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 see someone do the same for websites, or interfaces. It’s a very personal way of reviewing work, and his tone…
 
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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 Gladwell examines this evolutionary sequence as part of his fantastic article in the New Yorker entitled “Creation Myth.” Gladwell describes…
 
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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. Sure, she may paw at my laptop, but that’s just to get my attention. The TV can blast away and…
 
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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. Disney is using their Second Screen technology to accompany select DVD releases. Running on an iPad, the apps sync with…
 
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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 Gibson, which I thought was quite nice — and cautionary: “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial…
 
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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. One of the things that makes using the iPad so unique, is how it draws you in and focuses your…
 
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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. What’s initially surprising is that Digg has a solid history of beautifully innovative UIs. labs.digg.com has showcased a wide variety…
 
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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 “got” the story. Listening to this interview with Matt Richtel, the journalist who has been reporting this topic for the…
 
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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 reading experience. You can embed notes within the pages, share them with others, even follow them as streams. It makes…
 
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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 Blog did a post on John Cage’s watercolors and drawings.) The range of expressions that emerged from that era were…
 
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