![]() ![]() Here’s a typical sampling of customer reviews for Filemaker’s Bento for iPad. And they are outraged – livid with anger – when they discover that the $4.99 database system they just purchased for the iPad can’t manage their company’s books. They send angry emails when their late-afternoon order isn’t filled until 8am the following morning. They forget that things take a few days to travel from Boston to Bangladesh – especially when a small volcano shuts down a vast chunk of the world’s freight system. With software, plenty of people check their common sense at the door. Thanks to the myth, a lot of people treat software (and its makers) badly. We treat them like kids, and we talk about our own colleagues and forebears as if they were idiots. We tell users that they shouldn’t have to think. We teach them that software users are simple people with simple needs. We teach people that software developers are techies: idiots who don’t know how to dress and who require adult supervision and who happen to have a useful talent. But the old folks weren’t fools – they were working with stone knives and bearskins. Sure, user experience design has improved since 1967. When UI/UX consultants repeat this myth to clients, it’s a lie. This is historically false but makes a useful fable. In school, people learn a myth that, in the past, programmers didn’t care about users. But, first, we’ve got to do something about the users. Artisanal software and NeoVictorian programming can help. It was a good session, with three capable and engaging discussants on hand, ably to critique my review of hypertext criticism. I suspect that this was a two-cultures issue people assumed that systems builders would be less interested in critical theory. One mild vexation was that my own paper on Criticism (pdf) was scheduled directly opposite one of the strongest sessions on adaptive hypertext systems, and so I couldn’t see several terrific papers. Hypertext 2011 (Eindhoven, June) has a strong call for hypertext fiction and storytelling. It’s one of the inspirations for Tinderbox and it’s great to have a fresh flagship publication for it.Ī spontaneous (and excellent) session on hypertext narrative, chaired by J.Nathan Matias, was a novel and exciting development. VITE is a long-running project to combine spatial hypertext with formal AI-style knowledge representation. Hsieh’s paper on VITE was another highlight. The paper doesn’t really call attention to the most interesting aspects of the work. This is certainly interesting, and I believe it’s completely novel (though Jan Walker’s Document Examiner highlighted links on hover). Also interesting here was a new approach to link elision: links are shown on hover and otherwise hidden. I was talking to Haowei Hsieh (Iowa) after the talk – we’ve both spent lots of time building spatial hypertext views - and we agreed that the performance was really compelling. It’s built on top of Piccolo, a Pad++ successor, and gets lovely panning and zooming performance. One highlight new spatial hypertext system, iMapping by Heiko Haller (Forschungszentrum Informatik). These were papers meant to sustain you through the hard work that hypertext folk share, contributed by people who were interested in their own work but also deeply interested to learn what their colleagues had found out this year. There was rich and tasty food here, though it was not showy and seldom neat. If last week’s ELO_AI was a fallen lemon soufflé – aspiring to be high and frothy but turning out mostly burnt and bitter – Hypertext 2010 was one of those little meat pies they sell on the Sidney quay. Two conferences in two weeks might perhaps be too much. But the same view lends itself in interesting ways to planning. When we designed the timeline view, we were thinking chiefly of retrospective tasks: teaching history, disentangling evidence in court, explaining political crises. The vertical lines also give you a good idea of ‘crunch time’ –lots of cases starting at once– and the difficulty in starting them (the color of line). Make the bottom colors maroon and gold if those were your school colors, or make them represent who was in charge of the OR that day. However, the representation of every attribute can be changed. The color of the horizontal line for each case represents a category of procedure, the vertical line represents the ASA of the patient and the potential difficulty and slowness of anesthesia in starting the case. Each font represents a distinct OR room setup. ![]() In a recent weblog post, he shows how the new timeline view in Tinderbox can represent a wealth of information about facility usage. Brian Gregory studies ways to utilize operating rooms (and their personnel) more efficiently.
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