The Palm Pre uses this beautiful first-boot welcome video to introduce the user to the new gestures and UI.
Blogroll
Elsewhere
Venusian Time or Flow
When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the school library. I’m was not an avid reader, I was a geek. I loved browsing through tons of book. I would read a little and then skip to the next one. One of the subjects I was always fascinated with was Greek Mythology and culture.
I once read how the greeks had different concepts of time:
Chronological Time
Named after the god Khronos. Is the masculine time, the time that we meassure, that rules our lives.
Venusian Time
Named after Venus. Is the feminine time, you follow venusian time when you are in that state of love for your subject and time streches or compresses. You can see this in the stories of lovers that spend all night together, or artists that loose track of time while working on a project that they are very passionate about.
This is simmilar to the concept of Flow, a mental state that UX designers try achieve in their work. We want the user to fall in love with it’s subject. Software should help the user stay in venusian time, not interrupt it.
Æon Time
Which is eternal time. When something or someone escapes a lifetime. “That’s a classic!” is what we usually say.
It is such a beautiful concept. I remember this vividly because it has followed me through life. The problem is, I don’t remember the book where I got it from, and I can’t find any documenation on the web. Does anyone know about this? Please let me know, I would like to start using it as a citation.
Microsoft just announced Project Natal, a periferal for the Xbox 360 that includes gesture interface along with a voice command. I have been waiting a while for those to be combined in a meaningful way. Gesture interfaces have become more prevalent but the problem is that the more abstract the command the harder it is to figure out which gesture to use, so you end up having to remember which gesture to use. This degrades the experience to something closer to the command line interface. Now, with the aide of voice command, you might be able to approach a command from different angles. If you don’t recall that waving is what turns off the machine. Then you can just try saying “turn-off” or “Bye-Bye”.
Flash Catalyst, the software I have been working on at Adobe has released it’s first Beta. Please try it out and be very vocal about what you like and don’t like.
Email’Nwalk is the first iPhone app I’ve seen that uses the camera in this way. I am pretty sure we’ll see more of it, therea are lot’s of really cool possibilities.
On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter
Link: On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter
Bill Buxton offers an interesting opinion on the designer/engineer relationship. I really like his layered approach.
Last week I went to the Grand Canyon. While I was at the Skywalk, I realized how fast touchscreens are becoming pervasive. Apparently, if you place any screen at chest level, with no mouse of keybord, people will start touching it.
The great OK/Cancel button dilemma
Link: The great OK/Cancel button dilemma
These ambiguities always drive me nuts, it is so hard to put the issue to rest and be done with it. Jure does a good job at laying it to rest. It would be great to have an OS sniffer that switches the buttons to follow the respective HIG.
I’m excited to see that people are finding useful implementations of augmented reality.