Notes relating to the MM home page mock-up - generated as a result of feedback from my family
Most computers display 16+ million colors. Newer monitors can display a billion different colors.
One of my ongoing provocations is informing peeps of the available gamut of colors.
So in many of my scripts you will see random colors applied to different objects. Each time you reload the page, a different palette of colors will appear. My favorite thing is setting the background so that it displays three two-color gradients which - depending on the size of the window - means displaying two million or so colors all at once.
There's a lot of experience in dealing with two colors and quite a bit with palettes of three to five colors. But this multi-million color thing is a horse of a different color. And so a lot of the time a really weird palette shows up. When that happens just reload the page and hope you are are delivered a horse of a nice color.
The language is Latin. It's a quote from Cicero that begins 'Lorem ipsum'. Here's what Wikipedia says about the text:
In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum (derived from Latin dolorem ipsum, translated as "pain itself") is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content with placeholder text allows viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout without being distracted by the content. It also reduces the need for the designer to come up with meaningful text, as they can instead use quickly-generated lorem ipsum.
The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.
The even more amusing thing is that this use of placeholder text in Latin is usually called 'greeking'!
I want to get a sound engineer involved. What is the sound of the swish as the bookcase flies together or the er-er-er of a screw being screwed in? It could all be a lot of fun. Currently all the sounds are created on the fly - randomly just like the colors - using WebAudio, a new technology recently added to most browsers. I will be adding a mute button - and will set mute as the default before presenting to I Ikea unless we get good sounds of a different color beforehand.
You may note that the font used throughout Jaanga is the default monospace font that comes with your browser. This is in stark contrast to the world of publishing which uses proportionally spaced fonts - where the 'i' is narrower than the 'm'. The reason for this is that the audience for Jaanga is techs - people who program. And all programs are always written with monospace fonts. So Jaanga uses monospace. Once we know the type of person that Richard wants to talk to then we can update the fonts as needed.
The Ikea assembly manuals have a beautiful, simple elegance. And they are all in black and white.
My dream is to forget black and white. I want a billion colors. But you like black and white. Fine let's do both.
The Moving Manual visualizations you are seeing are not videos. The are generated on the fly by a series of instructions. Change a few instructions here and there and the visualization can be any color you want.
Have a look at Marching Cubes. In the top right, click on materials. Then go down the list - clicking on each choice. That's how different each viewing could be.
How do you get back to where you were? There's still a long ways to go in creating a fun user experience. On the phone I hope you can fast forward by swiping. There will have to be progress bars that allow you to jump anywhere. And much more. Wait and see. It's all doable