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In case you haven't checked it out, the Interaction-Design.org Foundation is an outstanding project started by Mads Soegaard and Rikke Dam to create free and open educational materials for the HCI and IXD communities. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction is the main project, where they've engaged professors and designers to contribute chapters that include HD video and commentary.

Mads and crew will soon release a chapter on Social Computing and its relation to social media, written by Tom Erickson, veteran researcher in social computing at IBM Watson Research Lab. The chapter includes multiple HD videos with interviews of Erickson.

These materials have apparently taken 10 months to produce and involved 3 editors, 2 peer-reviewers, and a camera crew of 4 people. There is also commentary by some renowned designers like Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo Research and Andrea Forte from Drexel University.

The group have prepared a preview for Konigi readers. The text and HD videos are completely free and can be viewed here: http://interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/social_computing.html?p=0230.

This is an incredible new resource. Be sure to check it out.

http://interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/social_computing.html?p=0230

Meaningful Transitions is the thesis project of Johannes Tonollo, an interface design student at the FH Potsdam, Germany. Johannes wrote his Thesis on "Transitions in the User Interface," in which he analyzed how motion in the user interface can be a helpful extension to static elements to enhance the user experience.

The collection of transitions is clustered into 6 different categories: Orientation, Spatial Extension, Awaking Controls (Awakening?), Highlight, Feedback, and Feedforward. His description of the effectiveness of each transition forms a pattern-like-library for motion in interface design. Each transition provides a short summary and abstract animation on the category overview. Be sure to click each item to view a detailed view that provides a description of the transition, explanation of when it can be useful, and a description of the benefits for using that transition as a design solution. Several items also provide a real-world example of the solution in use.

Excellent stuff, and impressive execution. Check it out. The thesis is also available in a downloadable PDF in German.

http://www.ui-transitions.com/#home

Usabilla is one of the remote, unmoderated usability test services I've reviewed and used in the past (full disclosure: they also now sponsor this site). They've added mobile testing to their remote, unmoderated testing service. The new feature lets users participate by using their smartphones or tablets to test the screenshots or urls you specify in each task or scenario.

As with their past offering, participants are stepped through each scenario and asked to respond by adding markers to screens and notes/responses to your questions. I ran test scenarios on both iPhone and iPad, and the interface is clean, and simple, and optimized to work well with both devices. Read more here.

http://blog.usabilla.com/mobile-ux-testing/