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NPR explains how we reached a population of 7 billion. Simply put, the world is making babies faster than people are dying, and with improved medicine and agriculture, people are living longer than before. The video above demonstrates the different birth and mortality rates, where each container represents a continent. There has been a shift in recent years:
Much of that growth has happened in Asia — in India and China. Those two countries have been among the world's most populous for centuries. But a demographic shift is taking place as the countries have modernized and lowered their fertility rates. Now, the biggest growth is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa.
Google+ Ripples [plus.google.com] is the first data visualization project from the elusive Big Picture Group, organized around (previous IBM Visual Communication Lab pioneers) Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. It is a working demonstration how aesthetics and functionality can still be effectively be merged.The 'Ripple Diagram' shows how a post spreads as people (publicly) share it using the Google+ service, with arrows indicating the direction of the sharing. A timeline at the bottom of the diagram allow the ripple to animate, revealing how this post was shared over time. People who have reshared the post are displayed with their own circle. Inside the circle are people who have reshared the post from that person (and so on). All circles are roughly sized based on the relative influence of that person.
The diagram can be created based on any public post in one's stream, by clicking the dropdown arrow at the top of the post and selecting "View Ripple". Using the metaphor of ripples that propagate and alter the state of their environment, the tool seems particularly useful for marketeers, viral social media managers and the like, as they now can include the intriguing graphics in their social impact and SEO reports.
More detailed information about G+ Ripples available here.
We’re excited to announce the release of the new ThemeRoller for Mobile tool. ThemeRoller is a web-based tool that makes it super simple to create custom themes without writing a single line of CSS.
If you’re familiar with the jQuery UI ThemeRoller, the basics of the tool are pretty similar: there’s a inspector panel on the left of the screen that has all the theme settings, and a preview pane on the right that shows you in real-time each change you make. But there are some big improvements in the new mobile version which we’ll cover below.
Once you create your masterpiece, you can share it via URL or download a ZIP file with your custom theme stylesheet, ready for production (or additional tweaking).
This is so beta, we’re not even going to add the flag. Have fun playing and please flag issues in the tracker so we can improve the tool.
The Mobile theme framework and ThemeRoller Mobile allow you to create up to 26 unique color “swatches” within a single theme (the UI version essentially has a single swatch). Each swatch defines the look and feel for a bar, content block and a button with normal, hover and pressed interaction states.
Within your site or app, you assign swatch letters to individual elements on a page to mix and match swatch colors for really rich designs. Swatches are assigned a single letter from a-z which allows people to share themes easily (unlike unique class names) and flexibly combine swatches on a page. For example, you can assign swatch A to one button and swatch K to another button to make a visual distinction between them.
In addition to creating sets of swatches, there are powerful global configuration options to quickly set the font family, active (on) state color, corner radii for groupings and buttons, icon and shadow styles in one centralized place.
In the left hand inspector panel, there is a slick tool to create the CSS-based gradients we use throughout the themes. In simple mode you can pick a single color, then drag a slider to choose how deep of a convex or concave gradient you want, or leave the slider in the middle position for a flat appearance.
Click the “+” icon to expand into advanced mode and customize the gradient colors individually for both points.
Above the preview panel, there are two cool tools that make it even easier to build a theme: the preview inspector tool and the QuickSwatch Bar.
First, when the preview inspector toggle is on, it allows you to simply click on an element in the preview panel and have the relevant section of the lefthand inspector panel open for editing so there’s no need to hunt around for the right settings.
An even more exciting feature is the QuickSwatch bar. This has a preset spectrum of colors that can be dragged and dropped directly onto an element in the preview pane to re-color it. The lightness and saturation sliders make it easy to shift the color spectrum around to find the right colors. To the right of the spectrum, we display the last few colors you’ve used for quick re-use. These colors can also be dragged and dropped into the color picker wells in the lefthand inspector panel for even more power.
A lot of magic is at work here: by dropping a single color onto an element, the tool with automatically calculate the two related gradient colors, border color, and text colors for good contrast (you can fine-tune these in the left panel). By dropping a color on a button/listview, the tool calculates all these colors for the default, hover and pressed states of a button automatically which is a huge timesaver. You can spend your time trying color combinations, not tweaking a million settings.
Picking a color palette that works well together is tricky business but we’ve made it easy by adding pre-made themes created on Adobe’s fantastic Kuler app right into ThemeRoller. Kuler is a great site focused on letting people create, share and rate color palettes.
If you’re looking for inspiration, simply click on the Kuler link in the QuickSwatch palette and you can browse the latest, most popular or highest rated color combinations from Kuler, or search by tag, title or color. From there, just drag and drop the colors onto widgets in the preview pane to quickly create a great-looking theme in a snap.
The jQuery UI ThemeRoller tool used URLs to track every step in your creation history and also make it easy to share and load themes by sending those URLs around. We think sharing themes is important to get feedback and allows others to play with your creations but the sheer complexity of the Mobile themes couldn’t be represented in a URL. Our solution is to store the theme on our server and create a unique URL that allows you to post a theme link and allows other to edit or download a copy of the theme (yours won’t be touched). For example, check out this theme I created.
Note: To keep our server from getting stuffed with themes, we’re only going to store theme links for 30 days so you’ll need to download a copy for the long term.
Once you have created your final theme, simply click the Download Theme link at the top of the inspector panel to generate a zip file that contains both the compressed (production-ready) and uncompressed (editable) theme files and a simple test page (index.html) to show that everything worked (whew) and instructions on how to add the theme to your site. It’s pretty simple: link your custom theme in the head of the page followed by the jQuery Mobile structure theme and you’re ready to go.
To import a theme, just click the Import link and paste the entire contents of the uncompressed theme file into the text input in the dialog, and the system will parse the theme into an editable format for sharing and downloading.
This tool came to be through the continued generosity of our sponsor Adobe who dedicated the development time of Tyler Benziger to work exclusively on ThemeRoller for the last 6+ months. Tyler did a fantastic job taking a handful of designs and creating a rock solid tool with lots of creative ideas that exceeded all our expectations.
Enough talking, jump in and start building your first theme at:
www.jquerymobile.com/themeroller
One more thing: the complete source code for the new jQuery Mobile ThemeRoller tool is open source under the standard jQuery project licenses for you to improve, remix and build into your apps. The core tool is designed to work completely client-side to make it easy to drop into your code — only the download and sharing features require a bit of PHP. Go forth and fork it on GitHub.
By way of Raymond Johnson, the best statistics multiple choice question ever written on a chalkboard. Try not to think too hard. [via]
This is a collection of Adobe Illustrator Scripts that exports layers or artboards to PNGs of different densities (iOS Retina Display, Android Devices, etc).
How to install
If you place the script in the Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/Scripts folder, the script will appear in the File > Scripts submenu. If you place the script in another location on the hard disk, you can run the script in Illustrator by choosing File > Scripts > Browse.
How to use Mobile > General
The general scripts asks for 3 values in sequence:
How to use Mobile > iOS
How to use Mobile > Android
Note on exporting layers: Locked layers visibility will be ignored and also they will not be exported. For example, this can be used to keep global layers visibility or guide layers from being exported.
Download zip file here:
Illustrator Scripts for Mobile
Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams asked visual designers why they write their own software and how it affects their process:
The answers reflect the individuality of the designers and their process, but some ideas are persistent. The most consistent answer is that custom software is written because it gives more control. This control is often expressed as individual freedom. Another thread is writing custom software to create a precise realization for a precise idea. To put it another way, writing custom code is one way to move away from generic solutions; new tools can create new opportunities.
Most of the interviewees are media artists, but there are a couple of names you'll recognize. My favorite, Amanda Cox, uses a Mad Libs metaphor:
Mad Libs is a game where key words in a short story have been replaced with blanks. Players fill in the blanks with designated parts of speech (“noun”, “adverb”) or types of words (“body part”, “type of liquid”), without seeing the rest of the story. Occasionally, hilarity ensues, but no one really believes that this is an effective method for generating great literature.
I'm looking at you, non-programming statistician.
Update: The article isn't there anymore, so you can read the cached page for now.
