E1n1verse

I was recently recording a narrated Keynote presentation for display on the web and found myself wanting to use the OmniGroup’s very cool OmniDazzle screen effects program in conjunction with Apple’s Keynote presentation package. Unfortunately, by default, Keynote doesn’t play well with other applications, as it intercepts all the keyboard commands. You can, however, convince it to play nicely very easily. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Open the Keynote preferences. This is in the program menu (or Apple/Cmd ,).

2. Go to the “Slideshow” tab.

3. Ensure that “Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen” is enabled with a checkmark beside it.

That’s it! Now you can use OmniDazzle in your Keynote presentations.

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When I was preparing for my thesis committee meeting earlier this year, one of the things I did was prepare a project timeline. In order to do that, I spent ages testing out project management software again, because working with FastTrack Scheduler was so frustrating and unrewarding. After a lengthy but rushed evaluation of several products, I ended up going with a relatively new product called Merlin from a German company. While Merlin isn’t perfect, it at least wasn’t frustrating to use and its import/export facilities meant that I could overcome some of its reporting deficiencies through the judicious application of other applications.

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This collage, created in March of 2005, is a mish-mash of important things in the different areas of my life: teaching, research, and fun. This PDF version was developed to print out on set of four A4 (European letter size) sheets.
Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) collage sheets

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The IDEAs and Interact labs are having an “away” day tomorrow. It’s part of our plan to forge bonds between the groups and provide a supportive atmosphere. As part of the festivities, we were entreated to spend no more than an hour creating an A2 collage to illustrate our lives, our research interests, and our influences. Of course, few us spent an hour. Mine is all digitally produced, my temporary housemate’s is digitally produced, and one of the new faculty was caught superimposing herself into a picture with Michael Moore.
As for my own, I chose to produce it on four A4 sheets and try out Apple’s Pages layout software, part of their new iWork package. Using one of their photo journal templates was satisfactory enough, but I found it more difficult to intuitively work with than FrameMaker or InDesign. Perhaps because I’m just more familiar with traditional DTP/layout programs.
It actually proved more difficult than I thought. In the end, I settled on a page about my research, my life in general, and my teaching, with the fourth (which is actually the first page) dedicated to general keywords related to my life. See the final collage pages.

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If I don’t finish my marking very soon, they’re going to kill me. The phone calls are increasing. With the ADD, though, I just have this overwhelming sense of guilt, failure, and frustration. More about that later. Something must be done.
Anyway, I have a plan. My Sweetie is helping me do some of the grunt administrative work that’s required (filling out the forms, uploading some of the files to each project directory to help check the functionality, checking for missing/incorrect project directories, etc.). While Sweetie’s doing that, I’ll put in a big push to finish assessing the remaining reports (22). Then, to take a break, I’ll fill in the scanning sheets for all the report-related marks for each student, and then have a go for a bit at assessing the coding parts of the projects.
The coding part is cognitively easier to assess for me as it’s definitely more black and white (it works/it doesn’t work; it’s written well/it’s written poorly). It still takes time to do, though, because you have to check through all the functionality for various points and write up the notes.
With luck, proper use of my ADD medication, and SweetieSupport, I hope to get it all in tomorrow evening’s post. I’ll let you know how I make out.

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Project marking has to be one of the banes of my existence. Right now I’m working on grading an end of course project consisting of a coding component and a report. The coding component is fairly straightforward to do. Other than perpetual shock at the things people believe is good design/coding, it’s something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. The part I have trouble with is the report.
Actually, any kind of marking where you need to subjectively weigh how close an answer is to what you want is difficult for me. Perhaps it’s because Ein’s have two states in many things in life: Ein/Auf, Happy/Sad, Tired/Bouncy. There’s not much room for shades of grey in the EinWorld.
Anyway, that leaves me with a 53 projects to finish and I’m already two weeks late and having trouble mustering any enthusiasm for it. To be fair, I already finished doing 60 for another course which also had a coding component and a project, so I am feeling a little burnt out and I do have attention deficit disorder. Nevertheless, I promised I’d be done.
As things stand, I finished 5 completely before deciding to switch to doing all the reports first. As the reports are independent of the coding component, that’s feasible. I picked the reports to do first because I like them the least and I’ll feel the most relieved when they’re done and the rest will be easy.
Of the 48 reports to grade, I’ve done thirteen. Any motivation, inspiration, or encouragement welcome!

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Professor James Fleck visited the IDEAs lab on June 4th, 2004 from the Management School and Economics at the University of Edinburgh, to present a talk on “Processes of Innovation and Design for Usability”.

This was a very interesting seminar, if not immediately relevant to my own research. Not only was some of the content fascinating, but the method of presentation was also novel. Professor Flack uses mindmapping software to prepare his presentation and then uses the mindmap as a navigation tool during the presentation. By clicking on a mindmap element, a separate page would be opened where he could explore that concept in detail or perhaps an image clip launched.

Here, belatedly, are a copy of the abstract and my notes from the seminar.

Abstract:

In this seminar I will outline a range of theories of innovation within the broader context of technological development, to draw lessons about how the design process may be facilitated or constrained, especially with regard to usability. The discussion will be grounded with reflections about several empirical cases. These will include the design of a particular “smart Product” (Persona–the electronic contraceptive) and the development of a “Personal Learning Appliance” for a new e-learning initiative at Edinburgh (The Global Innovation MBA–GIMBA).

Conclusions will address the need for practical trialling; the need for mapping the space of behavioural interactions (behavioural ergonomics?) and the need to overcome “default satisficing behaviour” among prospective users.

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