Inventing Interactive
Have I mentioned my love of the blog Gym Glass Magazine? It was there that I discovered Linefeed — Michael Bojkowski’s blog with amazing video reviews of current magazines. His reviews (or, maybe, surveys) are so cool — they’re just him, flipping through a stack of recent issues and commenting on them. I’d love to […]
The tale of Apple popularizing the mouse in the 80’s — taking it from the relative obscurity of the labs at Xerox PARC — is a technology and industry legend. But the fact that mouse had earlier beginnings, invented by Douglas Engelbart (and featured in his Sketchpad demo) in the 60’s is less discussed. Malcolm […]
Warning: This post may destroy any credibility I may have. But it’s not all bad — I get to post a picture of my dog! What does it mean for animals to interact with digital media? Do our pets care about our phones or computers? Our dog Suki (@suki_the_dog) seems completely oblivious to screen-based media. […]
What do you do when you’re watching tv? It’s old news that we multitask — using our laptops, ipads, and phones, and do all sorts of stuff. So it’s interesting to see these recent iPad apps that try to build on that activity — giving viewers a parallel track of information to accompany what’s on the tv. […]
Very Recent History – some of things I’ve been reading recently. The Death of Bohemia Mel Exon, at BBH Labs, wrote a great post about how, as the creative world moves faster and faster, “we need a little time to digest; work out what’s a fad versus what’s really interesting.” He used a quote from William […]
Since the iPad has been released, it’s been interesting to see how application designers are taking advantage of the generous screen real estate. The recently released Twitter app, for example, is a miracle in interface innovation for the platform — it packs a huge amount of content into a smoothly multi-layered and very flexible interface. […]
This week, both Twitter and Digg released new versions of their services. Digg launched a redesigned version of their website, Twitter released a new iPad app. But the difference in how the two releases have been received by users is remarkable. People are pretty unhappy about the new Digg. People love the new Twitter app. […]
There’s been a lot of press over the past month or two about the possible dangers of multitasking, and how it can hurt our ability to focus and remember. But it was only last night, driving home from work, and not distracted by all the other web pages fighting for my attention, that I really […]
Just released for the iPad, Inkling looks fantastic. It’s designed as an e-textbook reader — and has beautiful layout and typography. It’s also got support for a wide range of multimedia content such as movies, 3D, and quizzes. But I think its real killer-feature is the way it can integrate your social network into the […]
Eye magazine published a fascinating article in 1997, Sound, Code, Image, on how graphic scores can “liberate” music from the five-line grid of traditional music notation. It looked at the work of composers from the 50’s to the 70’s, and their experiments at making musical scores more graphic and expressive. (And just today the Eye […]
I love music visualization and explorations of synesthesia. MOCA’s 2005 amazing exhibition Visual Music, highlighted a wide (and deep) range of work tracing the development of music in the visual arts. For example, one of the show’s featured artists John Whitney (who’s son, by the way, was one my earliest employers), created amazing work which […]
Well, the iPad’s been out for a couple days and already there’s a batch of newspaper and magazine apps available. So… are they the future of journalism? Engadget reviews nine of them and finds plenty to gripe about. They find many with gestures that are “totally alien” to the iPad, or are otherwise slow, buggy, […]
Well, my iPad arrived this morning… and it’s been a lot of fun! Although… I wasn’t able to find a way to do this post using it (WordPress can’t access images from the iPad, and the WordPress iPad app crashes when I try adding images to a post). There’s been so much hype about this […]
In What Movie UIs Say About the Future, Tony Walt reviews a variety of interface types featured in some recent movies. His discussion on Complexity was particularly interesting — especially in the context of the iPad and its move towards simplicity: I’ve noticed that UIs in feature films are continually getting more elaborate and complex. […]
Ever since last week’s iPad launch, the image of an iPad’s web browser with the missing-plugin Lego-brick has been generating a lot of discussion. Is Apple at war with Adobe? Is Adobe’s Flash critical to the web experience? Is Apple’s restriction going to doom the iPad? It’s not only bloggers talking, even the New York […]
After my post about the fluidity of using the Symbolics keyboard, I thought Phil Gyford’s recent post about typing speeds on different devices, Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone, was very cool. As an experiment, he entered the same paragraph of text into using six different devices to see which […]