Today, the source code to MacPaint was officially donated to the Computer History Museum and made available to the public. MacPaint was declared as “the best program ever written” at an event celebrating the Macintosh’s 20th anniversary, by Stanford University computer science professor Don Knuth. Written by Bill Atkinson, MacPaint was beautifully simple, like much early Mac software — but also full of innovations. Features like the lasso (with the marching ants), and its ability…
 
Read the rest…

Wow that was fast. Yesterday marked the end of a remarkable Old Spice viral Internet campaign. Over the course of just two days, July 13 and 14, Wieden+Kennedy created about 185 YouTube videos as responses to queries and posts on Twitter for the Old Spice man. It was a fascinating take on interactivity. The team at W+K filtered through the Twitter posts and then, for each one that they selected, they’d write, film and post…
 
Read the rest…

Way back in 2006, at the Wired NextFest, Saturn sponsored a “green” exhibit, highlighting their hybrid technology. It was a 4,000 square-foot installation featuring a life-sized, interactive holographic people, CAD projections onto vehicles, and a interactive/reactive wall with user-generated content. I first learned of the project when I was judging the Communication Arts 2007 Interactive Annual and said it was beautiful and poetic. It may not have had deep interaction, but that was ok for…
 
Read the rest…

All of John Maeda‘s work is amazing and inspiring, but I find his series of Reactive Books to be among the most engaging and thought-provoking. Created between 1994 and 1999, each book explored the use of a different input: microphone, mouse, time, keyboard, and video. At a time when interactive media was trying to be more and more, the simplicity and focus of these pieces set them apart. Their visual simplicity allowed you to really…
 
Read the rest…

This is interesting… Intel Labs’ Oasis Project uses your kitchen countertop to recognize the foods that you place on it, and projects a variety of interactive content. It’s still early research, and so the sorts of interactions possible, as well as the content that’s projected, are pretty basic. But the video suggests a variety of ways people could be assisted in a kitchen of the future. Actually, when I first watched the demo, the first thing that popped…
 
Read the rest…

Way back in 2008, when Modernista! launched a new version of their website, I was blown away. It was such a simple idea, but it was daring and revolutionary. And it generated a ton of buzz. The site was super-simple, just a navigation layer that connected live Modernista-related pages from sites including Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and Google News. It’s embrace of Web 2.0 concepts startled some, but it positioned the agency as innovative and creatively…
 
Read the rest…

TED.com just posted a talk from this year’s TED2010 by John Underkoffler on his research into gesture interfaces. John is best known for his work on the interfaces in the film Minority Report but has since founded Oblong Industries. The talk demonstrates Oblong’s point-and-touch interface called g-speak. I have to admit, having never actually used the system myself, that it looks a bit baffling. How does a user know what to do? Don’t your arms get…
 
Read the rest…

Back in the late 90′s and early 00′s, Quokka Sports was doing some pretty groundbreaking design. Their sites were unlike anything I’d seen online before. An amazing mix of raw data, bold images, and real-time data that really connected you to the events. Quokka was founded to cover the 1997-1998 Whitbread Round the World yacht race. After the race, they aimed to become the premiere digital sports media company. And they produced some great sites…
 
Read the rest…

Over the past couple days, everywhere I turn it seems I’m finding stuff that has, for me, a nostalgic feel. So here’s my digital ramble… It first started with a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) at Rhizome on the demoscene. (Demos are computer-based audio-visual presentations that run in real-time with the goal being to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.) I don’t follow the demoscene, but come across it from…
 
Read the rest…

Information Aesthetics has a nice interview with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. After working for years at the IBM Visual Communication Lab, they’ve gone out on their own and founded a new data visualization firm, Flowing Media.  Their work is a inspiring mix of smart thinking and clever communication about the data being presented, allowing people to gain new insights into the content. And although their work tends to be primarially focused on data visualization, rather…
 
Read the rest…