Edgar Tanaka

How to render office hours in Drupal programatically

edgartanaka — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:41:58 +0000

If you are using the Office Hours module in Drupal and want to render it in your page using PHP, here is the code snippet:

echo $node->field_office_hours[0]['view'];

Thought I should share this as I was using another more complicated code snippet found somewhere while googling around.

Unemotional beings

edgartanaka — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:55:40 +0000

Today I decided to watch the “Invictus” movie (I recommend it btw). After the movie, my friends and I went to Starbucks to grab a cup of coffee. We started discussing how some people just seem to not human beings without an emotional side. Did you ever have this impression? As if some people look like robots? I mean, people who don´t express their feelings and don´t react to the world around them.

Somehow, we got to discuss how emotions affect our lives negatively and positively. We all know people who under a lot of pressure did things they regretted afterwards. People who just lost it at work, traffic or during a family gathering.

Would life be easier if we simply were unemotional beings? Would people get along better and conflicts be dramatically reduced?

I know humans will always be emotional beings so we just have to deal with that. But I am also glad that emotions makes each one of us unique and makes humans a single race (shall I say privileged?). While studying HCI, I realized that there will always be a part of us that is strongly dependent on the culture we are immersed in. We might be able to come up with some concepts and rules that apply for every human being but differences will always show up when analysing people from different countries, religions, cultures and backgrounds.

Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting question to ask ourselves. Should reason be the guiding light to solve our problems?

Design minimalista ou design simplório?

edgartanaka — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:13:33 +0000

Tendo minha formação em exatas (em eng. de computação), sempre tenho a tendência de querer encontrar regras para tudo. Isso acabou valendo também para assuntos relacionados a design pelos quais me interesso tanto. Não acredito que dê para definir regras de um bom design (seja lá o que isso significa e em que contexto) mas acredito que ainda existem espaços a serem explorados nessa área com uma visão de engenharia.

Sempre fui fascinado por coisas (falo coisas aqui porque englobam música, arte, arquitetura, textos e outras coisas) que conseguem ser esteticamente atraentes, elegantes e fáceis de se interpretar. Sou grande fã do velho ditado “less is more”. Porém outro dia estive pensando comigo. Fui visitar um consultório médico recém construído. Estava novinho em folha. Percebi também que o dono do consultório tinha uma idéia bastante engessada sobre consultórios médicos TEM que ser brancos (isso daria um outro post longo mas vamos lá). Diante daquele enorme sobrado branco com alguns detalhes de vidro e grades verde escura fiquei pensando “qual é a diferença entre um design minimalista e um design simplório?”. Se desejamos um design minimalista mas que não pareça aquele design de alguém que acabou de começar a fazer páginas web, qual seria o caminho? Quais os critérios para se julgar um design como assim ou assado?

Talvez muitos me digam que não existam respostas precisas para tais perguntas mas ainda acredito que algumas recomendações de alto nível devam existir.

Para aqueles também fãs do minimalismo, ficam aqui alguns exemplos (não simplórios) que encontrei por aí:

Aproveitem!

Building my website

edgartanaka — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:40:49 +0000

I’m building my website at http://www.edgartanaka.com.br

Take a look

Edgar

Pensamento – Viviane Mosé

edgartanaka — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:08:00 +0000

“A fórmula de exaltar o ganhador e tripudiar o perdedor não é correta, pois há muitas alegrias que vêm da perda. Precisamos redescobrir o espaço da alegria, que não é sinônimo de bem-sucedido.” (Viviane Mosé)

10gui: Very interesting concept to bring touchscreens to our desktop

edgartanaka — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:14:00 +0000

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Trying to keep up

edgartanaka — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:56:00 +0000

I am trying to keep up with this blog but things have been crazy lately.

Designers and Developers

edgartanaka — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:09:00 +0000

Another day I was reading this article:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/5-pet-peeves-designers-have-with-developers-and-how-to-avoid-them/

The article gives some tips to designers about how to talk and work with developers. I know that the author probably stereotyped these two roles in a company but I found a lot of that post to seem true.

I mean, I don´t work at a company that develops websites nor web apps. Where I work there are no designers. Developers need to fill the role of designers (if they want to or if they give a damn about it). We have no graphical designers, no interactions designers and a lot of times during a project the design decisions lie in the hands of the developers.

Well, being a developer is not very easy either. Developers need to deliver software that works and passes the tests. There is a right and a wrong. This difference pretty much 99% of the time clear. Designers work in a different way. There is not much of right and wrong. There is always a trade off in every design decision. There is a negotiation between a lot of aspects such as (to list a few):

aesthetics
readability
efficiency
safety
cost
time

I wanted to talk a little about how some developers might see design. Some of them might think that design is just about “making things pretty”. Some others do care about design (I am talking here mostly about interaction design) but they do need some rules to follow and design isn´t usually about following rules. I see designers actually like to break rules and create their own. Create new rules and new shapes, colors and ways to interact.

I also see that when we are working in a sprint to deliver as soon as possible another release with 20 bug fixes, usability will probably be the last thing a developer will care about. At that moment, when the client and the software development manager is expecting the release for the next week no matter how developers need to worry about a bunch of stuff already:

is this bug fix going to introduce a side effect?
what is the fastest way to fix this bug?
how efficient is this code I am writing?
what is the most elegant way to fix this bug?

So that´s why I do know thinking about design needs to be done in the newest stages of developing a website or web app or any software. After that there is too much to worry about. Stability will be the first thing the development team will think when introducing changes to the product. Plus (as someone already said before – I guess it was Nielsen) developers will try to argue that their work is good as it is.

Redesigning blog

edgartanaka — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:54:00 +0000

I am trying to make my blog look a little more personal.
Let’s see how it goes…
I’ll try to look for some picture.
My first aproach will be simplicity. So white background and easy to read fonts.

Icons

edgartanaka — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:16:00 +0000

I was reading the famous “Usability Engineering” (Jakob Nielsen) yesterday and I found a section talking about icons.
Icons have become a great part of interfaces today probably for 2 reasons:

faster to recognize and read than text
“a picture is worth a 1000 words”

It’s true that there are lots and lots of bad icons everywhere so it was interesting to see how Jakob Nielsen and the works he cites sees icons.

Icons can be classified as:

Resemblance icons: Depicting a physical object which the icon is intended to represent. Using a picture of an envelope to represent a file of electronic mail would be a resemblance icon.
Reference icons: Depicting some object which by reference or analogy might represent the concept the icon is intended to represent. For example, using a picture of a clamp to represent a file-compression utility (because it squeezes) would be a reference icon.
Arbitrary icons: Arbitrary shapes that only have meaning by convention. For example, a warning triangle might be used as the icon for a warning message.

For those who know about Peirce’s semiotics, this is exactly the classification he proposed for signs! Peirce states that signs can be classified as:

Icon: resemblance icon
Index: reference icon
Symbol: arbitrary icon

Nielsen says that reference and arbitrary icons will often do considerably worse than resemblance icons in internationalization. Arbitrary icons might be unknown in certain countries.

In my opinion each case is a different case. Arbitrary icons can be considered better than Resemblance icons and vice-versa. It all depends on the context. Running icon usability tests is a important part of the process.

Anyway, just realizing that signs are everywhere and that they have these differences can be an interesting tool to design.