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The Experience Stack

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Quartz Composer is my favourite adaptive tool at the moment.

If you don’t know of it, it’s an application that gets installed when you install the free Mac developer tools.

It’s a visual programming language for animated compositions, optionally interactive. There’s no compile button—the viewer window shows whatever you’ve created, running live.

The language is modelled on a patchboard, like the languages Max MSP or PD, if you’ve used either of those. Each patch, as the blocks are called, has inputs and outputs. so there are ones in the middle there doing calculations, and you can run images down the pipes too so you can run a blur, or a colour transform. You just hook the patches together. It does 3d animation, primarily.

The great thing about it is the output is saved as movie files. the compositions can be used in screensavers, iTunes visualisers, and in a couple of months (in the next Mac OS) as desktop backgrounds. Actually you can use the compositions wherever you can put movies, and that includes presentation slides [the Quartz Composer line was animated in the presentation itself].

What makes this so wonderfully adaptive is that you can write your own patches, so you can write something that brings in some other image or interactive element, and start channelling that data into the composition too.

And i’ve seen software based around it for video DJs that’s really high-level—it just looks like movie mixing software. but that software lets you dive into the compositions and start editing at this very low patch level. It’s the dream of having a running application that has source code simple enough that you can dive in and edit, while running. Brilliant. [See VDMX5 and Quartonian Mixer.]

I want to talk about another bit of adaptive software, this time on my mobile phone.

I remember hearing about the top 4 uses of mobile phones. Voice calls and text messages are top. Then next, before cameras and calendars, are using your mobile phone as a clock, and as a torch. You know, pressing a button so you can find something in the dark.

Then in another project, I heard about the top four things people do with their mobile phones when they’re bored and killing time. This is all pretty anecdotal, by the way.

Positions four and three are using the internet and playing games. Then at position two is looking through old photos. Top thing to do with your mobile when killing time is deleting old text messages.

Why isn’t there an application for this? It’d get more use than most of the other apps on my phone.

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September 25, 2007

The experience stack is a way of looking at the different contributing factors in experience design. This presentation highlights a number of products with good experiences and is called The Experience Stack. It was originally delivered in September 2007 at d.construct 2007.