Inventing Interactive
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 […]
A couple years ago, when judging an interactive competition, there was an entry that started with a dark screen and, in the distance, a flickering candle. Using only sound, you moved through a landscape to get to the candle. If my memory is correct you weren’t rewarded with much more than a scare and then […]
I have to admit, I’m always a bit skeptical about 3D. But then, whenever I see something in 3D I get a bit caught by the sense of wonder the technique can inspire — the way it draws you into the image and makes you forget the world around you. So the below examples of […]
Take a look at this cute project from the Japanese firm Mobile Art. From what I can get out of Google Translate, it’s what they call a “PhoneBook” and it’s titled “POPO and MOMO Ride! Ride!” (You can buy it from amazon.jp.) It’s a simple idea: place an iPhone inside a book-like container, then turn […]
Stephen Fry‘s new iPhone app MyFry has already received a lot of blog coverage… but I wanted to quickly post it here because it looks like such an interesting experiment in publishing. The app’s content is Fry’s new book “The Fry Chronicles” — but it’s been made non-linear. The primary navigation of the app/book is […]
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. […]
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 […]
Rhizome has a great post today Art in Your Pocket 2: Media Art for the iPhone and iPod Touch Graduates To The Next Level. It’s a really interesting collection of work that doesn’t normally get a lot of press. I’d love to copy/paste the entire post here. 😉 But instead… go over and take a look […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about giving, charity and philanthropy lately. Maybe it was realizing that the time I was spending playing We Rule wasn’t really helping anyone. I know there are plenty of great websites for all sorts of great causes – but was there a way that I could help others when I […]
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 […]
