Team North will design and deliver North House, a compelling, marketable solar powered home that makes use of the latest in high-performance architecture and mobile communication technology, while building Canada’s next generation of leaders in sustainable engineering, business and design.

This October, after a two-year development cycle, our team traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the US Department of Energy‘s Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall:

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

The architects and engineers on the project did an incredible job: combining leading-edge technology, modern aesthetics, and innovative materials to produce a net-zero solar powered home that is viable for the Canadian climate. After a challenging two-week competition, we placed 4th overall! Full results can be found on the Solar Decathlon scoring page. We were pleased with our performance, and feel proud of the achievement we’ve made with the house. Full details on the specifications and innovations of the house are available from the team website.

SFU’s contribution to this undertaking involved the development of a control system for the North House, and the design and creation of a suite of web-enabled applications to provide feedback, control, and community networking to the residents of the house. My role on the project was comprised of contributing to the design team for each of these main pieces of the interactive system, and then undertaking the development of each with a small team of programmers.

For the control system, I worked closely with Chris Brandson of VerTech Solutions. He wrote custom drivers for each of the house’s hardware systems (lighting, shades and blinds, HVAC, retractable bed, etc.) and configured them to communicate with Embedded Automation‘s mControl. I then developed a Ruby on Rails application to interface with mControl using SOAP. This allowed the design team to develop a custom interface for the residents of the home instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution. The controls were then presented on three embedded touchscreens: a 17″ display mounted in the western end of the kitchen backsplash and two 8″ displays at the north and east entryways. The central panel provides digital controls for all of the house systems, while the entry panels provide local controls for nearby lights. Additionally, from each control point residents can put the house into user-configurable Presets such as Home, Away or Sleep. These presets represent configurations for various activities or times of day that can be activated with a single button press. The control and monitoring system we developed was noted as a standout by software developer Patrick Smith in his Survey of Home Monitoring & Control Systems at the Solar Decathlon.

I worked with closely with interaction designers Kevin Muise, Jenny Thai, and Jin Fan on the web application. These talented designers delivered high quality HTML, CSS, and image assets that I then incorporated into the Ruby on Rails application and populated with dynamic data and enabled with interactive behaviour. The house data was made available by Rob MacKenzie’s datalogging systems. Along with this contribution to the project, his invaluable talents at network administration, hardware procurement, and his knack for pulling off last-minute hacks can’t be overlooked!

Finally, Kevin Muise and I completed the Mobile application together. He led the development with nearly solo design and prototyping work. I then developed the final version based on his prototypes and integrated it with the Rails app and control system. The mobile application provides access to a subset of the features of the desktop web application, including graphing utilities, house controls, and community networking.

Interactive demonstrations of the web application and iPhone application can be found on the Team North website under Interface Demos. Also, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by David Gura from NPR for a brief segment about the iPhone application that aired on All Things Considered during the competition. The segment is available online.

The competition and project as a whole were intense and challenging. The difficulty of channeling the talents and perspectives of students and faculty from a range of disciplines across three universities and two timezones cannot be overestimated. Over the course of the year, I clumsily learned to speak the languages of architects, engineers, computer scientists, and project managers while participating in many teleconferences and email exchanges. I learned how important priorities can sometimes be missed when working in large geographically distributed teams because each person and team thinks someone else is doing it. And I learned a great deal about what not to do (…and less of what to do!) in software development. That being said, everyone on the project undertook their part with such enthusiasm and determination that we were able to overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver a house that is beautiful, powerful, and viable.

My sincere thanks to everyone on the team for their dedication and determination over the course of the project. It’s been a truly memorable experience. Also a huge congratulations to all the teams and great people that participated in the contest, especially those I met from Germany, California, Louisiana, and Cornell. In the coming year, I’ll be applying much of what I’ve learned on this project to my ongoing research into information visualization and tools for feedback on energy consumption.

Other media links:

• Globe & Mail: North House Waves the Flag
• CBC News: The National (October 8th)
• SPIE: Students shine at the Solar Decathlon (video)

MarsEdit

Despite the recent overhaul of the WordPress interface, I still find their post editor somewhat clunky. As far as web apps have come, desktop apps are still superior in many ways when it comes to responsiveness, task focus, and interface affordances (think menus, panels, and native UI elements). To address this situation, MarsEdit takes the post writing and management features of your favourite blog software (including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Drupal) and puts them on your desktop, allowing you to focus on the most important part of your blog: writing. It has just the right feature set, and allows me to write, edit, and preview (and tag, categorize, and edit the metadata of) my posts offline – a crucial aspect when traveling or working away from wireless. I particularly like how it allows me to manage all of my blogs from one interface, rather than having to login to each in turn. Also, the Media Manager makes it effortless to upload, link, and embed images and other media, including those from my Flickr Feed, something that I do every time I write a travel post. Great job, Red Sweater Software! A steal at $29.95 (after a 30-day free trial).

Papers

Having recently become a member of the graduate level academic set, I’ve been learning that managing a research project by haphazardly stuffing attachments into hastily-named folders in Finder can lead to a needle-in-a-haystack situation in record time. Papers is an elegant solution to this problem, allowing you to manage the proliferation of article PDFs on your hard drive. Geared specifically toward research, the program combines database search with article management, reading, annotation, citation, and import/export features. Again, a desktop app trumps the online equivalents of each of these steps. For example, Papers allows you to add the proxy URL of your academic institution, so that when working away from campus you can seamlessly browse and download results from a variety of sources (Google Scholar, ACM, CiteSeer, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, etc) without being blocked by login pages every few clicks as when using a browser. Once downloaded, articles are scraped for bibliographic and other metadata, and organized by author, journal, and user-specified collections.

It is also possible to set Papers to automatically rename and sort the original PDFs into a Library in Finder, so that your files are as neatly organized as your annotations. Also, in addition to citation information, the metadata features allow you to rate your articles and track which you’ve read or printed – a simple but very useful feature. Another similarly well thought-out addition is a one-click Email button which formats a journal URL and citation and attaches the PDF to a new message in Mail. Makes sharing a relevant article with a colleague absolutely effortless. Finally, as a reading environment, Papers tops Preview by offering a magnification slider, improved full screen access, and intuitive icons for continuous/discrete paging and 1-up/facing pages. This has already become indispensable in my research workflow. $42 for a single-user license, after 30 day trial. And 40% off for students!

Xtorrent

Xtorrent is the only remaining BitTorrent client on my Mac. After trying the original, Vuze/Azureus, and others, I settled on Xtorrent for the perfect OS X look and feel, integrated search and download, freedom from ads and other media content that slow down the app (I’m looking at you, Vuze), and well thought-out sorting and selection interaction. From the (Canadian!) genius behind NewsFire, Acquisition, and Inquisitor. Xtorrent is $25 for Pro and free for a 10 kbps download cap after an hour into each session…anyone remember 1996? Worth the cash.

Rivet

When I crumbled to the pressures of consumer society and bought an XBox 360 last fall, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find that Microsoft had delivered a fantastic user interface and software platform for the system…that won’t talk to my Mac. This meant that if I wanted to stream any media or use my wireless network on my XBox, I’d have to run XP or Vista on one of my machines. Not a very appealing prospect. Rivet addresses the media sharing part of the equation, allowing you to stream your music, photos, and videos directly to your TV through your XBox. The app runs as a discreet menu bar icon (next to your clock, battery, etc) that allows you to specify which folders to share with your console. Shared files fit in seamlessly with the XBox media interfaces, allowing you to play slideshows, listen to music with visualizations, and watch videos. Also, Rivet improves on competitor Connect360 by reproducing the file structure of your media directories in the XBox interface, rather than compiling everything into one flat and difficult to navigate list. Incredibly, streaming doesn’t hiccup at all, even when playing from a USB or firewire connected hard drive! Sure beats tossing everything onto my USB key every time I want to watch a show. $18.95.

MindNode

Though I haven’t spent a lot of time with it, MindNode‘s intuitive interface and simplicity have caught my attention. It’s a ‘mind-mapping’ application that allows you to quickly map out hierarchical or networked data in an attractive visual layout. I haven’t quite found the sweet spot where MindNode’s feature set makes the most sense to use, but I do find myself playing with it. For example, I’ve used it to quickly sketch out XML tags and attributes, and database tables and columns, but find that once I get to a reasonable level of stability in the information design I switch to a more powerful app for adding metadata and so on. Perhaps this is the point of the software – as a mental sketchpad – and it’s just taking some time to get accustomed to the paradigm. I wish that the formatting inspectors were integrated with the main app window as sidebars or drawers, instead of left floating as (Apple default) external panes, but besides that small criticism, this is an intriguingly simple and intuitive app that’s worth checking out. Free. * A Pro version is available for $14.95, but I can’t seem to find any information about what is different between the two versions. The free app doesn’t seem to be handicapped.

World of Goo

And last but not least, World of Goo is a physics simulation puzzle game that has to be played to be appreciated. The game is clever, fun, addictive, and constantly surprises with moments of spontaneity and subversion of expectations. I haven’t enjoyed a puzzle game this much since Lemmings on the Commodore 64. It’s getting in the way of my to-do list in ways that only the best games can! The game speaks for itself, but the story behind it makes it even sweeter. 2D Boy, an ‘indie game studio’ made up of two gents from San Francisco, has been turning heads by returning game development to its roots…namely fun and creativity. Amazingly, they built the game with all open source tools and just $10,000 in personal savings. I think EA must have spent $10,000 on dynamic puck reflection alone in NHL 09! $20 for full version, single chapter demo free.

Sadly, the Safari on Windows experience hasn’t changed Apple’s approach. While working the other day, I was interrupted by the following prompt:

Firstly, the wording in the prompt indicates a Software Update. Despite the fact that .Mac is being replaced, Mobile Me is still new software (ie. not an update to existing software). Apple’s marketing department certainly wants you to believe this, and the $109/year (CAD) price tag would seem to underline it. So, Apple has interrupted my workflow (as far as I can tell launching this prompt independently of Software Update or any other process) to sell me something. That’s not OK. This follows the same sneaky pattern as prompting Windows users to install an entirely new browser on their systems as a ‘software update’ to their iTunes service.

To add to my frustration, this prompt for new software comes after weeks of idiosyncratic activity in Leopard. Notice the default Apple wallpaper behind the MobileMe prompt? That’s not there by choice. Rather, the Desktop pane of my System Preferences has been buggy and inconsistent for weeks, as I swap between monitors. Without going into detail, the folders for my desktop images (including the OS defaults) become inaccessible, rendering me unable to change my desktop wallpaper. I’ve found various workarounds…but this just underlines that Apple’s philosophy is broken. Rather than fixing bugs in existing software that I have paid for, I’m prompted to install and pay for new software that I don’t want! Apple’s always been known as a ‘Design company that makes computers.’ Perhaps they are actually a ‘Marketing company that makes software.’

So, a bit of an annoyance, and a reminder not to trust Apple. Then, this:

As you can see, when connecting my (hacked) iPod Touch, my iTunes interface becomes an advertisement! Again, a new piece of software (indicated by the price tag) labeled as a Software Update. What’s worse, the ‘update’ is primarily intended to install new software (the App Store) to allow me to give yet more money to Apple! Secondarily, it adds features to support MobileMe (which I would also have to pay for), and finally to install software that should have been on the device in the first place. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, maybe I’ll be convinced to upgrade to get the scientific calculator…

To add insult to injury, this message will be displayed every time I connect my iPod for all eternity, as the only options to dismiss the message are “Buy Now” or “Remind Me Later.” What about an “I’m not interested, stop using my desktop as a billboard” button?

UPDATE: Two days after posting this, the iPod software update interface changed. I knew Steve Jobs would read my blog:

After missing the Purolator guy by ten minutes on Friday, I had to wait out the weekend to get my hands on Leopard. However, once I let it out of its cage, I found it had eaten the following parts of my favourite pet Tiger:

• My hard drive! Well, then it regurgitated it. Upon initiating the install from the Leopard DVD, I clicked through the setup options (Language, License Agreement, etc), only to get to the Select a Destination screen…with no hard drives displayed. Confused, I clicked back through to the beginning, wondering what was happening. I then moved back through to the Select a Destination screen, again with no drives displayed. I opened up my old iBook and went online to see if anyone else was having the same problem, and found this forum post, which explained that Leopard was inspecting the drive for problems before offering it as an install disk. I waited, as suggested in the Apple forum, and after a few minutes, my internal hard drive appeared, but greyed out. After another 30 seconds, it became opaque, and I selected it to install. Not so slick, Apple. Would a progress bar have been so hard to implement?
• My custom icons for Terminal, Grab, and my external drives (but not for other apps, including Address Book, Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto). Not sure why it would lose some and not others.
• Inquisitor. Perhaps because this isn’t really its own app, but rather a ‘plugin’ for Safari that resides as a Preference Pane in Safari Preferences. It’s fully compatible with Safari 3.0 and Leopard, but I guess it was too tasty to pass up .
• My hotkeys in Adobe Illustrator CS (but not Photoshop CS). I hadn’t realized how consistently I use the hotkeys until they stopped working. Apparently, forthcoming Adobe updates will address these kinds of bugs, although this quote has me concerned: “Users of older Adobe applications, including Creative Suite 2, may find unexpected compatibility issues. Adobe stated that it has not tested its older applications for compatibility, and will not provide any Leopard-specific updates for pre-CS3 apps or the applications it acquired from Macromedia.” (source). Really? CS is only 3 years old, and they will not test it for compatibility with the OS that the majority of their creative professional users will upgrade to? That’s disappointing in a lot of ways.
• My custom Terminal welcome message.
• My energy saving settings. I don’t want my display to go to sleep after 1 minute, thank you.
• My (everyone’s) black arrow active application indicators, though you can get them back with a little bit of hacking. I find the new glowing blue dots inferior both aesthetically and functionally. Change for the sake of change is not a good thing!
• My Junk folder in Mail. I got it back by selecting Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail > Enable junk mail filtering. Not sure why this would be turned off by default, as it was on and working in Tiger.
• My notes in iCal. The new pop-up interface is kind of cool, I guess, but not as functional. Plus, it keeps opening up halfway between my two displays, rather than recognizing the screen edge and opening in the appropriate direction.

The Things Leopard Threw Up

When downloading an application and opening it for the first time, Leopard prompts “‘AppName’ is an application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” I know this is here to protect users from accidentally running malicious software, but I should at least be able to disable it. It’s just annoying. Also, it’s the first time I’ve seen OS X copy a Vista ‘feature’, especially after making fun of it.

Besides that small thing, the new aesthetic generally feels heavy:

• the darker drop shadows on the Apple menu and active window
• the darker metal on application windows
• the chunky iTunes-style menus in Finder
• the new default folder icons
• the heavily depressed active buttons in toolbars
• the more heavily saturated red yellow and green window icons
• the over the top highlighting of matches using Safari’s Find feature
• the gears System Prefs icon

It’s all quite dense and technical looking. Not sure how I feel about it just yet, but I’m not sure that most of the visual changes are improvements. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just not as graceful as Tiger. However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

There are lots of good things about Leopard: spacebar to QuickLook a document (awesome!), Spaces, WebClips, improved Safari functionality (movable tabs, finally), and many more that I haven’t yet found. Additionally, the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard was actually remarkably smooth, especially in comparison to other operating systems. And it must be said that OS X is still the finest operating system interface design yet invented, both visually and functionally. These are just a few odd changes/omissions I thought I would point out!

Locomotive

Locomotive is a tool for installing Ruby, Rails, and the various libraries you need to get started developing on Rails. After installation, the interface functions as a server manager to run your Rails apps locally on the ports you set. When I started with Rails, I didn’t know about Locomotive: after manually downloading and installing Ruby, Rails, and the LightTPD server and spending a long while on the command line compiling and recompiling, I finally got my local environment configured properly. Then I came across Locomotive, and haven’t gone back to managing things manually since. It’s slick, lightweight, and does what it promises! What more can you ask for in a piece of software?

CocoaMySQL

CocoaMySQL is useful for anyone managing MySQL databases, whether for Rails development or otherwise. I got sick of phpmyadmin‘s bugs, outdated interface, and the need to use a browser to view and edit my databases. For Mac users, CocoaMySQL is a lightweight, well-designed MySQL management app that fits nicely into the OS X ecosystem. It’s become my always-open DB utility when I’m developing.

Railscasts.com

Railscasts are the product of the hard work and Rails expertise of Ryan Bates. After reading several extremely useful tutorials posted by Ryan at the Rails Forum, I followed the link to Railscasts in his signature. I’m glad I did. Three times a week, Ryan posts well thought-out, easy-to-follow screencasts showing various Rails techniques. The videos are short (under 10 minutes), well-produced, and very helpful. His presentation style is clear, gentle, and he thorougly explains what he’s doing on-screen. I’ve already put the lessons I’ve learned in the Logger and Pretty Page Titles episodes into practice, and I’m eager to learn more. And, unlike PeepCode, all the videos at Railscasts are free!

I have been using Panic Software‘s excellent OS X FTP client, Transmit, for about two years now. The Mac software maker recently released Coda, advertised as One Window Web Development for Mac OS X. The software has already won an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X User Experience, and it has been getting attention from a lot of web developers, if the buzz on the blog scene is any indication.

After my positive experiences with some of Panic’s other products, namely Transmit and Desktastic, I was interested to see what Coda would offer. Fortunately, it is available to download for a free two week trial. I used the trial period to give it a shot, and found it comfortable to use, beautifully designed, and fairly fully featured. Though there are several issues which remain for me (see below), the overall experience of the product convinced me to lay out the $69.95 USD (Transmit owner price) to have it for my own. What follows is an (incomplete) rundown of the features, limitations, and bugs that I’ve experienced so far, for anyone else interested in switching to the product.

* As I have used TextMate and Eclipse almost exclusively for web development for the past year, many of my gripes with Coda address features found in those products which are missing or, to my mind, not properly implemented here. However, Coda offers a more intuitive, streamlined interface than either of these environments, and so naturally there are trade-offs.

Best Features

• Built-in Page Preview in Safari, and a drop-down menu to view the page in the browser of your choice (this list is automatically populated with browsers installed on your system). The page Preview can also be viewed in a split mode, with your code and page visible simultaneously (all in one window, of course).
• Inline validation of XHTML and CSS.

  

• Clips is a floating panel which allows quick access to common code snippets to be inserted into your code. Comes populated with common (X)HTML snippets like DOCTYPE declarations and page structure, as well as Lorem Ipsum text. Also allows easy addition of custom Clips.

  

• Built-in Terminal. Very handy!
• Symbols/Functions Navigator, akin to that in Eclipse, a more fully functioned IDE.

  

• Simultaneous Local/Remote viewing of sites, with built-in Transmit FTP. Makes managing local and live copies of files intuitive.
• Sites view. Great GUI for the various remote sites you have to manage on a daily basis.

  

• Overall design excellence. The Panic guys are perfectionists, and their attention to detail really pays off in all the little touches that raise this application head-and-shoulders above the other options in terms of look and feel.

Limitations

• No code block folding/toggling. This is a simple but major feature to leave out. I use this constantly in TextMate, especially when editing XML documents.
• Cannot select and set the case (Upper, Lower, Camel) of a piece of text, as in TextMate.
• No Find & Replace in Project (directory) feature (again, like in TextMate).
• Site images in Sites view don’t display Flash content.
• Can’t arrange order of open tabs (files). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)
• Can’t move around views/perspectives. In Eclipse, I’m able to arrange my window as I would like, and even the minimal interface of TextMate allows me to set the directory structure drawer to open on the left or right. In Coda, the default view is your only option. As gorgeous as it is, some flexibility would be nice!
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You’re right, the File Browser can only be on the left of the screen, though you can hide it by selecting Hide File Browser from the View menu. Just about everything else about the layout is customizable through the use of splits, though. I like having my CSS in an editor on the left, and a preview of my HTML on the right. Vertical splits are great!”

  This is true, although I meant the ability to move around the various inspectors/navigators. For example, the Find and Replace interface, the Functions viewer, the local and remote site navigators, etc. These are not customizable, in terms of position. However, as I mentioned, the default layout and design of these features is excellent, and I’d rather have one well-configured layout than unlimited options to customize.

• Clicking twice on a file in the file navigator on the left does not allow Renaming (as any Mac user would expect). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)

Bugs!

• Undo continually fails. Several undo’s will work, then suddenly stop. The Release Notes for the most recent version state that this has been addressed, but I continue to experience this issue, and it is by far the most frustrating bug of the bunch.
• Block comment feature does not recognize in-head stylesheets (uses HTML comments rather than CSS comments). Likewise with Embedded Ruby – tries to comment out HTML tags with Ruby comments (#).
• Dual-monitoring: didn’t recognize to bring my Clips panel back onto my laptop monitor after unplugging my external monitor. I wasn’t able to get the panel back until I restarted Coda.
• Syntax colouring did not turn on automatically after saving a file as CSS. Had to close and re-open to get colouring. Also, mixed files, and less common file types, are often coloured incorrectly, or not at all.
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You can change the syntax mode from the Text menu, or from the action menu at the bottom of the editor pane. As for your less common file extensions, you can set up custom syntax modes in the Preferences, under Editor.”

• General crashes have become less common since upgrading to V.1.0.3, but there are still application crashes during regular tasks. Apple-tabbing to other applications and back to Coda seems to be particularly problematic.

The limitations and bugs I’ve mentioned are not insignificant, but Panic has an excellent track record of constant improvement of their products. It’s clear that they invest more than the standard effort to make their products stand out, and I think that Coda is already very impressive, even this early in its lifecycle. Thanks for a great tool guys!

After sending Panic a link to this article, I received a prompt reply from Tim at the company responding to several of the issues I mentioned (included in-line, above), and asking for more details on the bugs I outlined. Thanks for caring!