can’t: you have to think to scroll all the way to the top of the page and actually do the change in the only, upper text box. You lose 2 seconds to scroll back to the top of the page and you may lose some idea on the way (especially if you have 1001 ideas at the same time). When you sometimes perform a lot of searches per day, the time you gain with Instant per search is largely lost by the time spent browsing back to the top. I’m not the only one to think it’s was a bad idea.

Browser hardware acceleration issue?

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:57:44 +0000

Browser hardware acceleration is meant to render websites faster by allowing the graphics card (its GPU) to directly display “things” (videos, animation, canvas, compositing, etc.) on the screen. By bypassing software rendering systems, lots of websites seem to render faster. All major browsers jumped on this: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera (post of 2008!).

I understand that enhancing the user’s experience while surfing the web is something that can be interesting. Hardware acceleration opens the door to unseen compositions, to new types of animations, to new kind of applications. Directly in your favourite browser.

Cognitive Surplus visualised

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:43:18 +0000

In the 300-and-more RSS items in my aggregator this week, there are 2 great ones from Information is Beautiful, a blog gathering (and publishing its own) nice ways to visualise data.

The first one is based on a talk by Clay Shirky who, in turn, was referencing his book Cognitive Surplus. In Cognitive Surplus visualized, David McCandless just represented one of Shirky’s ideas: 200 billion hours are spent each year by US adults just watching TV whereas only 100 million hours were necessary to create Wikipedia (I guess the platform + the content) …

Software license and use of end-product

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:37:29 +0000

In one of his buzz, Cédric Bonhomme drew my attention on the Highcharts javascript library. This library can produce beautiful charts of various types with some Ajax interaction. The only negative point imho is that it is dual-licensed and all cases deprive you from your freedom:

there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ;
there is a commercial license for any other website.

Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.

3DSecure not secure

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:51:59 +0000

You may have seen in various places that “3-D Secure” (aka “Verified by Visa” or “Mastercard Securecode”) is not as secure as it says. The original paper is here (PDF).

Unfortunately, having implemented the 3-D Secure system via a third-party somewhere in Europe, I have to agree with the authors. I will insist here on one aspect - the inline frame - but the authors are giving more aspects and some solutions worth considering in their paper.

Evolution of H1N1

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:16:11 +0000

I needed some data to test the pChart charting library so I decided to use WHO data about swine flu (in its weekly updates). The only issue I had was that the WHO started to collect data by country and changed to gather data by regional offices from July 27th, 2009 onwards. So graphs below are only by regional offices.

For your information:

Redesigned Pubmed

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:41:32 +0000

I often wrote about Pubmed here. Briefly, it’s a search engine for publications in the biomedical domain. They recently redesigned their user interface and, although there are a lot of new things to save time that came with the new design, there is still a problem with their interface: the new search box takes too much space …

Redesigned Pubmed homepage ( bigger image)

Redesigned Pubmed result page: search box is hiding the logo, the display settings and the first result ( bigger image)

Taking automated screenshots from a live video camera

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:06:35 +0000

Following my previous post, I attached a video camera to the composite input of my tv tuner. One good thing I didn’t noticed yesterday is that mplayer can be told to directly use pvr:// as a source instead of the generic tv:// (with many options). So you just have to enter mplayer pvr:// -tv device=/dev/video1:input=0 in order to watch tv.

Noticed the input=0 above? This tells the tuner to take the video signal from the tv (read the mplayer man page to see how to change the channel). Now, since I connected my video camera to the composite video in, I need to tell mplayer to use it with input=1. One last thing: taking a screenshot in mplayer is done by pressing the ’s’ key (with option -vf screenshot. In summary, the image below was taken with mplayer pvr:// -tv device=/dev/video1:input=1:noaudio -vo x11 -vf screenshot (camera facing the screen).

A first step toward TV on my Linux laptop

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:31:05 +0000

I recently got a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 (a TV tuner, video recorder and FM receiver) because I read it was well supported on GNU/Linux. The following post explains how I installed it on a Fedora Core 9. If you want to install it with another Linux distribution, some information may vary but most of the following steps will be exactly the same.

First connect the USB device, the list of USB devices shows my system has recognised it:

Watch your webcam with mplayer

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:01:24 +0000

A small post just to keep this command at hand:
mplayer -fps 30 -tv driver=v4l:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video1 tv://

This allows you to watch what your webcam “sees” (provided it uses a video4linux webcam). Btw, Cheese is funny to use too!

I was also trying to find a decent Python library for video4linux but I only found outdated ones ( libfg, 2003, and pyv4l, 2002). I guess I’ll have to use some C library for a small project I’ll tell you about later ;-)

E-conferences

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:31:44 +0000

Following my previous post about an e-conference, Daneel Ariantho provided me with interesting informations …

The conference about scientific patents was part of Second Nature, (scientific journal) Nature’s home in the virtual world of Second Life. Following their description, Second Nature is home to scientific exhibitions, ongoing projects and regular events. The conference in itself was given in November 2007 but, unfortunately, nor slides nor podcast are available. In real life, if you miss a conference, you still have a copy of the slides or, at least, the abstract ;-) .

E-conference about scientific patents

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:49:58 +0000

While looking for pictures related to patents, I found these interesting ones taken by Daneel Ariantho on Flickr. They depict a virtual conference about scientific patents. It could be interesting to get more information about 1) the content of this conference and 2) the kind of conferences organized in these virtual worlds. It could also be interesting to see the social aspects of these conferences (are your contact better/different in a virtual conference?) and the “quality control” (of speakers, of posters, of advertizers, …).

Bad choice for France Télévision web platform

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:20:46 +0000

It’s sad to see France Télévision chose a proprietary platform (MS Silverlight) to develop its web platform for video delivery … They developed this “thing” with public money; the content should at least be available to all the public eyes (even the “without Silverlight” link requires to have Windows Media Player 11 which even recent MS-Windows PCs do not have).

Here are some general reasons why it’s a bad idea to develop something with Silverlight:

Firefox 3.0 + Flash on a protected Windows PC

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:40:17 +0000

Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps.

Most Firefox plugins (" add-ons") can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights …

Performance freeze in Windows Task Manager

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:30:07 +0000

I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature (*) but the Windows Task Manager doesn’t seem to refresh its graphs when we are moving its window. It’s barely noticeable when you usually move it (**) but you can spot this behaviour when one of your other windows is freezing.

( larger screenshot)

(*) I know this post is nearly useless but I’m tired of waiting for this freezing software …

OpenSocial, a step further towards a "society of social networks"

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:24:27 +0000

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …).

Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to:

Buttons cluttering

Mon, 14 May 2007 12:20:03 +0000

Image seen on a post on the Hyper Dog Blog:

Fortunately, the content was still longer than the right pile and bottom line of buttons. Can’t someone create a “social network of social networks” (and call it “Web 3.0” of course) to help those poor recognition-hungry-bloggers? ;-)

New website design

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:40:45 +0000

Small news to share my amazement for CSS: changing the design of my website took me around 15 minutes (based on a Ganesh Gunasegaran’s initial template). The content didn’t change. Only the way “semantic elements” are displayed was changed (+ some minor adaptations, of course). Et voilÃ! :-)

Next step: adapt this blog design to my website design (I won’t do it right now).

A small journey in the world of LiveCDs

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:50:51 +0000

I have plenty of other things to do but, this evening, I decided to stop a little bit and try some LiveCDs I freely got at Fosdem. Since I did it very quickly and was tired, don’t take what I wrote for granted: LiveCDs are there to be tested. Download one and test it by yourself!

The first LiveCDs I tried were derived from Sun OpenSolaris (and on the OpenSolaris starter kit DVD). BeleniX was quite cute, directly launching XFCE. Quite a few applications were there. Some refresh problems were also present in the console. An old USB key was recognised without problem, as most parts of my low-end workstation.

Search for images by sketching

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:30:28 +0000

On his blog, Laurent wanted to know who is this guy. I though it was an interesting starting point to see how good is Retrievr, “an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch”.

Although my drawing skills really needs to be improved (and their drawing tools more refined - always blame the others for your weaknesses ;-) ), a first sketch gives some interesting results (see screenshot below): 7 retrieved photos (44%) show a b/w human face in “frontal view” (if you count the dog, it’s even 8 correct images).

Interesting interaction between videotracking and computer games

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 09:01:00 +0000

In his blog, Jonas Hielscher wrote about an animal controlled computer game), where a player can play Pacman against real crickets! It is so cool, I shamelessly copy and paste his screenshot here :

I find it cool to see nice application of tracking, like I did (tracking) with my rodents:

Tracking of a rat in the Morris water maze
rat = big, red spot on top
its trail from bottom is also in red

Identity 2.0

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:54:56 +0000

This week-end, I attended a scientific meeting and, although the content of the presentations were often interesting, they also often lacked attractiveness. This reminded me two videos I stored, some time ago, on my hard disk. SÃ©bastien Lorion called them “refreshing”. And, for me, not only these presentations look beautiful, they also talk about an interesting topic: who are you on the internet ?

In the first presentation (a keynote at OSCON 2005), Dick Hardt talk about what is identity and how do we prove who we are, in the online world.

GUIdebook, a graphical user interface gallery

Thu, 11 May 2006 00:01:36 +0000

A nice link found tonight: GUIdebook is a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). There is no judgment nor opinion associated with choices made by the various companies. They just show what is and what was the user interfaces, icons, splash screens, etc. of various operating systems and software.

Looking for a C++ widget toolkit for Linux

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:25:37 +0000

I am looking for a widget toolkit (a software bag of things that allow you to create GUI). I have two desideratas: I want to use C++ and I want to use it on GNU/Linux. I’ve found two big lists of widget toolkits: one on Wikipedia and one on atai.org. For the moment, I think of using gtkmm or wxWidgets but I need more information …

Now, some grumpy people will tell me they only use text-based applications ;-)

if x==456 then //checks for conditional x and executes code if x is true

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 06:46:32 +0000

In What Workplace Coding Practices Do You Use? (Slashdot), there are some interesting notes about coding practices. The main one is, of course, the use of comments (and good ones: synchronised with code update, not too short, not too long, not explaining obvious lines like (if x == 456) except if it has a very special meaning, it may be interesting to write comments first in order to have clear ideas of what we want from the code, etc.).

The importance of labels (on icons)

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:27:27 +0000

While looking at the User Interface guidelines from various well-known companies, I found this text stating The Importance Of Labels. In his blog, Jensen Harris (apparently working on Outlook at Microsoft) write about his experience with icons: icons only are not used by non-expert people although icons with label are extensively used. When reading the comments at the end, I saw an interesting thread … If we accept that people will preferably use labelled icons, why not try text-only buttons (instead of icons)? I probably won’t work since, when using the two (icon + label), you are simply making an association between the meaning that you can read in text and the symbol. Later on, you’ll simply look for the symbol, knowing that it has a certain meaning in a certain situation.