'At one time, I felt being a mother was the ultimate experience, a woman was not complete without it.''Now I feel it's not the be all and end all. Motherhood is a part of a jigsaw puzzle; life is the real big picture.'

If you’re familiar with iOS development you will know that a UITableView is very efficient when displaying a list of data. A simplification of what it does is display enough cells to fill the viewport plus a few more either side. As you scroll it re-uses cells that are now out of the viewport so … Continue reading "UITableView in JavaScript, list view with re-usable cells using flexbox"

As Captiv Techno Solutions continues to unveil its cutting-edge AI-based products, industry observers are keenly monitoring how Babu and his team will shape the future of technology.

As the world is rapidly moving towards the evolving digital space, skills like problem-solving have become more important than ever. The entire market size of AI is projected to grow from USD 214.6 billion in 2024 to 1,339.1 billion in 2030 with a CAGR of 35.7%. In Today's scenario, skills like problem-solving are not just limited to professionals, it becomes crucial to teach kids how to think critically and creatively to steer through the complexities of modern life. This not only sharpens their abilities but also boosts innovation and helps develop young minds to use tools needed to solve real-world problems.

People analytics focuses on leveraging employee data to identify patterns, assess performance, and understand the factors driving engagement and retention.

The rise of uPVC in the Indian construction sector can be attributed to several factors. Unlike traditional materials such as wood and aluminum, uPVC offers excellent thermal insulation, reducing energy consumption for heating and cooling.

As word spread about the success of the half-hour schedule, some early adopters became curious after the clinic director and the team showcased the benefits.

Dubai-based siblings have seemingly decided to offer the domain to Reliance free of charge, according to their website.

Shruti Parthasarathy showed promise.

Assam’s Nati dance tradition is set on the path to regaining respect.

In times when parochial forces are gathering momentum and market pressure could be felt on classical dance forms, abhinaya remains the tool with which performers can celebrate the idea of India.

Jagyaseni Chatterjee goes on the trail of Bharatanatyam's roots

Kuchipudi dancer Avijit Das shone in parts during his performance in New Delhi.

Bharatanatyam exponent Geeta Chandra explored various strands of Jaina philosophy through a two-day festival, says Sunil Kothari

How traditional enterprise can adopt digital transformation

Sapience Analytics CEO says that improving work-time helps firms operate at peak efficiency

When you are done with playing the critic’s role, evolve to that of a coach

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Handling the organisation’s ‘resources’ in a ‘humane’ manner is the way forward for HR

Farmers are afraid to go to the fields because of sporadic firing by armed miscreants from higher grounds 

Ministry directs all wheat stocking entities to register on government’s wheat stock limit portal and update the stock position every Friday

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Government allocates ₹1.52 lakh crore for agriculture and allied sectors in the Union Budget 2024-25; Finance Minister announces that the Centre will work with States to promote digital public infrastructure for agriculture

It’s against the Constitution, and means Norway will not respect the Paris Agreement, argues Tina Andersen Vågenes.

He puts his life on the line to protect the Democratic Republic of Congo's national parks.

How Senegal is trying to involve the diaspora to curb emigration. By Sofia Christensen

The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist talks to Graeme Green about extremism, the refugee crisis and feeling at home in the past.

We talked to homeless in different countries and they revealed housing insecurity's different causes around the world.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

As the functionality and scope of Web sites and applications has grown over the years, so has the prevalence of Help pages. Nearly every feature has an explanatory article outlining how to use it and why. But most Help pages are walls of text making them hard to act on. So a few years ago, we tried something different.

First let's look at the status quo. This Help page from Amazon is both pretty typical and by those standards, pretty good. It's specific to one topic, brief, outlines steps clearly, and includes links to help people accomplish their intended task. Companies iterated to these kinds of Help pages because they mostly work and because they're less work.

Keeping Help text up to date and accurate is less labor-intensive than updating images or videos with the same information. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a lot of words and there's a reason many people turn to video tutorials to learn how to do things instead of reading about how to do them.

When building Polar several years ago, we wanted a more approachable and fun way of helping people learn how to use our product. And while you might say "the best Help pages are no Help pages -just make your app easy to use" not all Help pages are smearing over usability issues. Some introduce higher level concepts, others outline capabilities, and some serve as marketing for specific features.

So with those goals in mind, we iterated to a simple formula. Each concept or feature gets a Help page that has a title alongside 1-2 sentences and as many sections consisting of a title, 1-2 sentences, plus a graphic as needed.

This approach meant people primarily relied on images (or their alt tags if visually impaired) to figure out how to get things done. So we iterated a fair amount on the images to find the right balance of detail and abstraction. Make the UI too realistic and it becomes hard to focus on the relevant elements. Realistic UI images also need updating anytime the actual product UI changes. Conversely, make the image too simplistic and it doesn't provide enough detail for people to actually learn how to do things.

Of course, not all Help topics are well suited to an image but the process of trying to create one often triggers ideas on how to simplify the actual UI or concepts within a product. So it's worth the iteration.

But is a visual approach to Help pages able to scale? Assuming it works, can companies invest the time and effort needed to generate all these images and keep them up to date? Perhaps in a time of image generation AI models, it's increasingly possible through automated or supervised pipelines. Time will tell!

The most significant user interface change from iOS 17 to iOS 18 are the navigation differences in Apple's Photos app. The ubiquitous tab bar that's became the default navigation model in mobile apps is gone and in its place is one long scrolling page. So how does it work and why?

Most mobile applications have adopted a bottom bar for primary navigation controls. On Android it's called bottom navigation and on iOS, a tab bar, but the purpose is the same: make the top-level sections of an application visible and let people move between them.

And it works. Across multiple studies and experiments, companies found when critical parts of an application are made more visible, usage of them increases. For example, Facebook saw that not only did engagement go up when they moved from a “hamburger” menu to a bottom tab bar in their iOS app, but several other important metrics went up as well. Results like this made use of tab bars grow.

But in iOS 18, Apple removed the tab bar in their Photos app. Whereas the prior version had visible tabs for the top-level sections (Library, For You, Albums, Search), the redesign is just a single scroll view. The features previously found in each tab are now accessed by scrolling up and down vs. switching between tabs. One notable exception is Search which stays anchored at the top of the screen.

In addition to the persistent Search button, there's also a Select action and user profile image that opens a sheet with account settings. As you scroll up into your Photo library a persistent set of View controls appears at the bottom of the screen as well. The Close action scrolls you to the end of your Photo library and reveals a bit of the actions below making the location of features previously found in tabs more clear.

It's certainly a big change and given the effectiveness of tab bars, its also a change that has people questioning why? I have no inside information on Apple's decision-making process here but based on what I've learned about how people use Google Photos, Yahoo! Photos, and Flickr, I can speculate.

1. By far the dominant use of a Photo gallery is scrolling to find an image whether to share, view, or just browse.
2. Very few people organize their photo libraries and those that do, do it rarely.
3. People continue to have poor experiences with searching images, despite lots of improvements, so they default to browsing when trying to find photos.
4. Most automatic curation features like those found in For You just get ignored.

All that together can easily get you to the design answer of "the app should just be a scrolling list of all your Photos". Of course there's trade-offs. The top-level sections, and their features are much less visible, and thereby less obvious. The people who do make use of features like Albums and Memories now need to scroll to them vs. tapping once. But as iOS18 rolls out to everyone in the Fall, we'll see if these trade-offs were worth it.

Exhibition: 28 Mar 2018 - 29 Mar 2018, London, United Kingdom. Organized by The IET.

Often we are confronted with calls from fraudsters. We know that the call is a fraud but are unable to do anything. The best solution then will be have fun at their cost.

A no-meat, zero-dairy challenge turns out to be a boon for this Maldivian lunch, as a happy diner finds out

For snorkelling, seafood or spas, there is nothing quite like unexplored coastal town of Nha Trang

The movers-and-shakers at the Cartier Concours d’Elegance

Celebrity Chef Gaggan Anand on food philosophies and handling fame

If you love great design and architecture, Finland’s capital is right up your alley

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is quite a marvel despite being just a first step with a new form factor

The iconic pilot’s watch returns with the Aviator 8 Mosquito —- and it’s better than before

London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

Singapore : Springer, [2024]

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

Cham : Springer, [2024]