Boxely TV Episode Two: Desktop Toys

Ahhh...gadget goodness! If only Laszlo and Flex could pull these off...

Being a very lightweight renderer with a javascript engine beneath what better than desktop widgets ala Konfabulator to test the mad skillz of the Boxely fluent. Boxely comes with all the features of Yahoo's fabulousness and more....some factoids of note:

• Spin up an animation timeline and couple it with knowledge of the desktop workspace geometry accessible from the scene level, some interesting physics toys can be thrown together.
  
  
• As you can see, it's quite easy to port existing Konfab. widgets over to our engine by porting the resources and script as appropriate (the calendar and lightsaber are examples). In just these tests, we were able to replace some of the Konfab artwork with our own procedurally generated bits - color transformations, affine rotations and scales, vector fonts - all come in handy when you want to lighten the bitmap resource load.
  
  
• Sneak peak of our scriptable vector paths in the etch-a-sketch sample.
  
  
• Don't miss the slick "liquid twirl" and "bubble pop exit" transitions demonstrated by the mini media player.
  
  
• Desktop widgets are aware of their surrounding workspace geometry as well as other desktop widgets and Boxely scenes! Watch as the bot seeks out and destroys other gadgets - oh what fun for the hackers at heart.
  
  
• Special thanks to the Gadget Gurus Scott Totman, Alex Liu, Alex Weyers and to the master craftsman himself, Peter Hirschberg.

Boxely TV Episode One : Layout Transitions

As some of you know, our team has been hoping to release Boxely as a fun toy for others to play with (most likely unsupported initially but will allow folks to experiment with their own applets and creatives). Seems we're making progress on that front, hope to have more news in the short term. In the meantime, I thought I'd provide a few teasers.

Over the next month or so I'll highlight some of the features of Boxely I feel have not been taken advantage of fully in our production applications. I will mostly focus on interface dynamics and procedural effects or functionality that we provide stock as part of the Boxely SDK.

This video (requiring Flash 8) centers on the concept of layout transitions. A very simple mechanism allows content authors to modify the layout parameters (algorithm, alignment, orientation) of a particular container box, while allowing the elements managed by that box to animate to their new positions from their old. The core toolkit orchestrates everything required to get the job done.

The first snippet presents a very simple boxely scene that transitions a number of fixed positioned elements between random placements. The second shows how one can affect the "dynamics" of the same transition - in this case a juiced up spring is applied.

Layout transitions have many practical uses - some of which are sorting lists or items, gracefully switching between one or more configurations or orientations of an interface, or revealing new UI elements to a scene or gliding them away...

The final three portions of the video demonstrate how layout transitions can be applied in other real world instances:

Our "Hitchhikers Guide To Boxely" (work in progress) is shown transitioning from a compact view to a more content focused view.

I mocked up a web browser thumbnail sorter - a sample to show how a flow panel can transition between states, first alignment is tweaked, then the flow panel is asked to switch to vertical flow from horizontal flow.

Lastly I demonstrate my inability to play simple guessing games - an homage to Grant Robinson's "Guess-The-Google" was thrown together in less than an hour. The scene will search Google's image repository for a random (secret) term and present the results as a thumbnail grid using random layout transitions. Object is to guess the term that was used to find the images. Fun Fun.

Next up I'll show off some of Boxely's desktop gadgetry-foo!

Simple Is Elegance

Elegant aggregation for the info junkie.

Happy Birthday, Kid!

Happy First Birthday little guy! Proud to be your Daddy.

Antique Journals, Time Travel, and Mind Maps

I've been reading a bit too much Kurzweil lately. I find his books about artificial intelligence, the mind, and the eventual melding of the two, to be both inspirational and fascinating.

Specifically the possibility of being able to one day, with the aid of software and ultra high-end computing peripherals, map the human mind -- the memories and past experiences of a human being catalogable and searchable as easily as it is to search online journals and weblogs today. When and if such technology becomes possible, virtual time travel would inherently become a possiblity as well. At least in the context of the mind map's owner and his or her individual reality.

Today I'll have to make due with open source mind exploration - while I manually sift through the memories of someone else's past through my small collection of antique journals and personal ephemera.


I started collecting journals, diaries, and sketch books of strangers about five or so years ago. I found a diary from 1899 in an antique shop on Cape Code, Massachusetts, and I've picked up a few others on EBay and other auctions. I don't know what it is about peeking into the past of someone I have never met - nor will ever meet (most are long gone). I suppose to me it is a bit like time travel. Through personal writings you can glean the trends, fads, politics, worries, and beliefs of the day (a previous day). The fact that most of these individuals were writing for themselves, the accounts are raw, truthful, and expressive.

For fun I jumped in my time machine today and began reading a journal from 1938 of a young girl who was trying to make it to Hollywood (no American Idol in 1938 unfortunately for her). I'd read it before, but for whatever reason had never dug that closely. Throughout the pages, of roughly six months worth of entries, she describes attending many hollywood parties with friends such as Gene Lockhart (who she mentions as currently acting in 1938's A Christmas Carol as Bob Cratchett). Most of the entries deal with her crush on a close friend named "Duffy". She included a letter from Duffy within her journal - which was addressed to "Hess". This was the first I'd seen her name mentioned.

IMDB wasn't quite the force it is today five or six years ago so I decided to sleuth a bit in their database, sifting through movies from the 30s. Turns out it's the journal of Hester Sondergaard who in fact did make it to Hollywood - and ended up starring in a few movies, one with a Howard "Duff" called The Naked City. Even more interesting perhaps is that Hester's sister, Gale, whom she mentions several times in her diary as the force of her guided tour through the Hollywood of the time won an Academy Award in 1937. Thank goodness for the internet - the additional notes helped put her story in context.

As fun and colorful as some of my collected writings are - (some more than others, one series is written by a mentally ill woman who was living with her parents around the time of Kennedy's death) - I still can't help but wish I could "plug-in" to my own past as easily as I can with these journals. Had I actually kept such a thing (or started my blog a few decades earlier) it certainly would have helped.

Laszlo Could Lead DTHML Abstraction Effort

Very Impressive! ...If they pull it off of course. I would love to see if they had to trim any bells and whistles or language features - but out of all the AJAX/DHTML compatible toolkits out there this has true promise.

At least it offers a nice modern model in a much easier to swallow package than other dhtml generators I've seen to date.

Down With DHTML - Call To Arms

Sure I can rub two sticks together to make a fire - but I don't make a habit out of it - when I have the tools readily available to make it an easier job (matches, lighters, flame throwers).

A little JavaScript and an HTML DOM can be made to create fascinating interactives, but why the hell are we still rubbing sticks together when we could advance distributed application interface development 1000 fold if we just got off our collective butts and did something about it. As an organized movement.

There is just so much about the current web applications model that pains me, especially around what it takes to do something cool and powerful with web and desktop application UI. (I'll defer my complaints to another day).


I've been keeping my own personal list of dream UI toolkit features for the past two years. Lo and behold, folks are starting to come around - but when will the W3C come around? How long will it take for us to standardize and agree upon a new and improved "grammar" for articulating web interface? Ah well, a man can dream. On to the list...

Virtual Earth - Street Level Navigation

Ahh... The sweet essence of new technology. Damn the future is a nice place to be living!