I used to have  main page before someone reach my blog which is about my random stuff (sometimes crappy).  But that had problem with firefox browser which rendered the page in a crazy way so I removed the main page honor for that 1 week effort. However I am thinking that in the near future ( just end of march may be) I  would design a new page (HTML 5 excitement! ) and as usual my simplicity mantra!

I think there would be a little bit improvement in my English( I hope so LOL), its obvious because am in UK now. I find it worth coming here to study about User eXperience Engineering (UXE).

I was always desired to study about interesting stuff and voila UXE is very interesting. I find it very challenging especially when it comes to learn about Users who use the system (whatever system from consumer product to computer applications), because people are really different and their perception differs from each other. But there is always few common things across every human regardless of people who are little bit exceptional in few cases. This sound really weird or obvious . For instance, there are musics which everyone likes (e.g those which gets maximum hits on youtube) and few exceptional people say “that music sucks” , people are different across the world in culture, languages, or whatever. But what makes that music so popular or viral ? (You could guess lots of examples for viral musics – “why this kolaveri ?? ” LOL ) there would be something special about the music, either the music which gets people pumped up(happens across the culture) or the lyrics of the music(people who knows that language) is at its best or both together. It is all exiting when I think about these ! It is quiet interesting to learn about what makes people love things, give them satisfaction , they feel the specialty of the thing, hold strong in the memory, sentimental touch , or whatever that make people comfortable.  Apart from these, there are few other stuff like safety , security, ergonomics, usability, simplicity ,how things are easier to understand, easy to follow and so on. There are many other things like methods to do research , get data about users, how to analyse them ,measure them, design , graphics, etc. All together I can call User Experience Engineering.

However, there are several myth about UXE, people usually misunderstand that it is all about designing UI for the applications. But this is just a small component of UXE, there is lot more including the stuff which I said above.

It took me a while learning about implementation of  height map to generate landscapes in Opengl. NEHE production portal is best to learn these stuff. So finally here is the screenshot of my landscape done using opengl program with c++.

Here is my first openGL program. It was very tricky to get things done on openGL api with c++.

The other day, I had so much fun with Xbox 360 with Kinect in a gaming shop! But I never had thought that Microsoft would give away the SDK for non commercial applications. Many things can be done with Kinect SDK, all we need is a Kinect device , Window 7 OS and Visual Studio 2010. To kick start , we can take refer Programming Guide and the SDK can be downloaded from here . Also there are some demos along with code available at MSDN channel9 .

Gesture based human computer  interaction methods can be easily implemented with the help of kinect. However, many such applications are possible with a simple web camera. Applications like Umouse an example for interacting through hand movements, AR toy from SourceBits which is an example for augmented reality using webcam. But Kinect make everything even more simpler with its infrared lazer projection and a camera together helps to convert the video data into 3D form, also it captures the Z – index of the object , i mean the distance between the device and the controller/object/user .

Following are few applications and demos which I found on youtube which helps to get inspired,

This guy has shown several short demos in youtube like one below,

another demo for Windows 7 interaction,

Kinect as a RC contoller

Kinect augmented reality experiments

Playing Mario with Kinect .. this is fun!!

I think Microsoft is much concerned on advanced user interface, like one which I found at the demo of windows 8 prototype, it was awesome and this kinect is a breakthrough technology which they have ever made. For the advanced future, with advanced and easy interaction , these technology would definitely help, especially when interacting with larger screens!

What’s that Second Life (SL)? Well, a virtual world were people never die if they jump from the sky but feasibly they can fly! What else? People can virtually laugh, dance, cry, fight, ride on weird virtual animals, can change cloths, can get undressed, <<censored>>, can do anything they want. In short, good people do good things, bad people do bad things.

I was aware about Second Life a few years ago. It was during my college days, and poor me, I had a bad machine which didn’t met SL’s requirements. But I used to play There.com; another virtual world which is not exists anymore.  Okay, let me start sharing my SL experience.

Actually I brought a new laptop with damn cool hi-fi, super-duper, incredible, super cool, super-fast hardware configuration. This actually exceeded the SL requirements!! Cool huh!! Yes, I able play SL with 75 FPS even in full graphics configuration!

When I first time logged in, I didn’t find myself in the game but just an Egg. I able type something and then I typed, “where is me?” I got reply from someone saying “you are loading dude”. Then I waited for a few mins but I wasn’t loaded fully, and in the mean time I explored the features and navigations and found the graphics preference. I dragged the graphic level to “Ultra” mode. Then I turned into smoke and noticed super cool sunshine! Then I realised the awesomeness of SL (As well as my laptop’s hardware power!) Later, I found a person and he helped me and I followed his instructions then finally I got loaded (it means that my avatar got loaded!)

Gradually, I explored everything and got few free outfits (it requires some L$ to buy super cool outfits, L$ means Linda dollar. people must buy that with real money or earn by working virtual inside the SL, weird huh!)

Later after exploring for a week, I got few friends and they shared few places with me and I explored them. It seems to be great actually. There are virtual cities, virtual universities, Indian temple, virtual tai chi moves … Really awesome! If we use SL in right way, we can learn hell lot of things.

So, what I am trying to say is that; SL is cool, but not cool as compared to THERE.com where I had social fun than SL.  I feel SL is better in graphics, lots of things to explore and learn.

Few snaps …

“It happens”! Sometimes I feel that life is like a graph of share market. So many ups and downs. Sometimes we miss people! But they don’t feel that they are missing us. Anyway, I don’t care them anymore when they have someone ELSE.. and LOL .. it is damn thing which that I need not bother.. Making up my mind! Enough for all bad things happen when we try to change ourself and keeping us away from our stuff…

Okay! I have taken a long break from exploring Java frameworks, designing websites, and killing my useful as well as boring time by  reading lots of tech blogs…(Which I forget in the next day ) and now am back into all these stuff.. I have to go ahead and I wish to showcase my experiments. So, I decided to create another page(will use TYPO3) to showcase them. TYPO3 sucks… better to create a simple php page..

What am gonna do next ? Well, I have few things to do on this blog . The purpose is to bring visibility to my works and what am doing which I really need for my career.

Firstly , I used to read some inspirational blogs and artistic things (design blogs actually) which I stopped few months back , because I felt I got more inspiration but now I feel that my fire within needs some fuel everyday and hence I have to resume this habit. I will start sharing them.

Secondly, I wan’t to narrow down my interests. I have to concentrate on few things alone instead of focusing on plenty of things which my brain actually struggles to handle and I have very poor memory , because of that I forget other things. As I have good knowledge in digital art and user interface design (like web and mobile apps) as well as programming in Java,  I starting bringing my attention to ‘processing‘ programming environment based on Java which is free and purely open source. I explored few examples which they have showcased and I am crazy on them.  It has wide range of libraries and easy to code.More info about it can be found here. There is a JavaScript (“Processing.js“) which can be used on modern browsers to bring all our sketch rendered on web pages. This is really cool stuff and hope if it get advanced , many things  could be possible on web. I will be exploring and will be doing few experiments on it. I have to showcase few other experiments which I have done with mootools JS framework.

Finally,  I feel better and hope am back on track . Its like a peaceful life when we are like as what we are. Following my own way make me better.

Never mind ! this is just another blabber!

Hi, its been a while since I last wrote on here. December was an hard as well as joyful month with so many travels, hangouts and parties which kept my away from blogging. Anyway, the new year has come(well, wish you happy new year.. its late wish huh? just couple of weeks tho!)  and my new year resolution is maintaining my last new year resolutions .Finally , all fun is over and back to my works.

I do lots of chatting with friends on Gtalk and FB most of the time. Some of my friends are too much(I mean good) with English. Sometimes they use weird words(I mean good words) which I never heard before (may be they read so much of fictional books). So, I always hit dictionary.com and find the meaning of the word , but now I just ask my bot. It will tell the meaning of a word which I ask! I named my bot as XbotDict. Created with Google appengine SDK (which is cool one and have XMPP api built-in , yeppie!!) This is my second app using XMPP api(previous one is TweetGT!). Coding was not so tuff but just getting the  approval and api  token id from Abbreviations.com made me to wait for few days.

I hope this application will be helpful for some folks who use any xmpp based chat clients like Jabber, AIM chat or Google Chat.

Link:? http://xbotdict.appspot.com/

Usability is very important for the websites with more user visits. Websites of University is very important to provide all kind of information for the students/prospective students. Especially course details and fee structure are the most visited pages in those websites.  I was going through University websites of  UK and I found few websites which got better usability and design compared to all other university website as found on Guardian.com

I can’t say the following are best in design but they are good and some have neat look.

1. University of Oxford

It is neat and simple! I like it.

2. Southampton Solent University

3. Glyndwr University

4. University of Leeds

5. University of Chester

6. University of Hertfordshire

7. Brunel University

8. Bucks New University

9. University for the Creative Arts

10. Northumbria University

11. Liverpool John Moores University

12. Birmingham City University

13. University of Cumbria

14. University of Nottingham

15. University of Glasgow

16. University of Greenwich

17. University of Norwich

18. University of Derby

19. University College Falmouth

20. University of Birmingham

Let me know if I missed any cool website! .. Thanks for reading.

Let me take a scenario, like:-  I am at office,  checking my scrum tasks, and finally I choose one for the moment, and alas! I found something which I really don’t know about it. Well, what’s that? Have to create something so weird !@#@# and have no clue of what to do with that. What would I do if I don’t know that stuff? Aha! I will open www.google.com (Perhaps, will be enquiring to my own busy boss and mates, let this thing be a worst case scenario”Nobody knows about it”). I will be googling to find out what is what? It will serve me the right information in seconds after all their algorithm

process behind the scene (which happens at Google servers).  But what happens next?  I got what I really need, I have more than 100% belief that Google will serve me anytime. I trust it almost same as I trust God.  In short, I can say I worship Google’s Google search But am not the only person  among Google’s 100 million users. There are thousands of users similar to me who worship Google.

So, what if Google is not loading at the moment I really need some information? Imagine, Google servers are hijacked and blown. No Gmail, no Google chat, no Google search, no YouTube and nothing. (Of course I will use Yahoo! Or Bing! But there won’t be any satisfaction).

Well, if Google doesn’t work, that doesn’t give much loss to me. But there are millions of people believe on Google’s advertisement service. Ad-words and Ad-sense are two major money making machine for Google and Google Users. If 1 day Google doesn’t work there could be loss of approximately 800 million US dollars for total ad-sense users. And what could be the loss to Google itself? There are thousand million users for Google ad-words who pay Google with their pay-per-click process; hence the loss to Google is huge. It will be millions of dollars. So, what else? Google apps is another money making machine for Google and not only the Google itself, many organizations and institutions uses Google apps. They will be screwed up, if Google servers are down.

I would like to list out some of the Google’s products and services;( you can also find this list on Google new and Wikipedia)

1. Aardvark

2. Gmail

3. Google Adsense

4. Google Adwords

5. Google Analytics

6. Google Answers

7. Google AppEngine

8. Google apps

9. Google Book search

10. Google Calendar

11. Google check out

12. Google Chrome

13. Google Chrome OS

14. Google Code

15. Google Desktop

16. Google Docs

17. Google Earth

18. Google Finance

19. Google Groups

20. Google Labs

21. Google Maps

22. Google Mars

23. Google Moon

24. Google News

25. Google Pack

26. Google Product search

27. Google Search

28. Google Sketch Up

29. Google Sky Map

30. Google Translate

31. Google Trends

32. Google TV

33. Google Voice

34. Google Wave

35. Orkut

36. Picasa

37. Youtube

38. Android

39. Google Phone (Nexus One )

and many more….

There are more Google products , its expanding day to day , intelligence is adding on their products. Its growing too fast and they are really awesome.. I am trying to follow their Ten things .  Enjoy Googling !