Opening gift after gift Christmas morning is an event. Accompanied by family and laughter, gift after gift is opened, and this year my wife, Sarah, got me an Echo Dot, a Phillips Hue starter kit (with two white Lux bulbs included), and she helped her mom and stepfather pick out a Phillips Hue Color Ambiance as [...]
'Twas the night before Christmas, in the automated home, Not a device was stirring, not even one; Google Home was set by the chimney with care, Waiting for "Hey Google" to hang in the air; The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of Phillips Hues danced in their heads; And mamma [...]
A path diverges in a wood. ― Robert Frost The future involves a monthly bill. Microsoft is Office 365, the cloud service with the monthly or yearly fee. Adobe has completely phased out their buy-once use-forever model, favoring a $50-a-month service. Same-same with Quickbooks. TurboTax. Amazon Prime. Netflix. Spotify. Even smaller, more niche software have jumped on the [...]
The Internet of Things has many design considerations, and one very important tool that needs to be considered in all but the most disposable IoT devices is the idea of modularization. You might be of the age where you remember going to work on the ol' Buick with your dad. You handed him crescent wrenches [...]
I had a great conversation with Jenae Ramos, UX designer and co-organizer of Orlando's Downtown UX Meetup, talking about design and the Internet of Things. Jenae joked that designing for the screen involves many permutations of "fancy rectangles." While that is completely selling the complexity of UX design short, I get the point. After years of designing [...]
What are the differences between ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, and the Internet of Things? These terms are full of subtleties, but my simplified is simply that the Internet of Things is ubiquitous or pervasive computing in a more limited scope. Ubiquitous and pervasive computing, which you can think of as pretty much the same thing, is the [...]