SpicyNodes will work on mobile devices, starting with iOS

November 9th, 2011
 

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they are stopping development of Flash Player for browsers on mobile devices.

The good news for the SpicyNodes community is that our team has been working on a mobile version of SpicyNodes since early 2010! As a proof of concept, we created the popular WikiNodes app for the iPad, which browses Wikipedia using SpicyNodes.

The tablet is an awesome platform for nodes. It is very intuitive to touch and move nodes with your fingertips. The Apple iPad is the most common tablet (over 25 million shipped as of summer 2011).

Your nodemaps will continue to work on desktop and laptop computers, but looking forward, our focus will be handheld devices. Plus, on the iPad, we are able to offer new, slick visual styles, and you will be able to put more complex html content in your nodes. Stay tuned!

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SpicyNodes wins AASL award for teaching and learning

June 30th, 2011
 

Last weekend, SpicyNodes received a “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” from American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Here’s a three minute acceptance speech from the conference:

See AASL list of 25 ‘Best Websites for Teaching and Learning,’ and their press release.

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Encyclopedia meets nodes… and falls in love: Introducing WikiNodes

April 27th, 2011
 

What would happen if an encyclopedia could be browsed with a finger tip, typing and swiping from node to node? “WikiNodes” is a new app for the Apple iPad that lets you read Wikipedia articles as nodes. Here’s a 30 second demo:

Version 1.0 is now available in the app store. It’s free for a limited time. We have a ton of new features and bug fixes planned. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear what you think. You can leave feedback here, send feedback via our online feedback form at idea.org, or send comments from within the app.

See WikiNodes at the Apple app store >

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SpicyNodes for commerce

February 20th, 2011
 

SpicyNodes is a great way to browse all kinds of things, including online marketplaces. The following is a prototype from our labs of how SpicyNodes could be used on an iPad to browse an online auction service.

We make prototypes to test different kinds of user interfaces, and experiment with how they might be useful. Like the product browser? We’re working on a version of SpicyNodes for the iPad which developers can use to add this kind of functionality to handheld apps. Stay tuned.

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Sneak peek: SpicyNodes Touch (Jan 2011)

January 22nd, 2011
 

Nodes want to be touched. We continue working to bring you “SpicyNodes Touch” running on the Apple iPad. Your same nodemaps that work on the web will work on a tablet. Here’s a preview:

Information displayed in the centered node is full HTML5 — meaning it can be any web content. It takes around 5 seconds for web content to load within the node. No need to menus and navigation, just link a bunch of nodes together.

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Disappearing user accounts

January 19th, 2011
 

We’ve been alerted to a problem affecting a small number of members who created accounts yesterday and today who have lost accounts. In most cases, the nodemap still exists, but users can not log in anymore. We are investigating. If you have lost an account, please contact us, Be sure to include your email address, and if you remember it, the user name you had used.

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Give your hippocampus some spice

December 16th, 2010
 

When web users control how they learn, they learn more.

How well we learn depends on a brain network that is centered on our hippocampus, and several brain networks is connects to, finds University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen in a recently published a study in the journal Nature:

“Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we’re beginning to understand why… Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you’re actively exploring the world.”

MORE »

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Social networks on the map

December 14th, 2010
 

What does  the world look like on the Facebook social graph? Paul Butler, at intern at Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, created the map below based on a sample of about ten million pairs of friends, which he plotted on a blank map with arcs between them.

MORE »

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Recently on the blogs

December 11th, 2010
 

The Center for Academic Technology, at the University of the District of Columbia, writes about tools that enable pedagogical innovation to improve the educational experience of students, and  recently wrote about SpicyNodes:

SpicyNodes is a neat visual communication tool which represents information in nodes… kinda like how the human brain stores the info… The web can certainly put you on information overload, and if anything, SpicyNodes keeps you within Miller’s Magic #7 rule… SpicyNodes helps chunk content not only for yourself, but students as well.
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Browsing career paths

November 22nd, 2010
 

Newsweek/Beast shows how careers of education and work life can be represented by the metaphor of a tree and its branches. The tree is great. What would it have been like as a nodemap? What would be the home node? What would the branches be?

Go to to the tree >>

via Information Aesthetics.

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