I have a weird relationship with AS3. As a designer, I hate how different it is, but, as a developer, I love how much easier it is to work with:
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A Quick FAP
December 9, 2007 – 5:55 pm
To help inspire growth on FAP, I’ve released A Quick FAP. It’s kind of like how people share videos on YouTube, now artists can share their works on their blog.
A Recommended FAP
December 9, 2007 – 5:51 pm
fAPI has been getting a lot of attention since I released it!
Inspired by all this activity, I created Recommended FAP. Enter your username, and it finds works that you will like based on your favourites.
The algorithm
December 9, 2007 – 5:51 pm
I finished the tags.xml data feed for fAPI today.
One of the interesting new features offered by tags.xml is finding related tags. A simple query on tags.xml?related=fox returns vixen, kitsune, vulpine, canine and tiger. The algorithm relies on people tagging things…so the more that people tag, the more accurate it becomes.
After that, I tried plugging in a few power tags to some surprising results…
tags.xml?related=favbyekigyuu finds tags that I’m most interested in, and tags.xml?related=userekigyuu finds tags that I use frequently.
Won’t be long until FAP is offering super accurate suggestions for works and artists that you would really like.
Eyetracking points the way to better design
December 9, 2007 – 5:42 pm
When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.
-From OJR
What have we learned? Know your audience. If you’re designing for men (especially straight ones) show lots of crotch shots.
Colour by Complex Math
December 9, 2007 – 5:42 pm
The hotlinked error images are now mathemagically coloured with random, complimenting or high contrasting tints.
I was busy geeking around with the graphics processing powers of PHP…when I became suddenly inspired and discovered a solution to a very difficult colour processing problem I had been having!
One of the new features I’ve been working on for FAP2 is the ability to search by colour. Currently, artists can tag colours themselves, but I would like to automate it so that the server calculates the colours upon upload and adds the correct tags for you.
Writing a program that evaluates colours quickly has been…difficult. But! I think I discovered a faster method tonight:
So, like, it creates a list of the 9 most frequently occurring colours, then compares to a limited list of colour tags (eg, black, white, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, etc…). Awesome.
I need to release the new fap, like, now. So I can play with these features on a larger base of art…grumble…
Preventing Hotlinking, the sexy way
December 9, 2007 – 5:40 pm
Recently, a lot of FAP’s bandwidth has been going towards hotlinked images. This isn’t very cool. But, instead of slapping down an ugly 403-image…like…
…FAP sends a polite, eloquent, beautiful little message to the person trying to take our bandwidth.
Ghost Code and AI
December 9, 2007 – 5:39 pm
I was working on the new FAP, adding some fun little suggestion-type-AI things…when something unexpected caught my eye.
The program was organizing things alphabetically. I didn’t tell it how to organize anything…it just did it.
…why did the program do this? I never told it to…?
It’s called Ghost Code, where the program starts doing unexpected things…nothing harmful, but curious little changes…like sorting things alphabetically, or putting things incrementally.
As a program becomes increasingly more complex, the possibilities for Ghost Code and the intensity of their effect increases…
There was a story about an uber-advanced society that created a series of computers linked together (internet, anyone?), and after a while…the combined computing power created a consciousness from fragments of Ghost Code. Ha, that would be hot.
Hacking CAPTCHA
December 9, 2007 – 5:38 pm
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are easily hacked…apparently.
So…I’m brainstorming different methods of testing for human intelligence that aren’t easily hacked by computers.
One major problem of conventional image-based CAPTCHAs are their inaccessibility to people that are blind. This shouldn’t matter to me if I’m developing a CAPTCHA for an art website…but still! It’s a fun little challenge!
The W3C has an interesting paper on the issue of inaccessible CAPTCHAs and offers possible solutions:
- Sound output: sites like Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo! use this secondary, non-visual CAPTCHA for blind users. Great. But what about blind AND deaf users?! Plus, voice recognition technology works very well with these computer generated voice samples…
- Non-interactive checks (like Heuristics, or SPAM filtering): these are my personal favourite techniques for CAPTCHA. But, using heuristics to determine the behaviour of robots still requires them to spam your site…and high-volume human users might be difficult to separate. Oh, and SPAM filtering can be hacked, sadly…
- Logic puzzles: this sounds promising…ask a simple math, verbal, or recognition-type question that computers can’t “get”. The W3C says, “Users with cognitive disabilities may still have trouble.” I don’t really want stupid people on my websites anyway…but, America is raising a nation of
below-averagestupid students, so these tests would have to be simple enough for them to understand. Argh!
I love challenges like this :D
I’m torn between making a Taboo-esque CAPTCHA (eg, What’s white, comes from cows, and you have it every morning? Answer: Milk!) and just using server-side, unobtrusive heuristics…
Sigh!
Heuristics are the way to go, obviously…but, omg…it’s not nearly as fun.
Sacrifice design to get there first
December 9, 2007 – 5:38 pm
“You can establish yourself with a typically bad interface, if you’re early and lucky or if you have the market power to force people to use your product. See Myspace, Amazon, MSN, Windows, QuarkXPress. Once you get to be market leader with a typically complicated interface, you actually have a good shot at keeping your users, as they’re that traumatized that they wouldn’t want to go through another painful learning process. Nowadays you have a better chance to become successful though, if you go for simplicity and usability. And you have a good chance to develop a strong brand by just doing that.”