slowFake

Apologies to Adobe

2008-11-06T08:02:00.001-08:00

I have ranted and raved on this blog about Adobe CS3. Then recently I my computer acted like it wanted to die on me. Turns out my hard drive was fried and had been for a while. After installing a new hard drive my laptop feels like new. All issues with CS3 have since disappeared. I am little ashamed of my emotional outbursts. My deepest apologies to Adobe, CS3 is a fine product!

Trash Recycling

2008-11-06T00:41:00.000-08:00

German's are holier than thou when it comes to separating trash for recycling. Their trash bins exhibit labels such as "Glass", "Paper", "Bio", "Packaging" (metal, plastic packaging) and "Restmüll" (remaining trash that can't be recycled). While this is descriptive for the content, it doesn't conjure up a larger conceptual model. Adaptive Path's Information Architect Leah Buley's trip to the California Academy of Sciences prompted the essay of the company's current newletter issue.
In the article she showed a picture of trash bins at the academy and came to the conclusion that labels matter after all! I couldn't agree more. The image in Leah's essay inspired me to do a little Google Image research on trash recycling.

trash bins at the California Academy: Image by Leah Buley

Spanish trash bins

German trash bins

Maltese trash bins

Palmer/Obama

2008-06-05T01:02:00.000-07:00

Life is truly immitating art. Would Senator Obama been able to win the democratic nomination without TV's "24"? It seems like a ridiculous question and yet, other blogs have been wondering about the same thing ("markmeynell", TV Blog "Remote Access").

In this article Dennis Haysbert says his role paved the way Barack Obama.

Photoshop CS 3 - worst Photoshop version ever!

2008-05-08T02:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, ok... I bitched about it before...

Adobe CS Blues
Abobe CS3, OS X Installation Problems
Adobe Flash CS3 Unstable Crapware

... but I can't get over it because as a designer Photoshop effects my life every single day. I am miserable, angry and frustrated. If you actually use many layers and organize them folders - be warned! Even though my work is screen based with file sizes around 20 MB PS crashes and hangs and f***s up daily. You WILL restart your computer often. You WILL lose work and waste time.

I used to run PS on a Mac Quadra 605 with 20 MG of ram and "Ram Doubler" installed. I expected to sit and watch progress bars. Get used to it again.

I should have never updated to CS 3. This suite is a sham. It's a memory hog (MBP, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of ram).

If you would like to avoid a lot of this....

... and haven't bought CS 3 - save your nerves and don't buy it! It's not worth the money.

That was fast!

2008-04-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

Wasn't it not only a few months back that we first heard of multi touch technology, the iPhone and Jeff Han? I recently gave a lecture on touch technology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. I wanted to start my talk by going back to the roots. So I (image-)googled the word "touch" expecting to find images of mothers with babies or perhaps pornography. Instead my search returned pictures of devices equipped with touch technology - over 58,000,000.00 of them!! Has the word "touch" become synonomous with "touch technology"?

I am surprised how fast it trickled into the public conciousness, especially since touch technology only uses a small fraction of our actual sense of touch. The abilities to sense temperature, shape, degrees of softness, texture, pain or the position of your muscles and joints are not playing any part in touch technology so far. A slick surface provides little haptic feedback which for example makes typing difficult.

At this year's Cebit convention, T-Mobile had an multi-touch installation, that was part Minority Report, part Jeff Han Screen and part vertical MS Surface "wall". In this video people seem so bored with the content itself. In fact they are not dealing with the data at all. How long will it take for the novelty of scaling and turning objects to wear off? What kind of interesting public application could this offer?

Service Efficienista

2008-03-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

I've been buying my coffee at Starbucks for 15 years. I think that outs me as a fan of the company. Yesterday I strolled into Starbucks at Astor Place and was greeted by a member of the staff wearing a "Janet Jackson Mic". He asked for my order. I was bothered by the experience, because instead of looking at the face of the person greeting me, I stared at his microphone and wondered who he was talking to when he dispatched my caffein craving. I couldn't see his collegue at the receiving end. Instead of talking to me, his attention was with somebody "out there". Headphones indicate privacy, because we usually listen to something like music or a phone conversation.

The experience became technical and distancing, rather then personal. Since I associate Starbucks with hours of hanging out over a cup of coffee (and maybe a refill..). I wonder if other customers felt rushed as well. And what happens if you don't know which coffee drink you're in the mood for today?

A few years ago I helped creating the technical service scenario at the Prada Epicenter Store on Prince and Broadway in New York. My Job was building the user interface for the store's "staff device", a hand held computer that could do everything from reading RFID tags to pulling up stock information and customer history. In my opinion it was a gigantic flop, because nobody researched the experience of what it would actually feel like to use the device in a customer/sales rep relationship. I walked into the store many times over the years and talked to the people working there about the staff device. I watched them and not once did I see an employee using one.

We have to be very careful when adding technology to a sales scenario. The experience can be off-putting - at least to the customer.

No Flash Player for iPhone Anytime Soon!

2008-03-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

(Sound of expelled breath...)

At the shareholder meeting two days ago Steve Jobs spelled it out: no Flashplayer for the iPhone! The reasons? Flash Lite, Adobe's Flash Player for the mobile platform is too weak, the desktop version too slow on the iPhone. The iPhone, in other words, needs a new Flash Player!

(not holding my breath here...)

Since Safari on the iPhone is the real thing, a Flash Lite version of the player wouldn't help anybody. Most Flash sites for the internet simply can't be transported to the lite player. More then ever it is best practices to have an html version of your Flash sites to avoid user frustration.

User Driven Design is NOT User Centered Design!

2008-01-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

Today I participated in a study conducted by the University of Basel – http://phpserver.psycho.unibas.ch/websiteexpectation

It asked to wireframe a typical online shop, online newspaper and company web site by dragging and dropping UI elements like "main navigation" , "company logo", "contact link" onto a screen. What exactly does this study hope to accomplish?

If you want to improve usability on websites you need to look at each specific case. There is no generic online-shop which works for *all* situations, products and users. Leave the improvement of usability to designers who will apply user research results and combine them with their own skills and creativity. This kind of study does not lead to more usable web sites. Just to innovation-free same ol'-same ol'.

I believe in a designer's work experience, the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. I believe in creativity, breakthroughs and revolution. I believe in the intricate knowledge of human behavior and desire. Stop praying at the altar of the-user-knows-best!

Two days ago the Mac Book Air came out. If it will turn out to be a visionary product remains to be seen, but the omission of an optical drive, driven by the goal to create a truly wireless machine, is bold. It wouldn't have happened if you had ask typical laptop users if they wanted that.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Steve Jobs May 25, 1998

Applelujah!

2007-09-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart Sells Universal MP3s without DRM Restrictions. No Mac Support!

2007-08-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

Wether Universal is truly interested in selling DRM free music online remains to be seen. Starting yesterday, they made a selection of albums and song available at walmart.com until January 31st. Each song can be purchased for 94 cents. Other vendors, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc., Best Buy Co., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody,..., were chosen for this test-run. Interestingly Apple‘s Musicstore was excluded, despite the fact that it is the largest platform for music downloads. Although MP3s are completely compatible with any music playing device – including the iPod and iPhone platforms, Mac Users are not welcome on Walmart‘s site. Instead they presented with this message:

We‘re sorry, your operating system is incompatible. .....visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP.

Incompatible with DRM free music downloads?? Somebody willing to upgrade their system to download some crappy MP3s?

Then I asked a collegue with Parallels and WIN XP installed to load the site, I was curious to see the interface Walmart came up with:

Why is all type on the page so tiny?

Songs can be previewed, but there is no „player“ functionality. You have to listen to a song to the bitter end, even when you don‘t like it. Sad...

Typing on the iPhone, Practise Makes Perfect?

2007-08-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

The first order of the day after my arrival in New York was to visit a store that sold the iPhone, in my case the Union Square location of AT&T. The store was almost empty and got access to an iPhone immediately. After studying the device exstensively online, I felt pretty comfortable using it right away, until I tried to enter a URL in Safari‘s address bar. Using the virtual keyboard is incredibly tough!! I mistyped constantly and everything. Forget about a two thumb approach. Thumbs are less of a pointing device, they hit the keyboard on an angle and force you to compensate for it, which is a hard thing to do. A few days later I met my friend Dave Carroll, associate professor at Parsons School of Design's graduate degree program Design and Technology. Dave is a notorious early adopter and has some great iPhone tips to share on his blog mercurious.com. He convinced me to trust the iPhone spell correction feature. So I tried to plow through writing text without regard to spelling. After a little while I was able to produced text fairly fluently.

However, the spell correction does not come into place when typing URLs. Get used to bookmarking URLs as fast as possible! I was disappointed that the iPhone doesn‘t have any other dictionary but the english one. Don‘t look for international keyboard layouts. They are not implemented with this first version. This iPhone is strictly for the english speaking market, which is weird because the States are so diverse as far as spoken languages go. Dave showed me javascript based keyboard layouts online, but their small button sizes are not suited for the iPhones finger-pointer approach.

Wholefoods Cuts the Dispatcher Person

2007-08-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

Observe a new implemetation of interaction design: Already famous for their well thought out dispatch system that allows Wholefoods to get 100 customers through the registers in about 5 Minutes, they automated (improved?) the process. The store got rid of the dispatcher person in favor of a computerized service. Customers line up in up to 8 colorcoded ailes. A monitor overhead displays corresponding color bars that sequentially display as well as „call out“ the next available cash register. The system senses faster then a person could when a register has become available again.

Apparently the usefulness of the system is up for debate. The next day the dispatcher guy was back to work in „tandem“ with the system. In my personal opinion the system is clear enough, speeds up the waiting in line and relieves a person from a tedious dispatch job.

Adobe CS 3 Blues

2007-07-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

I am soooo frustrated with Adobe CS3. I've complained about it before. This is another warning! Photoshop sucks up more resources than my entire system. I am working on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory and I am here to tell you: It's not enough! You will experience lags of 3-6 minutes(!) while Photoshop collects data from the hard drive instead of memory. It will feel like PS died on you. (My work is all screenbased, my files are tiny). You will endure frustrating crashes, especially when using "Save for Web and Devices". The whole application often feels like a beached whale. I hoped for speedy and elegant and bought CS3 the day it came out, because I so wanted my tools to be optimized for the Intel chipset. Well, keep hoping!

Flash is not much better. Adobe opted to create an annoying fade-in-all-windows-when-switching-between-apps effect that accomplishes first and foremost a laggy response. Don't ever try to use the debugger before saving your work FIRST, you will experience crashes!

Physical Interfaces: BumbTop, the iPhone and Leopard

2007-06-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

Recently I rewatched Anand Agarawala's demo BumbTop at TED 2007. BumbTop is a three dimension cubicle desktop. Documents on the desktop have physical qualities like weight, size, light reflection etc. They can be stacked, flipped through, bumbed into and organized in ways more similar to a real world desktop.

What struck me in the demo was the audience's reception. Partly due to Anand's humorous presention style, but largely because of the surprise effect the interface holds, the audience was clapping, laughing, even cheering. When the iPhone was introduce in January there were tons of moments like these. When Steve Jobs first scrolled through a song list with the flip of his fingers, the audience erupted. It is the RE-cognition factor. In that instance we identify a resemblance between real life physical behavior and the onscreen simulation of such physicality. It is a magical moment.

At the WWDC 2007 Steve Jobs presented the latest beta release of Leopard, Apple's upcoming OS for Macintosh. For a long time I imagined Apple's designers to arrive at their user interface solution by cheer genius. It never occured to me that the might take their "inspiration" from others, even purchase UI solution like Coverflow (first introduce to the general public with iTunes 7) from Steelskies . With the release of Leopard it will be a standard way to view information in its redesigned Finder.

"Stacks" in Leopard's Desktop

Leopard continues and broadens its use of animation as a general interface element. The Dock tags on the new "stack" feature, which may have been borrowed from BumbTops stack function, but lacks its physicality. Other Leopard features show me the direction Apple's interfaces are headed. Coverflow, Time Machine, Stacks and Spaces are all feature that rely heavily on animation. At the heart of them is Core Animation, a set of animation routines offered to developers to easily produce animated interfaces.

Leopard looks fun to use, but generally feels light, digital and spacey (quite literally in Time Machine). Animations in Leopard accelerate and decrease in speed which is a quality taken from a real world physicality. There is a new quality of light and shadow peeking through the new 3d-ish Dock design, but compared to BumbTop there is no sense of weight. The reason for that might be that we are still using a mouse pointing device.
In BumbTop is strikes me as odd to manipulate objects imbued with weight using a mouse pointer which cannot return physical feedback that resembles pushing weighted objects around. In makes sense that Leopard lacks the physical quality of weight. Leopard will also run on the iPhone, where the manipulation of information is accomplish with your fingers. While weighted pressure on its multi-touch surface will have no bearing, speed of movement does and thus represents one more step in the direction of physical interfaces.

Wireless Power Transfer at MIT

2007-06-09T06:31:00.001-07:00

Yesterday technologyreview.com published an article about wireless power transfer. MIT researchers were able to transfer electricity wirelessly to make a lightbulb light up.

I would love to lead a cable free existence! No more bulky charger cables to bring along on vacation and to the office? I'm sold!

In the article Professor Peter Fisher, one of the researchers, said: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of wireless power, it would charge automatically without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside such a room."

No batteries would make my labtop a lot lighter.... Then I remembered that I am already scared of the electro-magnetic fields of my cell phone. What about the safety of living organism in such equipped rooms? The thought of overhead coils charging my laptops, cell phones and light bulbs was starting to make me very uncomfortable.

Later I read a report on dailymail.co.uk. Dr Soljacic, one of the researchers said that:

"Most objects in the room - such as people, desks and carpets - would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy[....] The researchers believe there is little to worry about on safety grounds, saying that magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms and are unlikely to have any serious side effects."

Noticing the large amount of comments to the technologyreview.com article, I got curious. The comments were heated. People seemed very knowledgable about induction coils and called the project "dungheap" and "hype".

Kitk said:

" Systems like this can put out nasty little surges of vastly higher peak power than whatever is rated--mine burned a hole through insulated aluminum sheet metal. Sure, the new ones might control that, but ANYTHING that receives this power by coupling even a little, even at a microscopic level, can be cooked! I never tried my test a second time, because I knew if the transfer went wrong, I might light up and cook. Great lab trick, but like home nuclear reactors, not too wise."

Salammoniac was really familiar with the subject matter and furious about the hype:

"[...]45% efficiency is nothing to crow about. It's lousy, requiring 133 watts to drive a 60 watt bulb. On top of that, I bet that number is coil in to coil out efficiency, not wall socket to light bulb. A simple power cord will be at least 99% efficient, socket to bulb, more if you use a fatter cord. That's why we use wires, dummy.

Having this thing running all the time is the electromagnetic equivalent of turning on the fire sprinklers, so that whenever you are thirsty, all you have to do is hold out your cup."

That doesn't sound very convincing. We'll see in a few years time. In the meantime get a new Apple labtop. At least their magnetically attached power cords won't make you trip and kill yourself ... or your computer.

Much To Do About Microsoft Surface

2007-05-31T13:30:00.001-07:00

Microsoft's introduction of surface computing has caused a ruckus on the IxDa, which is the discussion board of the Interaction Design Association. There was a huge backlash on the product and I commented negatively as well. I was disappointed that already at the introduction of the product Microsoft had partnered with chain hotels and casinos to introduce the product to the public in the near future. It just shifted the focus from innovation toward selling the product. Many of the shown applications are lame like showing augmented information about the wine you are drinking right on the surface of the table...

On the other hand I really like the interaction with real objects. Using the table to share data between different devices. There is a lot of promise in that. I wonder if they could have solved the recognition problem with RFID tags instead of cameras. Cameras need distance, which makes the table bulky.

Ideas and innovation happens in synchronicity. All of a sudden a few people have the same ideas around the same time. Much of it has to do with technology moving to the next level opening up the doors for certain new ideas.
This has happened for multi-touch. The iPhone made it popular and the time for multi touch computing is now. It's everywhere and we are going to see a lot more of it. Exciting times.

This is another example of multi-touch used for a collaboration instrument as shown at the Transmediale 2007 in Berlin

This is one of MS's cheesy ads for Surface:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/surfacecomputing/default.mspx

Quest for the Eternal "Second, Third, Fourth..." Life

2007-05-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

Right now my I am hooked on Battlestar Galactica. Last night I watched an episode from the 2nd season entitled "Downloaded". The show produces "Cylon"-androids-want-to-destroy-humankind stories. When a Cylon dies, he/she/its consciousness is being downloaded into a fresh clone-body.

Why do characters like "Data" on Star Trek's Next Generation or "Sharon Valerii" on Battlestar fascinate us so much? Their struggle to be accepted as human asks us to define what makes us human. Data's struggles to teach his inner circuitry to "feel". Does our capacity to feel distinguish us from machines like the Cylons? What if these machines have "feelings" themselves? What if they look exactly like you and I?

"Shanon Valerii" and "Data" - SNG

After all, they are either created deliberately by us (like Data) or the result of machines that have declared their independence from humankind. The examples included storylines from "Terminator", "The Matrix", "2001: A Space Odyssey" and lately "Battlestar Galactica". The more human they appear to be, the more the differences blur and the more we are forced to compare:

We are fragile. Once we are killed or injured there is no clone-body to replace limbs or entire bodies. We are supposed to be unique. It consoles us that there never was and never will be another person like us. At the same time it makes us sad, that along with our death all memories and experiences will vanish as well. What makes our life more important than that of a fruit fly? What is a human life span in comparison to the age of the universe? Being reborn, "downloaded" into a fresh body, having eternal youth ... just visions for coping with our insignificance and imminent death?

Which brings me to the subject of Second Life. People virtualize themselves in droves. Is the creation of virtual representation of yourself a God-like act? Our (many) disembodied selves are free from pain, age and disease. The desire the extend life as we know it is incredible. Clones and Androids and replacement organs grown form stem cells are just a matter of time. In the meantime we have Second Life. Whatever....

Tactile Interaction with Mobile Devices

2007-05-16T04:25:00.000-07:00

More and more our digital devices and computers are being equipped with sensors. Physical computing is here at last! Apple's labtops have a motion sensor, that picks up fast movement. If a labtop is being dropped, it will shut down the spinning hard drive instantly to prevent damage to it. The upcoming iPhone is going to be equipped with proximity sensors as well as a accelerometer that detect when the device is being rotated from portrait to landscape.

Beyond the commercial applications there is exiting research being done at the university level. Steven Brewster, Faraz Chohan and Lorna Brown from the University of Glasgow introduced and tested tactile vibrational feedback on touchscreen devices. Typically people would like to use their mobile devices to get work done on subways and busses. Entering data is prone to errors because of shaking vehicles and environmental noise. Auditory feedbacks as tested by Brewster improve usability, but add no benefit in noisy conditions. In this system successful and erroneous typing (double taps or slips) each produce a specific feedback that suggests a "smooth" (success) vs. a "rough"(error) sensation. The study showed significant usability improvement. It increased the amount of data entered by the user and more successful error correction.
More information can be found here.

Technologyreview.com reports today (05-16-07) that the "British Telecom tries to wed Nintendo Wii-style technology to a tablet PC". Tilting and rotating the tablet PC would let the user navigate the computer "Etch-A-Scetch" style. While studying for my Masters (1999) Han Gene Paik and I developed an email application prototype that used tilt sensors to navigate in a similar fashion. Our concept departed from the WIMP interface and suggested the on screen environment to be filled with water. Sorting, filtering and selecting the email objects felt like digging for gold nuggets.

"Liquid Mail" by Han Gene Paik and Dirk J. Platzek

Today these accelerometer sensors are a lot more sophisticated and very tiny. They are known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and are used for example for the iPod Sport Kit , a joined effort by Apple and Nike. Accelerometers are placed into special running shoes. A wireless connection transmits the information to the iPod.

Another exciting idea in the area of physical computing was just introduced at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 2007, in San Jose, California: "Shoogle", - excitatory multimodal interaction on mobile devices has been developed by John Williamson, Rod Murray-Smith and Stephen Hughes. It also uses accelerometers to pick up user gestures in exchange for vibrotactile and audio feedback. The system produces feedback that - for example - feels like balls of different weights bouncing inside a box. From the sound and vibrotactile sensation a user is then able to distinguish length or urgency of a message. It is not necessary for the user to look at the device, which is great in situations where that is not appropriate. The idea takes advantage "of user's familiarity with the dynamics of processes in the physical world to present information in a natural and non-irritating manner". The highly recommended article can be found here.

Adobe Flash CS3 Unstable Crapware

2007-05-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

I need to start a bitch session on Adobe Flash CS3: It is highly unstable. While I am happy to finally run a native application on my MBP, I am pissed that Flash is quitting at least 3 times a day in regular workflow! Has anybody else experienced this?

Apple's Patent for Back Side Multi Touch Interface

2007-05-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought the iPhone's multi-touch-the-information was a breakthrough for a consumer product the next exciting interface appears at the horizon. Yesterday macdailynews.com reported that patents have been filed by Apple concerning their 6th G iPod. It looks like you can navigate the front face of the iPod with a touch panel located on the back side. Input and output will be on different sides of the iPod.

UPDATE 05-15-07: This post on Core77.com explains why a touch panel on the back is so smart: This way the user is no longer obscuring the very interface he/she is supposed to interact with...

The greatest innovation is often the timely implementation of a particular technology that often has been around for a while. This only happens after other technical hurdles, such as CPU speed, bandwidth or component size have been solved. The iPhone made me research multi-touch technology and I have written about it in previous posts. During my studies I discovered a touch table interface on youtube.com which utilizes the underside of the table for additional navigation as well.

Matthias Müller Prove recently reminded me of Alan Kay's famous quote: "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet". Physical computing finally makes it to the market place. Only the very best will catch our attention. Apple stock briefly climbed to an all time high yesterday again ....

Neurofeedback Gaming Interfaces

2007-05-10T03:50:00.000-07:00

Lately I've noticed a renewed interest in neurofeedback interfaces. Yahoo News reported on "mind reading toys" and mentioned Silicon Valley gaming companies such as NeuroSky Inc and Emotiv Systems Inc.

Electroencephalography, or EEG, is the basis of these technologies. It measures the brain's electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. Mostly these techiques are used in clinical contexts to help patients with migranes or kids who suffer from ADD. Beyond that there have communities obsessed with neurofeedback technologies since the 60s, claiming to achieve optimized mental performance.

Steven Johnson's book Mind Wide Open from 2005 describes his own encounter with neurofeedback devices. He says: "After the initial amazement had worn off while I was playing the space game at Seiden's office, I couldn't help noticing that I couldn't control the ship with nearly as much accuracy as I could have with a joystick or a keyboard. There's a fuzziness to interaction that would be unpleasant were I actually interested in having an efficient conversation with the computer."

and

"The almost unthinkable complexity of the brain's information network is necessarily compressed down to a crude language when a machine listens to the collective rhythms of brain waves through the skull."

NeuroSky is about to unveil a headset with brainwave "dry" sensors that won't require a conducting gel to pick up brain activity.

While looking futuristic and usable I wonder how much brain activity they will be able to pick up, when scientific instruments with a lot more sensors produce "crude" results.

Emotiv Systems Inc. "Project Epoc" headset resembles more the know EEG instruments and interface wirelessly with all gaming consoles.

The company's wiki states: "Emotiv uses proprietary, patented algorithms to formulate detections of activities from the reading of EEG signals. These detections can determine a user’s expressions, feelings and thoughts." Apparently the technology picks ups the player's muscle twitches and thus facial expressions. The player's character would smile in synch with the player or "react" to the player with a range of feelings like surprise or anger. In other words interaction with an artificial intelligence.

Last but not least I found a "brainwave dance performance" on youtube. There is an introduction on how the sensors attached to the dancer work followed by pretty bad dancing:)

The Emotional iPhone Experience

2007-05-01T03:25:00.000-07:00

Mac owners always had a more emotional relationship to their machines. That it is a great accomplishment on the part of Apple's designers. I like looking at my MacBook Pro every day! Touching it, using it is a delight. To prove my gushiness isn't rare to find amoung Mac users I'd like you to take a look at this video by Jason Ponton, Editor of The MIT Technology Review. He explains what makes a beautiful machine and his enthusiasm is a great example for the kind of emotional bond I am talking about.

Cell phones are intimate machines. We carry them close to our bodies and use them primarily to communicate, they are connectors to the world around us. I have never built that emotional relationship with any of my cell phones ( I am on my 5th phone now) . The novelty of a new phone wears off after a couple of weeks. It becomes a mere tool I expect to work. Since its features a miserably integrated I don't bother to use them. I am still doing the same few things with my phone I have always done: calling, texting and entering data into the calendar and the address book. My personal feature wish list has not changed for years. I don't need more features just a few done the right way. Nothing but sad compromises so far....

I think the iPhone will create that emotional relationship.

Why?

The integration with my Mac will be perfect. The iPhone will behave like my computer. It will be its ultra portable extension.

It will feel great in my hand, the multi-touch interface will make it feel like a real extension of my body. I will be able to directly touch and manipulate the information!

The overall success of the iPhone may depend on how well it will integrate with the Windows machines. The exclusive provider deal with AT+T is also annoying. No matter how great the iPhone is, I will not change my current phone plan for it.

I guess...

Shiira Web Browser 2.0 Released

2007-04-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was looking forward to testing the Shiira browser, because the demo video featured these really nice functions:

1. Select and open multiple links in new tabs
2. Tabs Exposé feature.

Use the cursor to highlight any part of the web page, - right click and choose the "Open all Links in new Tabs" command. The drowdown menu tells you how many links you have selected, so you can gage how many tabs will open up at once.

To me that seems more useful then Safari's "Open in Tabs" bookmarks feature. Together with the new Tabs Exposé you get a key feature: quickly scan the open tabs in Exposé mode and find your information faster.

Shiira desperately needs a "close all tabs" (but the first one) command. I tried to open 40 tabs "by mistake". My hard core test could not be corrected. Closing the entire window made the browser crash - repeatedly. It does not appear to be completely stable yet.

Shiira's shelf is well organized. All bookmarks from all browsers on my machine were thoughtfully added. Unlike Firefox you don't have to choose between a bookmark or a history side panel.

download the application here.

Adobe CS 3, OS X Installation Problems

2007-04-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

I bought CS 3 yesterday, excited to finally use the power of my new Mac-Intel CPUs. Bad hickup: Adobe forgot to mention to their Macintosh clientele that they needed to use the UNINSTALLER to remove the Photoshop Beta Version. If you don't remove it before the installation or trash it by hand, you'll get a conflict.
Customer service told me that their little oversight kept them extreeeemly busy with the Mac customers...Still, customer service guy "Aron"was patient and knowledgeable and took me through the manual uninstall process. After that everything was peachy:)

Twitter, Dodgeball, Mashups, Web 2.0 and the Ecstacy of Communication

2007-04-16T04:29:00.000-07:00

Until I read the post "Map-O-Mania" by Erhard Wimmmer I had no idea what on earth "twitter" meant as far as Web 2.0 goes. I had missed this!

The oxford dictionary defines it as follows:

• verb

1 (of a bird) make a series of light tremulous sounds.

2 talk rapidly in a nervous or trivial way.

Twitter.com concerns itself with one question: What are you doing right now? You can use the phone, IM or the web to submit SMS-length messages that will be broadcasted to your "friends" (all friend receive the twitter SMS). In additional - if I understand correctly - these messages go public on the twitter site. It's like a constant stream of disembodied ramblings that people can chose to contact. What gives?

It gets interesting when Twitter is being used in mashups sites like twittervision.com. The human need to communicate is relentless and we are right smack in the middle of a giant exstacy of communication.

In 2001 Han Gene Paik and I embarked on a project called "Guerillofitti". The concept was different, but the method was the same. This is from our original project proposal:

["...Using cell phones and other handheld devices that are meant to enhance "private" communications, participants instead publicize their opinions (read: twitter) on a censor free message board installed in a "public" space. This conversion of a "private-to-private" communication to a "private-to-public"..."]

We intended to have a projection or video wall installed in public that would display the messages. It seems now that Web 2.0 and our devices have become the public board. We are public with absolutely everything. I can only presume that anonymity and privacy don't concern people. On twittervision.com you even get to see where people are located, since it is mashed with google maps. Other services like Google's Dodgeball also function to locate your friends, - if they happen to be in your vicinity. The purpose is once again social interaction. Personally I find it alarming to be so locatable, but it might be naive to think that I couldn't be found, only because I don't "twitter" or "dodgeball".