With the attention increase on user experience, the care with usability when designing a web application exploded. Now there’s a general awareness, some good applications for testing and lots of usability companies out there.

Building APIs is now a sort of requirement for most web based services too. There are cases where it’s even the main feature. And you have already many APIs out there.

But I was wondering if besides user experience, developers are also concerned with their prosumers experience. When building your web applications, are you asking/paying other developers to play with your APIs, build applications and give feedback? There’s a lot of information on building generic APIs, best practices and so on. But web APIs (mainly REST) have unique characteristics. Just think of the fact that not only programmers are using them now, but all sorts of prosumers.

I believe there’s still little discussion on this matter and this will become a bigger concern. Any resources to share on this matter?

I’m still digesting this, but it’s great resource to share. Being a music fan, anything that mixes music and programming catches my attention. If it’s programming in ruby, even better.

It’s a talk at Ruby Fringe given by Giles Bowkett. It’s about a lot of things, about ruby, its paradigms, startups’ industry, but the main theme is Archaeopteryx, an open source ruby MIDI generator. As it’s explained on the video, it generates music on the MIDI format based on probability matrices. All the theory makes it a bit more complex, but with a bit of practice, you can make the matrices generate some good techno music.

However, what got me the most was the possibilities given near the end of the talk. Since the is music computer generated and its source data can be changed in real-time, the music itself may be changed to adapt to any sort of input. The example given was people at a disco strumming at some instrument to emphasize the beat that they were liking the most. The strumming information was then processed and integrated with the music generation matrices.

With a little imagination, great projects can derive from this concept. I imagine for example, an ambient sound computer adjusting to the mood it senses around the room, through movement detection cameras or small microphones. There are many possibilities indeed and I still have to research more on this topic.

If you like to try out Archaeopteryx check its repository for more information. The following short video shows a bit more of the library in action:

I’ve always been a bit picky on the magazines I subscribe, although I love to receive new ones. I guess it’s hard to find a magazine where you like every single article. Recently I subscribed a full year (6 issues) of Technology Review. I usually don’t subscribe a whole year without checking out an issue first, but the articles on the website told me it was worth it.

One of the good things about the Technology Review website is that they don’t just show article summaries, but long and quite interesting ones. I also liked the themes: IT, Science, Energy, Business…; and the feedback from a quick search on google was satisfying.

By now I already received and read two issues from October and December. It’s definitely a good magazine. I found myself reading a several page long article about trains and enjoying it (really, trains). The overall design and photos are also very good. However, I’m still considering if I will renew the subscription when the time comes. The percentage of articles on IT and Business aren’t as much as I wanted, and while I do like reading about science, I don’t need the depth some articles go into.

Anyway, if you like me enjoy those topics, be sure to follow Technology Review’s Twitter to be notified on the latest articles on their website. They’re worth it.