OK, the stylus backstory — why I decided to “roll my own” — is out of the way. Now . . .

DIY stylus prototype #1

Making Your Own Stylus

The videos from Crabfu ArtWorks and Make Magazine are worth watching. Start there.

Next, you’ll need supplies.

• A new barrel of some sort
• Super glue
• A shaft of some sort
• Scissors
• Conductive foam

The barrel

The videos show the use of a pen barrel or a drafting pencil. I chose the Staedtler Mars 980 drafting pencil (see slide 3 below) because I had one handy and it also has a great gripping claw to hold the pencil lead (this will come in handy later)

Cost: The Staedtler is available at most office supply stores for as little as $12, including additional lead.

Super glue and scissors

Cost: Super glue: $2.50-$4, readily available; scissors: you should have a pair somewhere around the house.

Shaft

DIY stylus supplies, minus scissors

Crabfu’s video showed the use of a plastic Q-Tip, trimmed at one end to create a point to push into the foam. I didn’t have a Q-Tip handy, so I looked around the house and decided on the thin “straws” that come with a can of compressed air. Later I tried an old Dremel tool bit, which provided excellent stability but was a bit too long (don’t worry: the end was dull and wouldn’t have scratched the iPad’s surface).

After prototyping the compressed air “straws,” I tried  using the lead that comes with the Staedtler. It’s thicker than most mechanical pencil lead — and you get 10 or 12 sticks when you buy the drafting pencil. It worked well, although it can snap just like regular pencil lead if abused or stored haphazardly.

Cost: negligible

Conductive foam

When I started, my first thought was, “What the hell is conductive foam?” and “Where do I get some?” The videos say  you may use the foam that comes with computer parts like RAM upgrades or hard drives, but I recently had thrown away those boxes — and the foam.

Depending on where you live, look around for a computer store like Fry’s. Luckily for me, one is nearby and I bought a sheet of conductive foam for $8 (minus tax and gas, see slide 2 below). What a deal.

Note: There are various grades and grits of conductive foam. Fry’s carried only one. It worked for me and I stopped there.

Assembly

Prototype and experiment with tip sizes and shapes

It took me about five minutes to make my first stylus. I cut a piece of foam, super glued it to the compressed air “straw”, trimmed the foam with the scissors, inserted it into the drafting pencil and . . .

. . . it didn’t work (see slides 4 and 5 below).

My advice: Prototype early, often, and try different styles and approaches. You’ll have plenty of conductive foam, so supply is not a problem.

Also: The super glue bonds quickly; use a small amount. If you use too much the foam hardens and is more difficult to write with on the iPad screen. I’m not sure, but it seems like hard glue messed with the foam’s conductivity.

In the end, I crafted maybe 20 tips.

Some were horizontal — these had the required depth and surface for conductivity but were a bit too bulbous to write with (and see what you were writing).

This led to a more vertical approach, which allowed me to taper the the surface so I could write on the tip or the side of the stylus. Also, this orientation led me to “smush” or taper the sides of the tip downward so the pencil’s “claw” not only grasped the shaft but also a bit of foam for added stability.

I even crafted one tip of just foam, no shaft, and it worked great, although it seemed to wear out faster.

The end result

For about $8 to $25 I have a stylus (see slide 6 below) that I can . . .

• clip to the side of the iPad in the Apple case without fear of breaking the clip (it’s metal)
• clip into a pencil holder in a computer bag without fear of breaking the clip
• mold tips that suit varied writing or illustration needs (almost like brushes)
• write comfortably with because I am used to the drafting pencil weight and form factor.

Hope this helps. If you have a better stylus, let me know.

The Backstory

Pogo stylus deconstructed

I know there are some folks out there who think you should only use your finger to draw or write on the iPad. Their reasoning is a bit hippie — the iPad is a touch surface, it allows the user to be more intimate with the interface and device, and using an intermediary tool such as a stylus is blasphemous. It alters the experience. Therefore, ergo, styli are bad.

I’m not so hippie. There are times to write and interface with the iPad with a finger. There are other instances when using a stylus is more comfortable and appropriate. That’s why I went in search of a decent stylus but, alas, there are few to be found.

I started with perhaps the best known stylus, Pogo, from Ten One Design.

Positives: It’s well-made, it’s short and unobtrusive, the aluminum (I think) barrel is thicker-walled than expected, and the tip is a conductive foam that seems durable enough after weeks of use.

Negatives: It’s short and the diameter of the stylus is a bit too small to feel comfortable in a larger hand (like mine), writing on the side of the tip (like one might with a pencil or pen) isn’t reliable, but worst of all Ten One Design uses a cheap plastic clip at the top of the utensil so you can attach it to a shirt pocket (a bit nerdy for me) or into a pen holder in a computer bag of some sort.

Pogo and its brittle plastic clip

I liked clipping the Pogo to the outside spine of the iPad in an Apple cover. It’s not an ideal solution (it tends to easily pop off), but it works for me around the house, office, or coffee shop. The problem is the plastic is so brittle it snaps off and leaves a crooked stump.

I’ve bought three Pogo styli, at $15 a pop, and all three have broken clips — the last one came less than 24 hours after purchase, and all I was doing was clipping it to the iPad cover.

Enough.

There has to be better styli out there.

Rather than spend even more money, I decided to “roll my own.” I ran across Crabfu ArtWorks’ YouTube video on how he improved on MAKE Magazine’s DIY stylus. Inspired, I set out to make my own.

Next up: How to Make Your Own Stylus

P.S. To be fair, someone at Ten One Design did offer to replace the broken styli, which I have not done yet. My motivation for contacting them was to pass along a frustrating design flaw of an otherwise decent product.

Too many choices, not the right info

This isn’t new. We’ve been complaining about too much information since the start of the so-called Information Age, but it’s only getting worse. There is so much data out there, so many choices to make, that we as users and consumers are paralyzed.

Can’t Design and user interface experience designers help us with this problem, or are they powerless when it comes to product development managers, marketers, and others who ultimately control what we as consumers see and use?

Case in point: I upgraded to the iPhone 4 and wanted to add some new, different podcasts. I hadn’t checked “design” in a while; what I found were pages and pages of listings with nothing to help me sort through all the possibilities. I clicked on one show that seemed interesting, only to find it hadn’t been updated for two years. I switched query strategies, only to find “design management” yielded just as many results.

information "i"

How can Design improve this experience? We don’t want just lists — name of show, name of person or media company producing the show, and its “category.” iTunes has added a little information “i” that you only see if you roll over the show icon with a mouse. Click and you get the same basic data and a list of shows. Click on the link provided to then go to that podcast, where a broader description is provided. Popularity is indicated by a horizontal, segmented bar.

But iTunes still hasn’t answered my questions. Is the show current? When was it started? What are the show’s subjects (and not just a broad overview)? How many people download the show? What does popular mean, relative to what? In this example, it seems to me that iTunes needs a user interface and experience overhaul.

Amazon, the greatest recommendation engine innovator, gives me What Other Customers are Looking at Right Now, Today’s Recommendations for You, Coming Soon for  You, and New for You (among others), and Apple has its Genius recommendations, but do these truly deliver to the consumer the data “life preserver” they need as they drown in choice?

How might choice be redesigned?

What is a “mediacation?”

Think vacation. Think vacation at home, or “staycation.” Now think of taking a break from the deluge of social media and social networks we use everyday. That’s a “mediacation.”

As an early adopter of social media and social networks, I find myself increasingly taking “mediacations” because I can’t (or don’t want to) deal with the onslaught of information in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and RSS, etcetera etcetera. With each subject — for me it’s design, music, baseball, cycling, Apple, interface design, politics, science, and many more — the number of sources and the amount of information to process grows exponentially, creating a massive information jam.

I’ve tried all sorts of strategies. Only read you media “inbox” every morning and evening. Use filters. If you haven’t read something in one or two days, delete it. Reduce the the numbers of blogs you read, the people you follow on Twitter, the times you visit Facebook. Self-proclaimed media gurus tell us how to deal with “information overload” and “data smog.”

But most of it’s bullshit.

Information management will come, in time, and we’re starting to see some interesting strategies like Instapaper or Read It Later or a visual approach to reading the news like Pulse. But are these really improving our ability to read and manage media sources and information, or they lipstick on the pig?

I finally got yesternow up and running. It’s where I jot down miscellaneous ramblings about technology, software, hardware, design, interfaces, music, books, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Yesternow comes from an old Miles Davis tune, allowing me to look at things in three perspectives —  yesterday, today, and tomorrow — when applicable.

So if I’m not here, I’m most likely there.

I see the London Museum has released an iPhone 3GS app called Streetmuseum that allows users to see archived photographs and paintings of street scenes with the same view today. The phone uses GPS, knows where you are, and shows you a copy of Google Maps of nearby locations with photos or paintings of interest layered on top.

Jane Tappuni, writing for FutureBook, tried Streetmuseum and found:

My only gripe is that I wanted more than just a picture and a snippet. I wanted deeper content on the history of the photograph and relevant information. Nevertheless this is an interesting innovation that should be food for thought for book publishers around the world.

It’s interesting that she wanted “more than just a picture” and “a deeper context,” because in my monthly dealings with the Dallas Museum of Art that’s exactly what patrons are asking for. To its credit, the DMA has mostly abandoned the linear “audio tours” that forces you to move from one painting to the next while someone talks to you — first on a cassette tape, now on a digital device — through the headphones stuck in your ears.

The DMA developed a mobile site (smARTphone tours) that corresponds to three exhibits — Collections, The Lens of Impressionism (which may be closed now), and the Reves Collection. Rather than carry an MP3 player and listen to someone drone on about Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh in a linear, timed fashion, museum-goers with any mobile, web-accessible device can visit whatever painting or sculpture they want, in any order, and spent as much (or as little) time there as they want.

Along the way, visitors are treated with all sorts of multimedia — an audio recording about Sheaves of Wheat, close-up images of Abandoned House near Aix-en-Province, interviews with curators, and much more. These “museum bits” range in duration from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

The beauty of the DMA’s approach is that you do not need to have an iPhone or a Touch from Apple. smARTphone Tours is device agnostic and can be accessed at home from a computer before or after a visit to the museum.

“It’s much better than audio tours because you can stop, move around,” one museum-goer said during the DMA’s iMuseum event in April. “I like that it deconstructs a painting. It tells you the tools that were used. It shows you where the artist and the work was in time, what was going on.”

Already patrons are offer suggestions to make smARTphone Tours even better.

“We want control over our experience,” the museum-goer said.

See also

You can follow the smARTphone Tours technology mastermind on Twitter at @tedforbes.

And here is a brief, informal look at museum innovation, including new perspectives from San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of modern Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (iAfrica), Ic (Louisville), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. imuseum (PDF)

Steven Johnson, one of my favorite non-academic, non-scientist authors, is about to publish his seventh book – Where Good Ideas Come From — and he’s written down a few thoughts in the latest Time magazine on privacy and oversharing one’s life like prostate cancer, colon cancer, or what you had for lunch.

In our house, we have built a set of improvised rules about how much of family life to make public: I tweet or blog little anecdotes about the kids, but don’t mention them by name. We never post pictures of them, except to our inner circle of friends on Facebook. When they’re old enough for their own Facebook account, we’ll let them decide for themselves how public they want to be with their lives.

And that’s the point, really: these are decisions now. In the old days, life was set by default to be private unless you happened to be famous. Now, we have to choose whether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactly we want to live there.

The subject of privacy really hits home for me. The Kid was recently a target of “analog” bullying, “cyber” bullying, and sexual harassment, all of which necessitated the need to log a formal complaint with the high school and the school district. The question is: What do I want to say about all this?

The reason for the “Febreze” refreshing is that blogs, over time, become stale. My last one featured a mix of writing on my life at the U, some observations about eBook readers, a bit of this, a bit of that. It was not my objective to become Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan, or anybody else who seems to blog in their sleep.

This time around, however, I’m just gonna write about topics that interest me — and hopefully you.

I’m thinking about beginning Ph.D. work in what I call Social Information Networks (more on this later), and I’d like to jot down some thoughts here. For all the hype that social media and social networks are getting these days, they are still just tools . . . tools that people use to share news and information through their — wait for it — social networks.

I’m also interested in the divide between traditional journalism and social media, new journalism, citizen journalism, user-generated content — whatever you want to call it. Unlike my social media brethren, I do not look upon traditional media and journalism with scorn and contempt. I said the day the Times Herald died back in 1991 that there always will  be a need to report on human affairs, there just won’t be paper in the news. I also noted at the time that there always will be a need for “reporters” to gather news and information; I just didn’t see far enough into the future to forecast that average folks would be sitting alongside the “professionals.” Still, one-and-a-half out of two isn’t bad.

Because of my unique background of journalism, product design and development, research, professional blogging, and education, I sit at the crossroads. Naturally, I fully, unequivocally support social media, social networks, and the technological changes we are undergoing (like geo-location, alternative reality, augmented reality, social and serious gaming, and so on), but I’m also a bit of a fuddy duddy. I take social media vacations. This stuff is not the cure for cancer. It’s not perfect, and we’re beginning to see unintended consequences emerge like cyber bullying, the changing nature of “friends”, privacy issues, the effects of hyper mobility, and on and on.

These are all food for thought — and discussion.

Adios.

It’s Spring, nearing Summer, and I just decided “what the hell, it’s time for housecleaning.” So, I backed up all the stuff in the previous blog/website, deleted databases, deleted files off the ftp server, and reinstalled and reconfigured everything. It just feels like time for a fresh start, for a number of reasons. About those . . . a bit later.

For now, I need to grill out chicken kabobs, take the dogs for a walk (in lieu of shooting them for excessive barking), and reinstall Thesis Theme later tonight.

I feel better already.

Aside: In case you don’t know what Febreze is, check it out. The Kid is addicted to it. Weird. But a good weird.