Everything but the parallel parking itself.

You don’t have to be in a big city to know that parking can be ridiculous. Try and go uptown here in Oxford and you feel like you hit the jack pot if you find a spot anywhere near where you want to go! When it comes to how to solve this dilemma theres no surprise that theres an app for that! There is not only one app, but a suite of apps under the name of Streetline.

The article, “Streetline Wants to Be Your Parking Saviour” explains that there is the app ‘Parker’ for individuals to find parking spots in cities,  ’Parkedge’ for parking garages to post their capacity, and Parksite for cities to analyze how parking in their city is utilized. They all work together with the same main app, but you log into the different types of the apps depending on what type of user you are (driver, city, etc.).

According to the article,

“The statistics on parking are beyond depressing: People spend an average of 18 to 20 minutes worldwide looking for parking and 30% of congestion is due to people looking for parking. And the parking meter? It hasn’t had any dramatic upgrades since it was introduced in 1935 (with the exception of digital readings and pay by credit card).”

 

 

‘Streetline’ was a 2010 startup that had only hopes to make their vision come to full scale. Recently though they were granted a 25 million dollar credit line from Citi and are able to make their app truly come to life. The app works by putting low-power, wireless censors in each monitored parking spot to be able to sense whether or not a car is parked in the spot. Unfortunately for cities to allow this system to work with their cities, it’s 20 to 30 dollars per spot!

While this is a high expense app and isn’t attainable for every city at the moment, their mission is to eventually allow it to be attainable for every city because it will lead to less wasted gas and carbon that is emitted when cars are circling looking for a spot!

Ditch the sweater. Bring on the programming.

Etsy is an online  mecca of homemade products put up for purchase by the producers. They have clothes, bags, journals, jewelry, lights, electronic accessories,and more. Really anything you could want — someone has made it. Obviously though, these are products that speak to women … and are also for the most part made by women. So it would then make sense that Etsy is ran by women, right?! Wrong. Etsy only has 11 women employees out of 96. Yikes.

While I think this is sort of sad … I am not nearly as concerned as the Etsy emplyees themselves. They care so much that according to the article “Etsy Narrows the Gender Gap With a Coding Scholarship for Women“, (they are doing just what the title says) and setting up a scholarship for 20 women to learn coding. The scholarship will go towards a summer Hacker School session that is taking place at the Etsy headquarters. While the school is free itself, the money is a stipend to live on.

While it’s great that 20 more women will understand coding better by the end of the summer, it’s even more exciting that Etsy is taking the time to think and change the male dominated workforce, especially in the media industry. Women have come to believe that there is something about them that makes them incapable of programming and Etsy is wanting to change that false notion. Hopefully this is a change that we start to see with many companies in the near future!

In fact, I’m actually thinking about learning how to publish my own blog posts instead of outsourcing them! (just kidding)

XXXonlinegraffitiXXX

Unless you are a computer mastermind, or happen to run with a hacker group like Anonymous, there isn’t much you can do to place your mark on established websites. The article, “Glitchr: Digital Graffiti That Defaces Facebook Pages”, interviews Laimonas Zakas about his new venture in online graffiti with Facebook. As the article states;

“IN THE ONLINE WORLD, WE DON’T GET THE CHANCE TO PROTEST OUR VIRTUAL SURROUNDINGS. UNTIL NOW.”

Zakas realized that with Diacritics (the accent marks in written Arab), you can make interesting, illegible patterns that break the norm of the sterile white Facebook boxes with everything fitting into them and instead put his mark on Facebook like this:

 

Zakas did this by creating an HTML strand and converting it to unicode before posting on Facebook. By doing this in his certain way, it causes the web browser to stutter while loading causing a glitch (hints the name of the movement) and shoots the symbols all the way across the page in different formations depending on how the code was done.

While I’m not necessarily a fan of destroying Facebook pages with not uncreative looking blurbs of symbols, I am all for the the discussion of who is in power of a site such as Facebook. As the article discusses; in the physical world we may not be in charge of a space or place, but whether legal or not can always leave our mark. With the internet it can’t always be that way. The creator(s) of the online space are 100% charge and more often than not meaning the structure can’t be broken.

This article, and Glitch movement brings up the question of power and the online community. Where is the line drawn between website creators and users, and how much power should be and could be demonstrated between them?

a journey to the .UK

Lately, I have been experiencing the world of HTML and CSS in my interactive media studies class, and whew, the whole thing has been an interesting experience to say the least. In one aspect, I never thought it would be humanly possible for me to figure out how to do a website other than a pre-made blog site and am completely enthused that I now somewhat understand this entire technical website making world. But … on the other hand, boy can things get complicated. One missing semicolon in your CSS document and you’re thrown out of the game. It isn’t easy.

With this, came the enhanced sensitivity of looking at websites and their aesthetics to see what works and what doesn’t. As someone who loves art and design, I feel like I always go for the websites that are more of an interactive piece of art rather than a functional website … SO I set on a journey to find a FUNCTIONAL website that also stood out in terms of design. After a chain of very obscure links I somehow came across a UK website for the Eynsford Music Festival.

 

While this screen shot only captures the top half of the home page, the header is what drew me in. The header is unique to the event, and done in a way that is unique enough in comparison to your everyday websites, that it stands out  – in a representative way, for its purpose. When I was exploring what was under each tab there were vastly different amounts of information under each one, but because the unique and large header stays the same the starkly different information on each page stays tied together nicely. The website also sticks with 3 colors along with the beige and brown, as well having a few central fonts.

Man, finding a website that is simple yet unique and presents the information flawlessly within that is not easy, but when found it is a good idea to learn from the positive aesthetics and think how you can incorporate them into your designs!

That’s drawsome!

I’m not sure about you guys, but ‘drawsome’ has become a new word in my vocabulary this past week. Why? Because of the new app (game) Draw Something. Once you download it, there’s no turning back — you get addicted!

The game is essentially like an online sort of pictionary, in which you can find friends through Facebook or registered usernames. I thought it might just be a college kid thing that we had turned to in moments of boredom or procrastination. Out of pure curiosity I did some Googling and boy, was I wrong. According to an article in the Guardian Draw Something is the top downloaded app in 85 countries (as of March 23rd), and was downloaded 35 million times in the first 6 weeks. Because of the serious success, Zynga just bought that app and it’s company for 150 million dollars!

With so many amazing statistics, MBAonline.com, put together this infographic of facts about the success of Draw Something. The infographic is interactive, but I have screen shots below;

 

 I think their coined phrase, ‘That’s Drawsome’”, could be used for their app in general!

Zite on target!

Maybe I’m a little behind, but I just discovered the fascinating world of “Zite” the personalized magazine app. According to the apple app store;

“Zite is a free personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter every time you use it. Zite delivers all the great news, articles, blogs, and videos you want – and helps you discover new stuff that you’ll love.”

Zite is now available for iPads, iPhones, and just recently Androids. Zite is an aggregator magazine, which means it pulls content from other places to combine into a ‘magazine’ that is tailored to your interests. How does it work? Well, it is” algorithm-driven” but considering I got kicked out of pre-calc, I’m not the one to explain exactly how that works. The Zite blog however, has a great post, on just how they collect their information to provide users with personalized content.

However, the latest breaking news, of just 12 hours ago, is that they created a new ‘Publisher Program’ in which 8 publishers such as CNN, Bleacher Report and Huffington Post have created publisher-specific sections to go along with the subject sections, which means the magazine will contain even more content than before! Check out Mashable’s article to learn more about the news!

Shake it like a Polaroid Picture.

You can shake it like  a Polaroid picture … OR you can just whip out your phone and Instagram it.

I heard about Instagram last fall and of course immediately had to look into it. I saw that it was an app that allowed you to capture and then tweak pictures to make them have a sort of a vintagy – artsy feel. You then shared them through either the Instagram social network, or through other social networks you are already a part of. The idea is that like Polaroid cameras used to allow, you can take a quick picture and get to immediately share it.

Rocky McGredy, in his blog post titled, “Instagram: The Social Camera”, says

 ”I think that we like to gain a glimpse into other people’s live, but the Instagram effect isn’t just that. When I look at an Instagram photo, I feel like I’m actually perceiving something as that person would. It’s a bizarre feeling that I have never received from Facebook or Twitter. I guess it’s the combination of the picture, filter, tilt shift, and caption that does it; but Instagram pictures have a very personal quality to them that keep us wanting more. Like they always say, a picture is worth a thousand words!”

His thoughts really cleared up a lot of confusion I was having about the app. I was beginning to wonder what the appeal was, and why suddenly everyone felt as though they were a professional photographer, but now that I think of it as a way to get glimpses of other people’s worlds and not necessarily becoming an artist by an app, I’m feeling much better about the whole thing!

To celebrate this new liking for Instagram, here a couple of the top photos:

 

We might not have to get 93940234 emails.

The amount of emails I get … along with everyone else I know is crazy. Super crazy. It’s gotten to the point where in order to keep it manageable I have to check, and respond if needed every time I get on my computer before I do anything else! Now with social media sites such as Twitter, everyone seems to be updated minute to minute regardless if they check their emails or not. So are emails really necessary all the time?

The article, “Email is Crushing Us, Can Activity Streams Free Us” posed the same question, and felt that Activity Streams COULD free us. Rather than getting emails individually sent to you, someone would post the information to you on a live stream. While this doesn’t seem much different than emailing because it is still basically person to person, it gets more important with more people involved. When someone sends an important email to a large group of people and then the ‘reply all’ fiasco begins, questions that aren’t necessarily important to everyone begin filling up inboxes at incredibly fast rates.

With activity streams users, can filter out, and prioritize. Say you are on a committee and need to know what is continuously happening, but don’t have a major role. You could keep up with the stream of activity but not have to individually be updated with every little detail.

The more and more people, places, and businesses take to online for any and every update, the more impossible it will be to personally keep up with everything by it coming directly to your inbox. While I can’t foresee person to person emails fading, I can see group emails fading away and turning into more of a live streaming/chat sort of set up. If only this would happen in the next weeks to aid with my flood of group project emails at all hours of the day!

Spring Cleaning

According to an article that came out yesterday on GOOD; people are cleaning out their closets …  but not in the way you are probably envisioning.  They are cleaning out their friends on Facebook and defriending people that they either don’t know well enough or that don’t really serve a purpose in their life anymore.

According to the article:

“The idea of “cleaning out” Facebook friends is getting more popular: The percentage of people unfriending other Facebook members rose from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011.  In gross terms, 158 million people were unfriended in 2009, and more than a half a billion in 2011.”

The article noted that this rise in defriending friends is probably due to the fact that Facebook used to be solely for college students and is now expanded to include more 35+ members than any other age group. While this makes sense, less friends per member on Facebook might equal some problems with Facebook in the future. There will be less information for advertising to know what kind of a background everyone is coming from, and what world they currently live in, and in turn the less Facebook can charge advertisers and the more concern investors have.

This is all just a theory though. With Facebook having such a large captive audience as it, Facebook can certainly figure out a way to get around the defriending situation without causing too much trouble! (I’m hoping/guessing …).

If I could only think of the name …

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to tell a friend the name of an awesome unknown restaurant, or a great stop on your last road trip and just can’t seem to remember the name … or where it was. Geez, why didn’t I write that down somewhere, I’m always thinking? As a girl that likes documentation – I frankly WOULD like to write everything I ever did down, or at least make a scrapbook every now and then — but who has time for that?! No one that I know for sure.

With all of us carrying around phones with decent cameras nowadays, it is getting easier to snap a picture to remember something. With the new app, Everplaces, it helps those random pictures along with scattered notes mean so much more as the article “Everplace Creates Pinterest for a Real World” explains.

Not only can you snap pics, make notes, and add things to maps all in one place — but you can explore other people’s collections as well as give other’s your own recommendations.

What I find interesting though about this app is that we have been seeing aggregate websites flourish in the past year or so, but not necessarily with our very own information (pictures and all). If this takes off, it could open up an entirely new genre of self-aggregatory apps!

As an avid explorer of any city I can get my hands on, I am going to download the app as soon as I publish this post! I’m surprised nothing like it has come out sooner …