The Software Garden: Software Quality Visualization for Non-programmers

The idea here is to come up with a visualization of source code that would give some indication of quality to non-programmers.

Imagine for example a service that indexes open source code and provides such a visualization in the form of gardens. A non-programmer could quickly examine and compare the gardens for some competing open source software applications.

Bad smells in the source code would manifest themselves in the form of a poorly maintained garden.

You could also show code evolution via an animation of the garden over time.

Visualizing Software Systems as Cities

From the abstract:

"This paper presents a 3D visualization approach which gravitates around the city metaphor, i.e., an object-oriented software system is represented as a city that can be traversed and interacted with: the goal is to give the viewer a sense of locality to ease program comprehension.

The key point in conceiving a realistic software city is to map the information about the source code in meaningful ways in order to take the approach beyond beautiful pictures.

We investigated several concepts that contribute to the urban feeling, such as appropriate layouts, topology, and facilities to ease navigation and interaction.

We experimented our approach on a number of systems, and present our findings."

http://www.inf.unisi.ch/projects/evospaces/publications/Wettel07b.pdf

If lifecasting is too much for you, why not try "Lifehinting"?

For many people, lifecasting is just too much of an invasion of privacy.

So why not consider "Lifehinting"? The idea here is to give clues as to what your life is like.

For example, you could do this by an algorithm that transforms a lifecasting feed into abstract animations, perhaps resembling VisualID Scenery. Similar sorts of activities would result in similar sorts of abstract animations.

After a while of doing this, your friends will start to get clues as to the sorts of things you do -- at least, for those activities that they are familiar with.

“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major Googler” (Song)

Via Google Blogoscoped:

http://lauren.vortex.com/modern-major-googler.mp3

http://lauren.vortex.com/googler-lyrics

Also, check out the CSE Band, especially Theory Girl.

Study Stickies Facebook Application

I would appreciate feedback on my Study Stickies Facebook application:

http://apps.facebook.com/studystickies/

Study Stickies allows you to take notes (stickies) from books as well as online resources (e.g., pdf/html documents, videos, etc.).

The vision behind Study Stickies is two-fold:

1. it allows people to take notes for themselves for easy browsing/search; and
   
2. these notes accumulate allowing you to learn from others.
   

Imagine for example getting stuck on page 147 of your algorithms textbook or SQL reference. You might then see if others have made any insightful stickies for that page.

Using human computation games to promote your startup

In a previous post, I described a variation of the Listen Game that could be used to get people to look at online advertising carefully.

Another approach would be to build a custom human computation game for your startup to promote your startup in a more domain-specific way.

For example, if you are building an online video site, then you could provide a game similar to the ESP Game but adapted to video. Not only would this give you useful data to improve video search on your site, but it would also provide an engaging form of advertisement for your online video startup.

Will Wright: Toys that make worlds

From the talk description:

In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces. Here Wright encourages users to create not households, as in The Sims, or cities, as in SimCity, but the entire universe, from single-celled life forms to galactic physics. While guiding us through his mesmerizing beta, Wright shares his thoughts on Montessori schools, Darwinian theory and long-term thinking, emphasizing, throughout, that Spore is not so much a game as an opportunity for discovery -- "an imagination amplifier."

(Via TEDBlog.)