We presented both a web solution as well as a localized USB stick solution containing 2000 public domain books at the conference. You can read more about the event here, and you can check out our web solution in the Rural Design Collective UI Lab. When we first started this project, our goal was to make public domain books more accessible and appealing to kids. Technology in this space is progressing rapidly, so it was fun to balance innovation with a well-defined set of deliverables. That is what makes working the Web so interesting – there is always something new and challenging to learn.

We have a lot of ideas regarding the next steps for our project (and our program), and we plan to implement them. We will be releasing our documentation and code in the next month (everything will be available for download), including a roadmap of the next steps for this particular project. We are very excited about the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), but just did not have enough time to work it out this season. We may work it in as an Extra Credit project this winter as we are eager to get set up as a catalog so we can hit the ground running next summer, adding more books and metadata to our collection. We have 600+ digital public domain books that were donated to our program by the Boston Public Library in support of our program (if you were wondering what the gray book icons are in our user interface, they represent placeholder categories for books that were donated by BPL).

The future looks bright! We are planning for next season and working out long-term goals for the Rural Design Collective. We already have eager candidates for mentees, a list of potential Friends of the RDC, a lot of interest, and many opportunities for projects. We will be spending the winter months on outreach and applying for grants. As always, we will share what we learn here.

Steven and Scotty have been working together to create a completely localized version of the collection for the sticks using the new genCollectionInterface tool. The biggest hurdle to overcome is presenting the user interface initially when the stick is inserted into the XO, and delivering the metadata before the book is opened in the Journal. In the meantime, we also developed an online version of the user interface that utilizes a streamlined version of the Internet Archive bookreader (also known as the embeddable bookreader). This bookreader interface works amazingly well on the XO and fits neatly on the screen. We also optimized the collection interface for viewing on the XO – we strongly encourage you to view it on a little green machine if you can (it looks a bit bare in a web browser – but wonderful on the XO … see the screenshots below!). We still have a bit of tweaking to do, but we are quite pleased with the results!

Additional Screenshots: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]. We worked diligently to provide an “XO-friendly” interface that accommodates the native elements in the Sugar UI. We are still tweaking some navigational issues, and resolving screen resolution on the XO – but we are pleased with the results!

It is possible to generate either version of the user interface using the genCollectionInterface tool with minor modifications to the code. Right now, we are trying to reach consensus as a team on how much crossover there should be between the online and local versions.

Levi has polished up his public domain icon set, creating one that is Sugar-friendly. We are exploring how to finesse the resolution in Sugar, given the fact that the XO browser renders the pages using 134 DPI. We are also researching to see if there are any standard naming conventions for Sugar icons so we can appropriately name and format the icons for the various states (on, off, hover) so developers can get right to work. We invite other Sugar developers to use these icons in their applications to represent categories of public domain books, and we will be improving the collection in the future – including giving developers an outlet for feedback so we can improve the set. This will also be explained in our documentation. Stay tuned!

Hello! Busy times at the RDC. Our Launch Party deadline is swiftly approaching, so we are working to have the best demo possible for the event. It will take place over Labor Day Weekend, September 4-7, and will coincide with an art show at Point B Studio entitled “Find Way.” This art show is the first in a three-part series, “Art in the Information Age”, and will feature artists who have elevated information visualization to an art form in their chosen medium. It is an exciting series that will build over the course of the next year, so please add us to your bookmarks!

In the Lab, we are coding a few new bits and pieces of the user interface. We decided to eliminate the top navigation bar on the collection navigation to get more content on the screen (and we will most likely eliminate it entirely so it feels more like a Sugar application). This led to the clever solution of making a touchpad widget for the icons that Levi has been working so diligently on. This builds on the constructs and motifs already established in the Sugar environment (pulldown menus, intuitive icons, icon docks), while introducing new possibilities. We think it works! There is a bit of a challenge to ensure it is not obscured by the icon dock frame that is native to Sugar, but we have taken that into account and are designing accordingly.

Scotty and Steven will use this as a template to programmatically generate the pages for the collection that will be distributed on the sticks. There are still a few details to hash out before we get to that point, but when Levi and I get there, Scotty and Steven will be ready to take it the rest of the way (Teamwork!). For our demo next week, we will most likely go with a simple HTML list just to illustrate our concept.

As I mentioned before, we plan to extend our work into October, bearing in mind that each of us has other work to do and the changing of the seasons brings on a new tempo. We are all pretty detail-oriented (and plus we just like working together), so we agree that there is more work to do before we are ready for production. This has been an amazing mentoring season, and we have grown and gained knowledge from each other by having this opportunity to create beautiful and meaningful things.

We officially declare the 2009 Rural Design Collective Summer Mentoring Season a resounding success! w00t!

Greetings! It is Saturday, and I finally have time to write the blog post for Wednesday (so much for Internet Time . It is becoming somewhat of an RDC tradition to tweak the details and let the ideas percolate a bit before posting to the web, which suits me fine. The best work takes time to develop.

Levi is making great progress with the icons. He has about a third of them completed, and I asked permission to post a few of them today to show the process. To give the icons uniformity, he is starting with a basic visual element – the circle – and building out from there. We are also using the Sugar icon set as a basic palette for look and feel (and eventually, color). As you can see, the set is beginning to work together on its own, and it looks spectacular on the XO.

Steven has gathered the metadata for the UI and made it available in a .CSV format. After brainstorming a bit, we decided to explore building out the web UI programmatically before we solve the puzzle of how to extract the metadata from the .CSV file into the Journal from the stick. We want to ensure that this collection will be accessible in other applications, such as GIAB (now in its 3rd revision) which solves the metadata issue, but does not work with local collections. We are always thinking about how to keep the architecture and data open so other people can use it and we can continue to improve it in the future.

We also conducted a few usability tests on the XO, and made some adjustments to our layout. The most notable change is that we decided to use a liquid layout as opposed to a fixed layout. Simply put, liquid layouts allow the user to have control over a very important personal aspect of their view: the amount of information that they see on-screen. Using our own layout as a basic example, if a user prefers to see more than five books in a row, all they have to do is resize the browser window (go ahead, try it! – you can see a similar design practice in the search result view of Open Library). This is important on both the web and the XO. On the XO, using a liquid layout means that the display refreshes automatically when a user physically flips the monitor from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. We like smart, elegant UI at the Rural Design Collective.

We have also tweaked our collection considerably in terms of categories, which is reflected here. We are still contemplating what the best approach is in regards to collection size and content in general – but that is a design solution for another day. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

This week, we started defining the toolkit for our user interface. Scotty and Steven are working on the technical details of gathering the necessary metadata. We ran through a few quick flow tests on the XO, and there are some intermediary steps to the process of transferring the book from the USB stick to the Journal that need to be considered to guarantee a seamless user experience. We want to make that transition as fluid as possible, and the metadata is a critical component in that process.

We also began building our graphical interface! Levi is developing an icon system to work with our categories (which we are still in the process of finalizing – much debate about that . It is not an easy task dealing with almost 20 categories of books that do not readily lend themselves to a symbol or pictograph. We developed a standard RDC cover in the meantime to give us a default image to use as the icons and user interface are developed and the collections are improved. We don’t want to rush this step in the process since building a visual language is such an important part of any user interface design and some of the categories or content may change. All is a work in progress and, ultimately, we will release the icon set and the user interface into the public domain (the books are already there .

We took a look at the basic design on the XO, and will have a few adjustments to make before we enter final production. We are considering usability within the current Sugar environment (i.e., using navigational methods already adopted as a best practice such as tooltips and dropdown menus) with the goal to make it accessible and friendly to children. Scotty and Steven are developing a plan to auto-generate the pages for the collection, and we are evaluating a couple of Ajax libraries to build out our final user interface. We are leaning towards script.aculo.us, simply because it plays nice with other JavaScript libraries on our web site.

Things should really start coming together over the next couple of weeks – we have a rollout plan, a deadline … Labor Day Weekend – The RDC Launch Party! … and will need to get busy soon writing our documentation and creating some necessary items to make it very simple to use our sticks with the XOs. Go RDC!