It is the fastest selling consumer electronics device with sales figures that outstripped all other consumer electronics according to the Guinness World Records selling a total of 8 million units in the first 60 days. We then witnessed the Kinect Effect as researchers, academics and tinkerers realised the potential of the device to engage with people in a new and natural way. As Alex Kipman, the founding father of Kinect said, ‘if you know how to do something in the real world, you know how to do it in Kinect’s world’. Kinect is making technology disappear so that users no longer need to learn how technology works, instead, the technology is learning how we work. This is game changing stuff.

And now, today sees the launch of Kinect for Windows. This is a new piece of hardware that can be connected to a Windows 7 PC and allows anyone to develop applications using Kinect as the controller. The hardware is available for purchase and the one point oh version of the SDK can be downloaded today from the Kinect for Windows site.

The Kinect for Windows sensor is available in the United States, for a suggested retail price of US $249. You will also be able to purchase Kinect for Window sensors in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. There is also a reduced price of $149 for Qualified Educational Users.

In the three months since Beta 2 was released, many improvements have been made to the SDK and runtime, including:

• Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer
• Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which user is being tracked by the sensor
• Near Mode for the new Kinect for Windows hardware, which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device
• Many API updates and enhancements in the managed and unmanaged runtimes
• The latest Microsoft Speech components (V11) are now included as part of the SDK and runtime installer
• Improved “far-talk” acoustic model that increases speech recognition accuracy
• New and updated samples, such as Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, color modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls
• A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.
• Robustness improvements including driver stability, runtime fixes, and audio fixes

More details can be found here.

What about Mac users?

Sorry, this only works on Windows 7 and Windows Embedded Standard 7. It is also compatible with the the Windows 8 Developer Preview which is currently available as a free download.

Kinect Accelerator Program

There is still time to submit your application for the Kinect Accelerator Program. This is open to both companies and individuals who are looking to take part in an intensive 3 month incubation programme starting in April in Seattle which aims to work with you to build incredible experiences with using Kinect. For full details on the entry requirements and how to apply, see the BizSpark Kinect Accelerator website.

UX has become a bit of a buzz word in the last few years. Seemingly out of nowhere, UX designers started cropping up everywhere over the past five or so years. However, there’s a really good reason for this… All you need to do is look around you to see the vast array of badly designed products and websites. Thankfully, user experience designers are changing things,  designing and creating products that put people first, with the output being usable, useful and enjoyable. For websites, CMS systems have often been touted as the bearers of bad UX, with clunky, out-dated interfaces and little to no consideration of design. However, in recent years, things have started to move forward, with WordPress and Drupal vastly improving their interfaces, and now with Joomla working toward their 3.0 release, they’ve established JUX, a team dedicated to improving the user experience of Joomla in future releases.

We caught up with one of the team leads, Kyle Ledbetter, to find out more about JUX…

Why is user experience so important to Joomla?

UX is the cornerstone of any software. It’s the first and last impression you get while using it. Your experience in using Joomla is how you rate the quality of the software. Even if the underlying software is fantastic, if the UX is poor, Joomla is poor in your mind and your recommendations.

What do you hope to achieve with JUX?

My vision of the JUX will improve the daily lives of all Joomla users: designers, developers (core and community), site administrators. 

With proper standards and a set of UI tools, designers can more rapidly prototype wireframes and flows. With this, there would be little to no testing required or special CSS needed to provide a beautiful and seamless experience in a frontend site design, providing all the extensions are standard.

The community of Joomla developers have always struggled with the tools they have been given in the Joomla API, and end up innovating outside the core, essentially creating their own UI kits. The result is the current disjointed, nonstandard set of component interfaces that all have different design patterns and usability issues. If we all get on the same page with a core library of UI elements (JUI) and a set of best practices, developers can focus on the code and rapidly deploy interfaces, that use standards and have low learning curves.

Whether an administrator is running their own site, their company’s site, or delivering a site to a client, they clock the most time in the Joomla admin. An intuitive interface and logical workflows can lower barriers and increase adoption. From component to component, learning curves would naturally disappear as the UI and workflows become repetition.

I envision JUX iteratively improving 4 Joomla fronts: 

1. Joomla.org (which we’ve just recently redesigned)
2. Joomla Admin Template
3. Joomla User Interface Library (JUI)
4. Joomla Default Frontend Template & Sample Data

Can you explain a little more about the Joomla UI library (JUI)?

As I mentioned, Joomla developers have always faced issues with the available UI library in Joomla, and thus create their own UI islands. We need a core UI library that is continuously improved and evolved for the community developers’ needs. It’s impossible and illogical for the core team of devs to maintain this, so we need contributions from Joomla’s design community. I’d like to model the JUI after great UI toolkits like Bootstrap from Twitter, and possibly start with that set of tools. If Joomla developers have this available, I think we’ll see the amount and quality of components rise dramatically since you won’t have programmers fumbling around with interfaces. You have to remember, most Joomla devs are 2-3 person shops that don’t have a designer on staff!

What would you like to see in the Joomla 2.0 admin?

The focus of the Joomla 3.0 admin will be usability, workflow and customisation. We’re starting with a blank slate and no creative hindrances. How should Joomla look? How should Joomla work? 

We need a modern, flexible UI that honours the Joomla brand but reinvigorates the perception. It’s crazy to say, but this will be the first completely unique admin interface for Joomla’s core. Since 2005 we’ve been building on what we inherited from Mambo. This admin template should certainly be built on the JUI so it’s completely standard with community extensions.

I’m very excited about creating some new workflows around page creation. It’s probably the biggest pain point of Joomla. You currently have to jump from Categories to Articles to Menus to Modules and possible Templates, and each of those things have settings. We need a simple flow where you create a new Page, then pick what type of page it is and what shows on it. From there you can tweak settings, hopefully all in one location.

I’d also like to see the Joomla admin menu surface in the Menu Manager. Joomla has a powerful ACL system now, but is largely untapped in the admin site. We can deliver an admin menu system to offer all the customisations of the Joomla frontend.

I’ve taken my first stab at a Joomla 3.0 admin concept, but we’re also inviting other Joomla template designers to join in and share their concepts. This really needs to be a community effort!

What do you think of the current state of UX across all the major CMSs?

UX is on the forefront of any worthwhile CMS at this point. WordPress has focused on UX for years, improving their UI and workflow with every release. This is why WordPress is deemed “easy”. I believe that now WordPress is more than blogs, they’re hitting some of the UX issues Joomla has, since you’re providing an interface for…everything! Drupal realized their UX shortcomings and launched a community initiative with Drupal 7, and have significantly improved.

We should look beyond our neighbours though. There is some fantastic UX in hosted systems beyond open source, like LightCMS and SquareSpace. Those systems each have a wonderful frontend admin user experience, which could easily rise in importance for the JUX and Joomla 3.0.

Kyle is a Usability Engineer for Ebay, Inc. and UI/UX Designer for Joomla! Follow him on Twitter, or to find out more about about JUX and JUI, head to the JUX site.

Yesterday the beta of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Windows Phone was released, making the Amazon S3, SimpleDB, and SQS Cloud Services directly available to Windows Phone 7 Developers via C# APIs. The SDK is published as open source code under the Apache 2.0 license.

Why do this? Microsoft designed Windows Phone to be a Cloud-friendly phone across vendor boundaries. There are various Cloud platforms available on the market today and Windows Phone developers should be able to efficiently and rapidly get their Windows Phone applications connected and integrated with the Cloud services they want.

This release is aimed at gathering feedback from the developer community to deliver the right support in the SDK. The Windows Phone team is keen to improve it and deliver the right features based on the feedback.

Developers can download the SDK , along with the complete source code under the Apache license. A Getting Started guide can be found on the Windows Phone Interoperability Bridges site along with other resources.

Windows Phone Porting resources and API mapping:

• How to port your Android, iPhone or Qt apps over to the Windows Phone platform
• Leveraging your iPhone development expertise to build Windows Phone applications
• Leveraging your Android development expertise to build Windows Phone applications

by Simon May

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

At least that’s what Bill Cosby of questionable jumper fame suggests, and I think it’s true. I love my music especially a bit of old school HipHop but finding new music that you like can be a tricky thing. Luckily you aren’t alone as for quite some time there has been a service that enables you to discover music that matches your taste by understanding music that you like listening to and suggesting new stuff. Last.fm use a process known as scrobbling to look at your music collection and determine what else might suite your unique preferences.

Last.fm aren’t new, they’ve been around a while and there are applications available on all your favourite platforms including anything that starts with an “i”, Windows Phone, Xbox and Windows 7 and recently I popped along to Last.fm HQ in London. Whilst I was there I had questions for people on their API team and questions about how they determine the look and feel of Last.fm through UX design – obviously a challenge with an open API.

In the video you’ll learn about some of the ways that Last.fm thinks about UX design, about music discovery and finally about how they make their API available to you to work with.

Since I went in to film this with Last.fm they launched a HTML5 based experience that capitalizes on IE9s support to help you discover new music, Last.fm Discover. I spent yesterday using it to explore the world of contemporary jazz in true Bill Cosby style; although I must admit I was lacking a suitable jumper! The Discover experience starts by suggesting a musical tag – I choose “jazz”, then starts playing a track, you can select something you like then Last.fm will suggest “more like this” or “something different” depending upon your choices. One of the joys is that you can discover some new talent with tags like “under 2000 listens” which surface music that hasn’t been heard by many people. With so many music taste makers listening and sharing with Last.fm it’s hard to imagine just how ahead of the curve you can be.

If you’d like to start developing with the API you can get the API documentation here.

Simon May has over 10 years experience in financial institutions, the NHS and some other gigs and is an IT Pro Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Simon is also the author of The Rough Guide to Windows 7 which helps everyone get to grips with Microsoft’s latest operating system and he blogs regularly at TheDigitalLifestyle.com about Windows Media Centre.

“Fake!” I hear you cry. That’s what I thought, especially as the above video has comments disabled, however, the next video goes some way to explaining how this could be possible.

To understand how this works, take a read of the Meissner effect and diamagnetic (ism) over on Wikipedia. Essentially, when you cool something to very low temperatures (that’s what the liquid nitrogen is for) certain materials transition to a superconducting state and that’s when it creates an equally opposing magnetic field (which makes it hover).

I still think there’s a bit of CGI going on there though. If not, I want one for Christmas. Ok?

Last week we tuned in to the Web Heroines Emerge mini-conference. For those who haven’t come across it before, it’s a platform for celebrating women in the industry of tech – from web and design to development and start-ups – with a mission to increase the number of women in the UK within these fields… And I think the ‘mini’ comes from the myriad of multi-media these ladies got hands on with over the course of three days, topped off by a live panel hosted in the stunning British Library.

Emerge had an amazing line up of workshops and talks, from speakers including Jen Myers, Rebekah Lock, on generating design ideas, and Abbey Tosic, on writing for magazines and life as Usability Lead at 3M.

We joined some of the talks and here are our highlights…

Rachel Andrews from the special web development agency edgeofmyseat.com and author of The CSS Anthology spoke about launching a product from her experience of developing, launching and supporting her CMS product Perch. We really liked her ‘No FAQ Policy’ – “if it would make it onto a FAQ page it’s effectively a bug in your process or system that you need to resolve.” Rachel followed it up with a great example of a minor technical step that users were coming unstuck on when installing the Perch CMS and the solution, as easy as an automated message with instructions!

“Mobile is taking off like Gang Busters!” according to Annette Priest, an independent UX researcher and designer involved in the shaping of the usability standards, in her webinar on the essentials of mobile user experience. Effectively web UX principles hold true when considering mobile design

There were one of two fantastic talks on user experience, the other was on top tips for interviews that provide real user and client insight from Evgenia “Jenny” Grinblo, a self-taught designer who called on experience of her ethnographic study on go-go dancers.

Our favourite tips include:

• Focus on the other person
• Learn to love silence
• Ask “why” – followed by…
• Ask “why” again
• Check yourself

Overall, Emerge was a stupendous forum of web women sharing their expert knowledge in a mini- conference and inspiring a thriving community of web heroines. We’ll be posting a rundown of the panel, featuring Sarah Parmenter and Julie Howell, early next week.

I stumbled onto this article this week. I have family and friends who would use the M11 on a regular basis so wanted to check out the details from a tweet that mentioned a crash on the M11. I was surprised by the content of this page so I decided to quickly colour in the various sections of the page as the actual content was surprisingly brief compared to the weight of the page.

I coloured them by:

• Content – [red] – the article that I was actually looking for
• Navigation – [purple] – links to other pages on the site / social links
• Ads – [green] – content that leads to external sites
• Related stories – [yellow] – other news articles on the same site

Here’s a link to the original post – http://www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/9486732.11_car_pile_up_on_M11/?ref=rss&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

What struck me as surprising about this was:

1. the percentage of ad content on the page
2. the lack of actual story

I’m not saying that I always have a story to tell and sometimes even I can be superficial when it comes to posting content online, but surely in instances like this where there is a need from the user to view an important news article then that content should take visual priority in some way? Here’s a few thoughts on how news sites could handle this sort of situation.

A simple template for short stories

Reduce the ad space and related article content when there’s only a short piece of information about an event or situation. This would allow the user to see immediately the info that they were after. I’m guessing that an unlikely user journey will be arriving on a page to check out some breaking news only to remember that they’re actually looking for a second hand car and leave the site via a banner ad. Surely we all know by now that user experience and relevancy is more important than ad impressions?

Make news content stand out

We’re used to seeing this happen in reverse such as when you click an image on a blog and the page dims, the image grows and comes into focus. This same method could be applied to all content from external links. This would mean that people who are not used to the layout of your site would immediately be focused on the content that the link they clicked promised them. Having this work on a timer would be acceptable.

There’s many situations on the web where a template simply isn’t used for it’s intended purpose and content management tools sometimes are not able to deal with these scenarios for us. But I do think that web authors need to be more thoughtful about the user.

Feel free to post your own thoughts and solutions to this problem below. Also, any links to blog posts and websites of mine where i’m contradicting myself will be appreciated.

With the Critters nominations opening last week, we thought we’d catch up with a few of the award winners from last year. At last year’s awards, HTML5 Doctor picked up the gong for Blog of the Year, and why shouldn’t they? With a collection of some of the brightest sparks in the industry waxing lyrical about implementing HTML5 and CSS3 today, it’s become an invaluable resource to the web development and design community.

Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, and Tom Leadbetter started HTML5 Doctor in 2009 after an HTML5 meetup after Future of Web Design, with Oli Studholme and Remy Sharp joining the team soon after. Bruce collected the award last year, which is proudly sitting in Rich’s office at KMP, and we recently caught up with him to ask him a few questions…

What are your fond memories of the Critters last year?

Frolicking with Freida Pinto in the champagne jacuzzi. Or perhaps it was fighting with Beeby, in a puddle? It’s all unaccountably hazy …

What can we expect from the doctors in 2012?

Last year we had a re-design, we’ll continue adapting and refining that. We’ll also focus on getting more content to the audience while keeping the quality high.

Oh and we might have a couple of surprises too!

What do you see as the big issues and challenges with HTML5 for 2012?

Same as last year. Developers getting too hypnotised by The Shiny to make sure they cater to all their users. Also, mad people spouting nonsense about HTML5′s game-changing value-added synergies that leverage a new app-based immersive customer-facing media paradigm (that’s £1K in consultancy fees, thanks).

Make sure you nominate your picks for this year’s Critter awards by the 22nd of Feb!

The Design of Understanding is a conference that popped up last year as a bit of an under the radar conference for people interested in the design of ideas. Run by Max Gadney, who led the design team at BBC News Online for a few years, the day features speakers from places like Makielab and Eye Magazine, talking on various aspects of design.

Eva-Lotta Lamm, who has sketchnoted a few conferences for Ubelly in the past, attended the conference last year and will be heading down again this year. “It’s one of these great one day conferences that have been happening in London for a few years now,” she says. “Rather than being a discipline oriented conference (e.g. a UX conference) it brings together speakers and attendees from different disciplines around a topic that is relevant for various disciplines – in this case: How do can we ‘Design for Understanding’?”

Last year featured speakers from the areas of information design, exhibition design, digital design and data visualisation, addressing questions like how we can turn the masses of data collected today into appropriately designed information that generates new insights and real understanding, or the responsibility of the designer to understand the data and its context to treat it appropriately.”

Andrew from the Ubelly team will be heading down on the day to cover the event for Ubelly, so make sure you say hello to him if you see him there. He’ll be tweeting and posting about the day on Ubelly so make sure you visit us next week if you haven’t secured a ticket for yourself. If you have, have you added yourself to the Lanyrd page?

Picture standing in front of a crowd. You have five minutes on stage to talk about something you love. 20 slides, each slides advancing every 15 seconds, out of your control. Nerves aside, you launch into it. You finish, the crowd loves it and you feel like a god. Welcome to Ignite.

Ignite started in Seattle about 5 years ago and is the brainchild of Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, and Bre Pettis of Makerbot.com. Basically, it’s a presentation style where you are asked to present about something you love for 5 minutes. 20 slides. 15 seconds each. Think Pecha Kucha. That’s all you need to know.

After seeing the brilliance of Ignite at Le Web and Over the Air, Ubelly are hosting their own Ignite as part of Social Media Week London on 15th February. We’ve got some great speakers lined up for the event, including Bruce Lawson, Martin Beeby, Ewan Spence and Andrew Spooner. However, we need a few more…

Want to speak at Ignite Ubelly? Submit your talk below! As we mentioned, the only prerequisite is that you are passionate about what you’re speaking about. It could be about women in tech, memes, ghosts or even the concept of 5 minutes.

Subsmissions for Ubelly Ignite are now closed.