Military Family Appreciation Month

November 23, 2011 1 Comment

This November is National Military Family Appreciation Month, and in its recognition, Thetus is honoring the families of the military by collecting and sending donations to a local base in Washington state, Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Starting this month, we’ve begun collecting together toys, books, games, home goods and various other donations for families of the military. When we’re done, we’ll be packing up our box of collected items and shipping them to Lewis-McChord’s Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation center. This department will then choose which of their community groups our donations would best benefit. They’ll choose from groups like ACS (Army Community Service), a program designed specifically to assist military personnel and their families in coping with everything from relocation to survivor outreach assistance. Another group that may receive our donations is the SFAC (Soldier & Family Assistance Center), a section that provides an environment where military personnel in transition and their families can gather to foster physical, spiritual and mental healing.

By donating needed items to local military families, cooking dinner for families at the Ronald McDonald House in East Portland and giving out food to the homeless in our own neighborhood, we’ll continue our efforts to provide help for those who need it most.

For more ways to help the families of military, click here.

 

Filed under Catching Up With Thetus

Intuitive Design: Where You Been All My Life?

November 17, 2011 1 Comment

The spectacular success of Apple’s iPhone and other products has pushed the importance of intuitive and elegant design to the forefront of everyone’s mind.  Intuitive design goes beyond simply interacting with an application’s features and considers something deeper—our own instinct.

While it’s not something you can formally study, it is a way of thinking that improves the product. The result is an interface that’s easy to navigate and doesn’t get in the way of the job the user is trying to do. Software that has a visually complicated interface does not sell users on the power of the tool if it takes too long to figure out how it works. Users will quickly become frustrated and move on to a tool that’s easier to use.

Intuitive design is a far simpler concept than you may think. For example, consider the wildly exciting world of door knobs. We all know how use them–it’s the same nearly everywhere. You turn the knob and either pull, or push–you don’t need to be told each time you use a new doorknob how it works. Now take something more complex like a programmable thermostat. Each make and model has different features that vary across the board but essentially provide the same results. Most require some squinting, and even a user’s manual to come to grips with the features of a design that presents the user with too many options. Compare that to the thermostat below’s take on the same functionality (top). The user interface strips away all the complexity and boils it down to its essential purposes.

This design approach isn’t just for phones and tablets or devices—we’ve found that it helps guide the choices we make for delivering a superior user experience in Savanna, our multi-INT analysis solution. From the start screen to the seamless dragging and dropping of assets between components, Savanna optimizes the analyst’s workflow through intuitive design.

In our upcoming winter release of Savanna 3, the start screen places all the essential analysis tools within a simple mouse click. The MyStuff case management and organization feature offers improved, intuitive content organization and maximizes production workflow. MyStuff is more collection and tag- oriented than the traditional file system—all assets can be freely moved and co-mingled within and between projects by simply dragging and dropping. Savanna also allows users to drag and drop items where they make sense, whether it’s to visualize a document’s content geospatially or place a snippet of text into a custom document.

Like everything, there are some drawbacks to intuitive design—developers and designers have to be careful creating new elements and not let things get too cluttered. Our lead UI developer, Reggie, says, “I encourage the devs to create work that is for the most brilliant users, that aren’t necessarily technologists.” This mindset isn’t always easy to achieve, but you know it when you see it.

What are your thoughts on intuitive design? Do you use it in your own work? Tell us in the comments.

Filed under Techie

Veteran’s Day: Remembering and Looking Forward

November 10, 2011 Leave a comment

On this Veteran’s Day we recognize those who have served our nation and continue to do so in their daily lives. We appreciate and honor these members of society not only as veterans, but as our loved ones as well: they’re our dads, sisters, uncles, grandparents and friends.

We recognize that coming back into the workforce after the trauma they’ve experienced is no easy feat, so we’ve provided some links below for recent veteran employment opportunities. We’ve also listed some sites for the family members and loved ones who also fight every day to help make life better for their veterans.

http://www.military.com/news/article/obama-to-promote-ways-for-vets-to-find-work.html?ESRC=sm_todayinmil.nl – a piece about President Obama’s actions being taken to provide work for veterans.

http://veteransfamiliesunited.org/ -A beautifully written and personal site created by parents of a man living with PTSD. The site is a place for families of veterans to connect, find help for their loved ones, and donate.

http://afps.dodlive.mil/ -A blog for veteran families and loved ones to learn how to regularly provide support.

http://www.dhs.gov/xcitizens/veterans.shtm -The Department of Homeland Security’s job site for veterans—they’ve employed 50,000 veterans so far and are always working toward helping more.

http://www.public.navy.mil/donaa/Pages/woundedwarrior.aspx -This site for The Department of the Navy / Assistant for Administration (DON/AA) pulls together financial and career support for veterans of the Navy and holds conferences to provide employment opportunities.

Filed under Thetus Blog

PDX-UX: Putting HTML5 to Work

October 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Last month’s PDX-UX meeting brought a staggering 80 developers and designers who came together to talk about UX/UI (not too shabby for our first gathering).

Come help us drink this.

This Thursday, we hope to see an equally fantastic group come out to listen to our presenters and bond over UX/UI. This month’s speakers will be discussing all things HTML5:

Thomas Wester

Thomas will explain how Second Story utilizes HTML5 to build engaging and unique user experiences that go beyond the computer screen. They’ve produced everything from a media wall at the alumni building at University of Oregon to a thematic mosaic exploring Mexican history within Los Angeles.

Simran Gleason

Simran will show off some of the HTML5 experiments he’s created prior to his job here at Thetus. Have a

peek at his personal site to see how he plays with color, sound and physics on canvas, and how he takes a single spring-based word design through a series of design iterations toward an online competitive word game.

Martin Nelson

Martin, who is the Head of Architecture at Accelrys Inc., will discuss how he has thoroughly improved a web app he’s been developing by working with HTML5. He’ll tell us about the unexpected benefits of HTML5’s rapid feedback cycles, its ability to focus on delight, and the potential to expand its use to a team-based collaboration tool that could work in real-time with customers and clients.

The beginning of an impressive turnout at last month's meeting.

Our meeting will be held this Thursday, October 27th, at Thetus Corporation: 34 NW 1st Ave (corner of 1st & Couch), on the 3rd floor. The food and networking begins at 5:30, and demos will start at 6:00.

As always, there will be food, beer and soda provided. If you haven’t already, please RSVP at our PlanCast site.

Filed under Catching Up With Thetus

Have A Beer, Talk UX/UI

September 28, 2011 Leave a comment

UI developers are in good company in the Silicon Forest. Because of this local abundance of talent and interest, Thetus has decided to host a user group called PDX-UX . PDX-UX gives developers, designers and other interested folks a chance to come together on a regular basis, share some food, sip some soda or beer and talk UX and UI.

If that sounds good to you, come to our first PDX-UX meeting! It’s happening tomorrow night at the Thetus office in the Blagen Block Building in Old Town, and the line-up of presenters is looking pretty fantastic. Our presenters are: Dino Citraro from Periscopic, demoing a project that will be released in November for The Economist, Paul Wagner, demoing Forkfly 4.0, Brian Reavis, demoing Seamless Studio, Object Prism’s Jim Klein, talking usage analytics and customer engagement optimization tools available for designers, and Kelly White, demoing a Windows 8 Tablet.

Here are the details–we hope you’ll join us!

Who
Anyone interested in talking about/showcasing user interface and user experience development and design.

When
Thursday, September 29th
Food and networking starts at 5:30
Demos start at 6:00 and will wrap up before 7:00

Where
Thetus Corporation
34 NW 1st Avenue (corner of 1st and Couch), 3rd floor
Portland, OR 97209

For more information, check out our Google group.

Filed under Catching Up With Thetus

Bikes, Parties and Sustainability

September 21, 2011 Leave a comment

As your baby grows, it’s nice to mark his or her progress. The taller the child becomes, the more marks on the wall, so to speak. Similarly, as startups like ours grow and flourish, it’s always good to acknowledge and perhaps even celebrate that growth.

Mingling with other software companies at our party

These days, we’re growing in size, and continuing to expand our sustainability practices, from our reused hardwood floors to the compact lighting above our heads. At Thetus, we practice a triple bottom line approach to our business practices, taking into consideration not only what’s best for the company, but how we can practice our shared values of environmentalism and community involvement and have fun doing it.

To celebrate our growth and the growth of the Portland software industry, we decided to throw a  moving up party last week .The party was held on the newly remodeled 3rd floor of our building(the historic Blagen Block Building in Old Town) and had a great mix of local Portland flavor. In attendance to help us celebrate were software companies and other local businesses, Mayor Sam Adams and new Software Association of Oregon (SAO) president, Skip Newberry. While we snacked on organic hors devours provided by local catering company Food in Bloom, we celebrated the new faces at Thetus, our eco-friendly renovation/expansion to another floor (thanks to the hard work of Beardsley Development), and Portland software growth.

Although we always enjoy a good party, Thetus is also always looking for creative ways to have fun while getting involved in our community and helping the environment.

Our Bike Commute Challenge team

For the past two years, we’ve participated in the Bike Commute Challenge, a friendly competition between Portland businesses to see which company achieves the most days of cyclist commutes in one month. Our BBC team captain, Justin, says, “The friendly-competition of The Bike Commute Challenge has actually encouraged a number of people to dust off their old bikes and try riding them to work, which has been very positive. And it’s fun to keep track of how many calories you’ve burned, how many miles you’ve travelled and how much CO2 you’ve saved—it all really adds up quickly.”

As Thetus grows along with the local software community, we’ll continue to seek out fun and interesting ways to contribute to our environments, locally and globally.

How do you integrate sustainability in your workplace? Let us know in the comments.

Filed under Catching Up With Thetus

Why Models?

September 15, 2011 Leave a comment

We talk about modeling a lot at Thetus. In fact, if you ask us what we do, we’ll tell you we are a modeling company that tackles complex problems. To us, models are a way of expressing the concepts, properties and relationships that describe a complex system. We use many concepts and the standards from the Semantic Web, and the types of models we build are ontologies to describe what things are, how they are related, and where they fit into the overall model.

Thetus Ontology

The word ontology elicits a bit of eye rolling in some circles due to an abundance of enthusiasm for the potential of ontologies in the early years of the Semantic Web. Ontologies were heralded as the magic answer machines. Nevertheless, the power of describing concepts and relationships and following inferred connections through models to answer questions is real, but the model by itself is not an application. We’ve always taken a pragmatic approach toward how we use these models and how we build software to get value from them. Savanna, our analysis environment, uses models for everything from driving the user interface to link charting and modeling the analytical process. Models are simply rich building blocks for characterizing.

This modeling capability is especially useful for sociocultural analysts because the information becomes process-centric. Analysts can work through a problem and then be able trace the process that helped them arrive at the understanding they’ve gained. At Thetus, we’re interested in functional ontology that accommodates the constant change of real-world understanding even when it contradicts our models. Definitions aren’t simply one-sided–they’re multi-faceted and dynamic.

In other words, we define, but we don’t restrict.

For example, imagine that a sociocultural analyst is working to understand how regional alliances are formed and how they can be influenced. The analyst needs to employ a number of interconnected models to really characterize the environment to create the basis for analysis and, ultimately, to make an assessment. Analysts need to describe concepts and relationships that span social, economic, political and environmental factors. These factors intersect with temporal and geospatial vectors to form a rich model of the region. Some relationships and concepts will have concrete and observable manifestations, and others will have more subtle and inferred connections and associations.

The truth is, we’re unintentionally using models in our everyday lives every time we make a decision. For example, if we hold a dinner party, we must consider what kinds of guests we’re cooking for—some people are vegetarians and other people like meat–some people have food allergies and some people are just picky eaters. We’re also thinking about external environmental influences like weather (serving soups in the winter or BBQ and fresh tomato salad in the summer), or the availability of ingredients (corn on the cob might be harder to find in January). All these aspects contribute to the final dish, and it’s models that help us make the decision.

Life is full of complexity. Even dinner choices involve many factors and defy easy definition. We embrace this open-endedness because we know that the answers aren’t always set in stone.

Filed under Industry

September 11th, In Memoriam

September 9, 2011 Leave a comment

The events of September 11, 2001, mark a significant moment in every American’s life. This Sunday, we honor the victims of 9/11 and their families. We remember those we’ve lost, those whose actions were selfless and brave, and appreciate those we are lucky to still have with us today.

Filed under Thetus Blog

Maintaining Sanity in the Iterative Design Process

September 7, 2011 Leave a comment

Savanna Crumbnet Iterations

These days, it’s fairly common knowledge that the cyclical, conversational nature of iterative design fosters creativity and ultimately produces a better end product. The constant feedback and refinement of designs early in the process helps identify areas that need improvement before too much time has been invested. That said, the iterative design process can drive people crazy. For one, it’s a process of constant feedback and revision, which means that, as Faulkner put it, you must regularly “kill your darlings.” Iterative design is about evolution, so you can’t get too attached to any one design.

While the process can be challenging at times, we’ve found that having the team evaluate, discover, and understand before moving forward fits well with the nature of our analysis platform, Savanna. Our application is designed for dynamic environments, and so is the iterative method, which means that we can constantly improve our products, our user experience, and better serve our customers. As our VP of Products and Services Phil puts it, “It’s a process that isn’t afraid of change.”

Iterative design opens the conversation with our customer. We can focus on what’s materially important to the end user and not blindly follow a specification, which is great since customers rarely get incorporated or considered in the process of designing and developing software.

So how is it possible to maintain sanity within all this revision? First of all, you can’t fear change. You have to realize that you’re not working to design something you’re attached to—you’re part of a team that has a larger goal in mind. And, as with any dynamic process, communication is key. Along with that, fast wireframing and prototyping have been helpful for us. Our designers have the ability to create a visual blueprint without having to fill in the blanks. Our UI developers can evolve the designs with real feedback informed by working software.

Filed under Techie

User Interface Technologies

August 23, 2011 Leave a comment

Ever since Steve Jobs announced his opinions on Flash and HTML5 back in April 2010, the debate rages on about whether or not HTML5 really will be the last tool standing. As a software company serving a broad range of users and platforms, we don’t have the same luxury as Mr. Jobs. It hasn’t been that long since we stopped having to support Internet Explorer 6! We know that we have to support a number of presentation technologies including portal widgets, HTML5 and Flash. Fortunately, our UI developers haven’t committed to either side too religiously.

On one hand, we find it exciting that the bleeding edge releases of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox are early adopters of HTML5. We like that it’s open and doesn’t require developers to use third-party plug-ins for graphics and animations. HTML5 also isn’t limited by the security sandbox that Flex is, which opens up functionality like dragging and dropping into a browser window. But the downside is that all your users have to have the latest browser and ideally a powerful GPU. Browser consistency is another issue that makes it difficult for developers to justify using HTML5 over a tool like Flex that provides that functionality out-of-the-box. We appreciate that it’s easy to understand and build since it’s a document with semantic meaning attached. And we definitely appreciate the power of semantics within HTML5 considering the ontological underpinnings of Savanna, our semantic modeling and analysis platform. Although the deployment environments we work in do not make HTML5 a feasible tool for an enterprise-class solution yet, we’ve got our eye on HTML5, and we’re watching for what’s on the horizon.

In the meantime, we’ve been using the more established Flex4 quite successfully to provide a rich user experience for Savanna, along with Java-based services for the backend. We’ve found that it works well with Savanna’s browser-based, model-driven approach. Here’s why:

  • Flex is a full-fledged language–it goes beyond the animation-driven Flash and is more of an enterprise-class solution, especially when you have to support browser versions that are more than a year old.
  • Since Savanna is built based on the properties of semantic models, Flex provides us with the reliability to dynamically load problem-specific user interfaces.
  • Flash user interfaces are highly interactive, so our users can manipulate graphs in real time.
  • Flex is web-based, allowing for convenient application update deployments.
  • Flex provides tools for rapid development.
  • Developers can choose to fade out and write other display tricks and only take a single line achieve it. This      frees up time to work on the hard stuff.

One of our UI developers, Reggie, says of Flex: “Flex’s look and feel are really some of its best features. It’s the best option to display in an interactive, beautiful way. Flex gives us the ability to express ourselves and not have it take the entire day to do so.”

While we’re reaping the benefits of Flex, we are also aware of the drawbacks: single threading doesn’t allow several animations to happen at once without appearing jerky, the security sandbox blocks some of the functionality that HTML5 makes available, and it isn’t as easy to use it for free as HTML5.

Arguments aside, we’ve concluded that it’s not significant which is better–both tools have their strengths and weaknesses–and from the looks of it, neither is going away any time soon. What really matters is delivering a great user experience.

What user interface technologies are you using? Tell us in the comments.

Filed under Techie, Thetus Blog

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