Refresh Detroit meeting May 21st - 6:30pm-8:30pm

May's Refresh Detroit meeting will be on the 21st, from 6:30 to 8:30 at the downtown Ann Arbor District library in Ann Arbor. Map to the location.

SPONSORED BY YAHOO SEARCH MONKEY DEVELOPER PREVIEW

TOPIC: There will be a few quick presentations by members of our great group, and general discussion on the latest news, challenges, projects, and ideas that the group members have encountered in their web related occupations/hobbies/activities.

The event like always is free to anyone who is interested.

The current speakers will be:

Nick DeNardis
Designer of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science website. He will discuss the latest release of the website, their goals, process and challenges.

Brian Kerr
Information architecture, user experience, and django development guru. Exact topic details to come…

Paul Tarjan - Yahoo! SearchMonkey
The fine folks at Yahoo! are sponsoring this event and promise to bring lots of swag as well as give a short presentation on their new open source semantic web search in your own applications and websites. This new product they are releasing is called "Search Monkey" and you can read more at:

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000523.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/yahoo-open-search-platform-launches-into-private-beta/
http://searchengineland.com/080424-113600.php

TechSmith talks user experience

http://refresh-detroit.org/2008/02/29/march-19-2008-refreshing-snagit-a-case-study-for-focusing-on-the-user-experience/

Refresh Detroit is hosting Barb Hernandez from TechSmith to talk about how they evolved their Snagit product to focus on the experience of the user that leads to the conversion from interested person to customer.

the last Sochi Design Challenge of the year

Exciting interaction design challenge tomorrow at the School of Information. Here is the description sent by Joshua Palay

It will be on Thurs. at 5:30 in Room 405A/B with lots of food.

Dealing with Google's open source phone OS - Android and its $10 million competition.

Hope to see you all there!
Josh

Here's a video introducing Android:

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39029453,49294145-5,00.htm

We'll send out an agenda next week, but let SOCHI know if you're interested!

For more on Android, read on below thoughts from HCI faculty member Mark Newman:

There are several videos on YouTube that seem to be about the best intro to what they're up to (start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg&feature=user and look at the other videos from "androiddevelopers" as well). The focus is primarily technical, which makes some sense because Android is being positioned as a Mobile OS. In some sense, it isn't technically very different from, say, Windows Mobile. The primary difference is that it's an open platform and, well, it's not Windows Mobile (or Palm OS, or Symbian OS, or the stripped down Mac OS running on the iPhone).

Thus, I'm not sure that a deep understanding of Android is totally necessary for the design jam. It might be enough to say "Now we'll be able to easily design and deploy applications for smartphones that have a persistent network connection and can (presumably) easily integrate with the latest and greatest web services like facebook, flickr, google maps, . We can assume that the platform will have a critical mass of users over the next few years. What applications should be developed to take advantage of such a platform?" While, in theory, this design exercise could have been done a few years ago, the fact that Google is putting its leverage into pushing this platform (not to mention the fact that Apple is opening up the iPhone SDK) means that such an exercise is more relevant now than it was previously. One can argue that smartphones are about to explode in the US (they are already fairly ubiquitous in Japan, Korea, and Europe) and that a new opportunity is presenting itself. Not to mention that Google is planning to give away buckets of cash for the best applications developed for Android. I'm not sure that SI can realistically compete with the various startups and major software companies that are likely to be going after that cash but who knows?

Finally, the Andriod platform may provide an easier way for handset manufacturers and third parties to create peripheral hardware. GPS locators are one add-on/built-in that is already on the rise for smartphones and will presumably be even easier to integrate with Android. We can probably assume that phones that know their location will be ubiquitous in the next few years. What other assumptions are safe to make? Cameras, limited voice recognition, bluetooth connectivity, are effectively ubiquitous already. 3D graphics acceleration, accelerometers (for doing in-air gesture-based interaction), integration with peripherals (large monitors, printers, scanners, speakers), and others may be coming sooner rather than later once an open platform exists that allows various market players to compete.