What a cool application! Moodstream lets you create and save a multimedia “moodboard” based on criteria you choose via dragging around some sliders at left. You wind up with a multimedia show from which you can select and capture different pieces of media.

This makes me wonder how they associate the metadata you’re selecting against with these pieces and how do they decide just how much that metadata applies? For example, if I crank down the “sad” slider, how does the application know that a video clip is more (or less) sad than any other piece in the repository? Is it weighted? Tagged? Do they let users themselves decide by seeing how many “sad” moodboards attract a certain image or by letting them rate how “sad” an image is somewhere else? (Or, maybe more “sad” just means fewer and fewer “happy” images appear in the rotation.)

One of the cooler apps I’ve seen in a while and an excellent way of promoting people to buy your stock media by bubbling up clips that they may not ordinarily find through an innovative way of filtering.

Thanks to the always-spectacular Information Aesthetics blog for digging this up.

Tags: design, moodboard, getty, multimedia, flash

Ernst & Young have just launched a site that I had a hand in building. EY Insight is a college prep tool for students interested in a career at EY. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a true JavaScript and Flash hybrid, mixing them together so well that you can’t really tell them apart. And, this is true high-fidelity JavaScript animations sitting on top of full-screen Flash video: they are damn smooth and look damn good all the while!

Why is it cool? It’s one of the first sites I’ve seen that mashes up JavaScript (in this case YUI) and full-screen Flash video. There’s some pretty complicated Flash/JavaScript interaction going on, and I really haven’t seen too much like it. (Thanks SWFObject and Alisdair Mills). This is the biggest YUI app that I’ve launched, and brings a nice, high profile to how much fidelity you can get out of a JavaScript app.

What did I do? With the design/UX team, I helped drive the interaction design for this one, especially the Picture Yourself app. Really cool, snappy, sensible interactions there: this is how to make a quiz "not boring". I also did a lot of the JavaScript heavy lifting (a big chunk of the JavaScript back-end and the Object modeling) as well as the bulk of the Flash / JS interaction work before helping David (below) when I could spare a minute or two.

Props to David Tong of Molecular’s San Francisco office, who was the sole full-time engineer on the project for doing some really nifty work.

Yes, I snuck in conditional compilation on this, too. Another interesting note: IE6 has some interesting issues while trying to destroy Flash objects and Flash streams. Seems to orphan them a lot. This might be worth another post in the near future.

Tags: yui, launch, production, ajax, flash, video

Here’s my first official post on Molecular’s blog. Reprinted here for all my (less than 10, probably) subsrcibers.

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We all know—or at least have been told repeatedly— that we’re in a world that’s changing rapidly due to technology: while we don’t have flying cars quite yet, the ways in which we interact with the world have changed a great deal, even in the past few years.

Just how much has changed? Steve Portigal posted a link to Beloit College’s Class of 2011 Zeitgeist on his blog, and if it’s any indication, the answer is just about everything.

As of the Class of 2011, we live in a world where college students have:

• never rolled down a car window,
• always been able to slap mp3s up on MySpace or write on their friends’ Facebook walls,
• always had hi-definition television available,
• and always were able to fired of text messages back and forth.

In short, almost every interaction—designed or not—that I grew up with is a thing of the past. While growing up, I:

• always cranked down the window as fast as I could like it was some kind of game,
• never let my friends borrow any of my tapes (!) or CDs because I didn’t want them to get broken or scratched,
• never could get in any of the TV channels I wanted to watch without messing around with a set ofrabbit ears,
• and never really liked calling my friends on the phone to see if they wanted to play baseball in my backyard because you’d always get stuck with their mom or sister on the phone.

I’m not that far out of college, but I’m already far out of touch with college students. For product, service, and interaction designers like us, that’s kind of a scary challenge: we’re living in a world where the fundamental “laws” we build are thrown right out the window in a short span of years. For business owners, that’s even more daunting: how do young kids see your products and branding when they grew up in a completely different context than you did?

Here’s the real challenge for designers, developers, and business owners alike: we need to constantly and consistently keep creating new ideas, new products and services, and new ways to interact with those things we create before those old ways are already forgotten. As the Class of ‘11 can tell you, in today’s world, that’s happening faster than you think.

technorati tags:ifeelold, userexperience, ux, interactiondesign, ixd