OmniGraffle has become my favorite tool for all design work. Stencils are reusable diagrams, like templates in MS Word. There are some stencils like YUI, Facebook that I use frequently, but I also search for new stencils often. Graffletopia has the best collection of Omnigraffle stencils online. I am surprised that Omnigroup is not maintaining their own repository of stencils. It is like Mozilla not maintaining the FireFox addons repository.

It is possible to download stencils from Graffletopia without leaving Omnigraffle. To download stencils within Omnigraffle, open the stencils window (shortcut: ⌘+0) and click on the triangle next to the lens icon and choose Graffletopia. Now you can search for stencils as you would on Graffletopia website. Click on the search results and select install to download the stencil.

This design pattern of installing addons/extensions within the host application is becoming standard. During the early days Firefox for example, users had to visit Firefox addons website to find extensions, download the file and install them. Now users can install addons within Firefox itself. Other browsers like Google Chrome also do the same.

Do you have any OmniGraffle tips? Share them by adding your comments below.

I’m reading Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton. It is a interesting book, just the title convinced me to read the book. In a chapter the author refers to the prototyping of the bifocal display  (YouTube Video of the original prototype) which displays receding text above and below the user’s field of vision. This allows to gauge what is coming up ahead and what was just read. This solution can be useful for reading text in small displays. The author recreated a prototype of the bifocal display using materials found around the office. THe author went on to say any interaction designer should be able to recreate the prototype and record a video of it in 30 minutes. I took up the challenge and started creating the prototype.

The book has pictures showing how the prototype was constructed. So I started by collecting materials similar to what was used in the book – cardboard pieces, magazine cutouts, pens. I didn’t have a printer or a screenshot printout – so I sketched it on a blank paper. I used rice instead of glue (gross!). For the first 5 minutes I thought this would be a cake walk. But when I started putting together the cardboard and the screenshot I had aligned issues. Then there were problems with the thick edges of the cardboards.

I kept reminding myself that the end objective is to show how the user experience will be, the materials and method don’t matter. I tore up the thick edges and used a cardboard box instead of the single cardboard sheet. Finally I set up the camera on a bar stool and recorded the video. I completed the prototype in 35 minutes. My prototype would not be effective in communicating the intended experience of the bifocal display. But it was a good learning experience for me.

I came across an interesting service Tipjoy. to simplify the hard problem of co-ordinating a monetary transaction. Exchanging money is a very strong social signal. When we communicate with others we are exchanging only attention, other costs associated with communicating are almost zero. Internet and mobile technologies have made attention very scarce resource. I would argue that in some context it is more scarce than money. Attention scarcity is one of the challenges facing development of new Web 2.0 applications.

I think money, in the form of micro transactions, can be used to solve of this problem. By micro payments I mean in the order of few dollars or dimes. But coordinating human activities is very difficult, let alone exchanging money. So the cost of making a financial transaction is greater than transacted amount (a few cents dimes.)

It is not a very difficult problem. But I think it is a more rewarding problem to solve than doing information aggregation (news feeds), new messaging channel (Twitter), or similar tools which only steal more attention from us.

Go tipjoy, go, run like a wind….

Human curiosity has no bounds.  For US$ 535 you can visit the Chernobyl, Ukraine – where a nuclear reactor exploded in 1986. Visit www.tourchernobyl.com to find details about the ecological trip to Chernobyl. The company claims that the tour is 100% safe and many visitors have posted their pictures and videos. I’m certainly interested.

I found this cartoon on the whiteboard in an library study room.

Yael Naim’s song – “New Soul” was hand picked by Steve Jobs to be used in the Macbook Air commercial. After the commercial went on air the song rose to the top ten list in US.

I went to BlogPulse to see if I can spot any trend for Yael Naim, sure enough I could see a spike against her name around Jan 16. The interesting thing is MacBook Air was released only on Jan 29. So something else happened between Jan 16 and 29. Another trend you can notice is that after Jan 29, the number of posts has come down, but is higher than the pre Apple commercial days.