Not crazy about Wordle

You’re probably familiar with Wordle. It’s a neat application that picks up the most common words in a text and arranges them in a pretty word cloud. As a toy, it’s quite fun.
But there’s an idea seeping in among the blogs I read, suggesting that Wordle clouds are actually useful as a communication tool. For [...]

Walk Score

Walk Score is such a nice app: Give it an address and it’ll tell you how walkable it is.

Our apartment scores a very decent 83/100: “Very walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car.” Yes it is.
(via Joel on Software)

Whiteboard diagramming

As you probably know if you’re keeping in touch with the software engineering research community, there has been plenty of research on conceptual modeling in recent years. Most of it focuses on the creation, refinement, and formalization of modeling languages (UML, for instance). But the question of how do software developers truly use diagrams and [...]

xkcd’s map of online communities

This map from webcomic xkcd is absolutely cool:

Among my favourite bits: The sunken island of Usenet, the small “Attractive MySpace Pages” peninsula in proportion to the huge MySpace kingdom, and how the Bay of Angst shores on Xanga and LiveJournal.
(Speaking of weird maps, you should really check out the Strange Maps blog if you haven’t [...]

Virtual City Toronto

This web application may become quite cool given enough time. Enter an address, or ask for directions as you would to Google Maps, and you get photographs of the area or route of your result. The interface of the beta is still clunky, but the principle is exciting: It’s far easier to find out how [...]

Project lifecycle visualizations

Over at Lost Garden, Danc has a series of beautiful illustrations of software project lifecycles, focused on the gaming industry. The accompanying discussion is certainly worth a read too.

CSER and CASCON

This past Sunday and Monday I went to a meeting of the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER). Popular topics there were empirical software engineering, research ethics, diagnostics, and models and visualization. There were a couple of talks from Peggy Storey and Ian Bull, from the University of Victoria’s Chisel Group, which has built some [...]

Ben Shneiderman on Creativity and Visualization

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and author of Leonardo’s Laptop, gave a talk at Ryerson University yesterday and at the University of Toronto today, on two different topics:
At Ryerson he talked about creativity support tools. I was a bit frustrated by his approach to the topic: the creativity [...]