Deus Ex Machina Labs

Experience Design & Strategy

j0nny — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:56:54 +0000

When recently thinking about Experience Design & Strategy in regards to a recent project I could not help but think of Mark Rothko…

“only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.”

- Mark Rothko

Google Wave ♥ iPhone ♥ iTouch

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:27:55 +0000

Typical Google login screen

Browser detect screen, “If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead.

Ahhh, the list of waves

Testing, creating a wave via itouch

After reading an article on TechCrunch about accessing Google Wave via an iPhone, I had to try it myself.

Here are a couple of screenshots of my experience. I have always seen the browser warning message, but I did not see the fine print to click through. After clicking through, the interface is very similiar to the Google’s gmail interface.

To view a particular wave is still rather slow for the iphone.

Google wave

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:07:50 +0000

After playing around with Google wave, I found myself asking what next. Below are just a few extensions/gadgets you may want to expore.

Robots

(To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)

Chatbots

Eliza - ogenex@appspot.com - An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.
Elize - elizarobot@appspot.com - Is one of the first robots that was created by non Googler and is very useful if you are feeling alone in your Google Wave client.
Rude chatbot - notatory@appspot.com - An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.
TooAngel Wave - In Progress - tooangel-wave@appspot.com - A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way

Conversion

BotURL - boturl@appspot.com - A URL Linker that replaces full URLs with hyperlinks.
Calcbot - calcbot@appspot.com - This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.
Cartoony - cartoonybot@appspot.com - Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.
Dice Bot - dice-bot@appspot.com - Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.
Flippy - flippy-wave@appspot.com - Turns text upside-down.
Fnordlinky - fnordlinks@appspot.com - Replaces “PMID ” with article information from PubMed.
Hearty Emobot - hearty-emobot@appspot.com - Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.
i-cron - i-cron@appspot.com - Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().
Insulty - megabytemb123@appspot.com - Information Needed
IPA Bot - ipa-bot@appspot.com - Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.
Piratify - piratify@appspot.com - Turns whatever you type into “Pirate Speak” .. Arrrr.
Plotzie - plotzie@appspot.com - Plots sparklines from your data.
Shortee - Wish - Change “c u l8r” to “see you later” etc.
Swedish Chef - borkforceone@appspot.com - Changes english into Swedish-Chef Speak. Bork! Bork!
Syntaxy - kasyntaxy@appspot.com - Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.
Watexy - watexy@appspot.com - Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!
Wikify - wikifier@appspot.com - Replaces specific marked up text with a link to Wikipedia or a description relevant to the marked text.

Games

Hangman - wavehangman@appspot.com - Play Hangman.
Roshambo - roshambowave@appspot.com - Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).
Speedy - Wish - Track the words per minute of all participants, competitive typing!

Groups

Groupy - groupy-robot@appspot.com - Robot to manage groups.
Groupy - groupy-the-bot@appspot.com - Robot to manage groups.

Integration

drop.io - mikeswaverobot@appspot.com - Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.
OpenAustrailia - In Progress - A robot to allow interaction with the OpenAustralia web site.
PlonieBot - In Progress - ploniebot@appspot.com - Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS
Poppy - In Progress - poppywave@appspot.com - Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.
Rssybot - rssybot@appspot.com - Turn google wave into an RSS reader!
Starify - starifybot@appspot.com - Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.
Tweety the Twitbot - tweety-wave@appspot.com - You can access your Twitter account.
Twiliobot - twiliobot@appspot.com - Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.
Wave-Email - In Progress - wave-email@appspot.com - Provide an extension to Google Wave which will allow the integration of both sending and receiving emails.
Wave Live Messenger - wavelivemessenger@appspot.com - Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.

Language

PhilBot - Wish - A suggested solution to the problem of waves with languages you can’t read.
Rosy Etta - rosy@wavesandbox.com - Translator (40 Languages).

Polling

Polly the Pollster - polly-wave@appspot.com - Poll Bot.

Search / Aggregation

Dr Maps - dr-maps@appspot.com - Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
Dr Weather - shiny-sky@appspot.com - Gives the weather for a City
Embedded Search Results - wave-sandbox@appspot.com - Web and Image searches inline.
FML Blipper - fmlblipper@appspot.com - displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
Grauniady - grauniady@appspot.com - Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
Stocky - stocky-wave@appspot.com - Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
Wavethingy - wavethingy@appspot.com - Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
Yelpy - yelpful@appspot.com - Searches Yelp with a user defined location and category.

Utilities

AmazonBo t - amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com - Enables social product research and shopping on Amazon.com. Wave participants can share products & reviews with contacts in real-time thanks to automatic queries by the AmazonBot against conversation keywords. The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
Bloggy - blog-wave@appspot.com - Information Needed
Bit.ly Bo t - bitly-bot@appspot.com - Shortens the url using bitly.
Botty - Wish - Will automatically add a set of useful bots to a wave according to a collection of bots (so they don’t have to individually be added when you use them all the time.
CountColon - countcolon@appspot.com - Adds text statistics to your blips (words, lines, etc.)
Companion Sphere - companionsphere@appspot.com - Collection of geek utils, first working verb is “lookup” for wikipedia/wiktionary one-line descriptions.
Databot - Wish - Will start as soon as the GData interface is published.
Emoticony - emoticonbot@appspot.com - Replaces text representations of emoticons with the relevant image.
JBREAKOUT BOT ADDED - jbreakout@appspot.com - Debug utility that reports event triggers.
Maison - maison@appspot.com - Makes blips public at http://maison.appspot.com.
Multi - multi-wave@appspot.com - A quote collector. Reply a blip you want to quote with ‘quote this’ and randomly display a quote with ‘quote ’. The bot is still being under development but you can try playing with it.
Natural Language Processing - knowledge-books@appspot.com - Adds blips with NLP analysis.
Nokar - lab2market@appspot.com - Has many features such as translations, image insertion, insert last tweets etc.
Posterous-robot - posterous-robot@appspot.com - A robot for posterous.com user to post blog in Google Wave. Here is how to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous.
Publisher - wave-publisher@appspot.com - Information Needed
Skimmy - wave-skimmy@appspot.com - Converts text emoticons, from : ) to img. Has a bookmarklet which creates a popup menu to insert emoticons for which the code is unknown.
Smiley - smiley-bot@appspot.com - Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
Smiley - In Progress - smiley-robot@appspot.com - Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
Style Chart Robot - stylechart@appspot.com - Inserts a chart into a wave.

Wave Management

Bouncy - bouncy-wave@appspot.com - Allows you to remove robots from a wave. Doesn’t seem to work on real people though, and laughs if you try to ask it to kick itself out. To get it to kick a bot out, type “bounce:name@domain.com”
Linear - Wish - Enforce all replies to be to the main wave. If a user replies to a reply, remove it and place it as a reply to the main wavelet.
Read Onlie - readonliebot@appspot.com - Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.
Seekdroid - seekdroid@appspot.com - You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.
Sweepy - sweepy-wave@appspot.com - Remove empty, whitespace-only blips.
Taggy - taggy-wave@appspot.com - Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.
Tocgen - tocgen@appspot.com - Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.
Twitusernames - twitusernames@appspot.com - Replaces all Twitter @username with links to the Twitter accounts.

Gadgets

(To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom text box)

Utilities

Ajax Animator Gadget - In Progress - http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/manifest.xml - A fully integrated multi-user web based vector graphic animation authoring environment.
AmazonBot Gadgett - http://amazon-withwaves-com.appspot.com/gadgets/AmazonProductList.xml - The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
Bidder - http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/bidder.xml - Simple Auction.
Checky - http://wave-gadgets.appspot.com/checky.xml - Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.
Click me - http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/hellowave.xml - Shows a button with a counter. Each time the button gets clicked, the counter is incremented by one. Shows off how the state interaction works.
HTML- http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml - Embed any HTML into a wave.
- http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml - Embed any web page (as ) into a wave.
iWave - http://gadget.wave.to/iWave/iWave.xml - Allows you to create a profile on wave to make wave just a little more personal. Uses facebook connect to retrieve your details if you sign in.
Licensing - In Progress - http://wave-license.appspot.com/license_gadget.xml - Creative Commons RDF Embedding - Planning Stage.
Maps - http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/101415471413908368316/mappy.xml -Embed Google Map.
Napkin - http://my-wave-gadgets.appspot.com/wave/NapkinGadget.xml - Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget, similar to Whiteboard gadget above - source on Google Code.
QuakeBot - In Progress - Server information on the Quake 3 protocol.
Raffly - http://raffly.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sandbox/raffly-xml1/raffly.xml - Insert this gadget to select a random participant from your wave to be the winner. The winner of what? Well that’s up to you
Ratings - http://google-wave-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/extensions/gadgets/ratings/ratings.xml - Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.
Slashdot Gadget - http://www.m1cr0sux0r.com/slashdot.xml - Loads latest Headlines from Slashdot.
Troco - An experimental peer-to-peer currency - http://troco.ourproject.org/gadget/org.ourproject.troco.client.TrocoWaveGadget.gadget.xml - Aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, that is, a peer-to-peer currency system. Also you can see it as an IOU or promissory note based system. More info click here.
Vector Editor - http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/wave/vectoreditor.xml - A cross platform collaborative real time vector graphics editor.
Whiteboard gadget - http://vps.michaelrose.id.au/canvas.xml - Draw on a virtual whiteboard.
Who is Coming? - http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/areyouin/gadget.xml -Show a list of all people that have said whether they will come or not.

Games

Backgammon - Wish - Remove all of one’s own checkers from the board before one’s opponent can do the same. [Wikipedia]
Battleship - Wish - Displays different board based on user.
Boxes - In Progress - Connect lines to make boxes and win.
Cards - http://wave-cards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cards.xml - Play card games.
Chess - http://gerculanum.appspot.com/gadgets/com.example.chessgadget.client.ChessGadget.gadget.xml - Play chess.
Connect 4/Four-in-a-row - In Progress - sdunster@wavesandbox.com - http://www.sdunster.com/wave/four.xml - 2 users + observers, turn locking, just waiting to write win-detection code.
Floodit - http://gadget.wave.to/floodit/game.xml - 2 player race to fill a board with colors.
Magnetic Poetry - http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107558585548952247431/fridge-11.xml - Re-arrange random words to form poetry.
Match them colors! - In Progress - Match 3 / gem matching game.
Othello - Wish - Play Reversi.
Sudoku - http://blah.appspot.com/wave/sudoku/sudoku.xml - Play Sudoku.
The Button - http://hyperthese.net/wave-gadgets/the-button.xml - A useless (I mean USELESS) game.

YouTube’s viral marketing case study

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:58:12 +0000

It was just last week 10 million people viewed
Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party on Youtube.

The results….staggering…check it out for yourself at Google’s Blog.
I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

Google’s Strategy

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:30:03 +0000

All about Google

View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon. (tags: google strategy)

I ran into this interesting slideshow titled “Everything you always wanted to know about Google…But were afraid to ask.”

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009

admin — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:00:55 +0000

“I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.”
- Andrew Wyeth

One of my favorite quotes that I have always related too. RIP

Risk

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:50:45 +0000

“Security is an illusion… It does not exist in nature…
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

- Helen Keller

Jon Montenegro in Practical Webdesign Magazine

admin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:51:47 +0000

In recent news, my design work has been in another design magazine. This time its

Practical Webdesign magazine. In the December 2008 Issue183 in the .net/showcase/gallery section.

It features about 4 screen shots of some of my work and a written piece which states…

“Jon Montenegro
URL www.jonjon.tv
Company In house (Jon Montenegro)
URL In house

When we talk about navigation, we delve straight into the way we work with the web, yet for some people, a word processor or email client is actually a more familiar way of sharing content with users.
In essence, that’s exactly what ‘experience director’ Jon Montenegro has done with his engaging site.
It simply lists content like emails, with the details in columns. These columns can then be changed to be viewed by client name, format, work, industry or year, much like how emails can be ordered by subject, date or size. The concept is so simple and bare-bones that it’s almost ridiculous that a site could prove successful by using this method. Yet Montenegro knows the power of the familiar and has created something instantly accessible.”

Many, many thanks.
Jon

Design in an Agile World.

admin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:09:51 +0000

“Design is finding the problem, not the solution.”
- Leslie Chicoine

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Are Agile Projects doomed to halfbaked design

Radiohead + Google Code = House of Cards

admin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:28:17 +0000

Check out Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”.
No camera or lights used.
Just data. A very interesting example of data visualization.

Go to Google Code for more information.