Tag Archives: tech

Levitated interactions

The way we interact with the world is in constant change – for us, users, the best to do here is to adapt as fast as we can. No matter what the current technical development brings to our homes, we will push those buttons, twist the wheels and touch some screens.

Of course, sci-fi is always a step ahead: we have seen touch screens and something very similar to the iPad in futuristic movies from 30 years ago. But when it gets real and possible, it is a different thing. Or did you blink since you’ve seen the video above?

MIT created a very interesting user interface from levitating orbs. Placing balls in an empty place does indeed look amazing, and the rendered 3D video is crazy as hell – but the real power of this thing is in what user interaction designers think we could use it for.

I just can’t wait to see the first buttonless home stereos and washing machines – operated by levitating some orbs.

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Magazine view

For keeping track with hundreds of blogs, RSS readers are the best tools; my personal favorite is Google Reader which is free, easy to use and available for all devices. For most of the blogs it’s perfect, but with Flipboard you’ve got something different: a magazine experience.


image from flipboard.com

Google Reader is brilliant to collect blogs and consume information: the followed web pages can be grouped by interests – you know which of those lists to read carefully, and which ones don’t need a very close attention. I usually read all the posts of friends’ blogs, but with the 200-300 incoming posts a day with the label ‘inspirating-graphics’, I could sit at the computer and push the next button for the whole day.

These labels therefore need some special treatment, and that’s where Flipboard has no competition. It’s a great way to read information you don’t really mind missing out: you can scan through all your feeds just as if it was a magazine. Big pictures, headlines with nice typography and page layouts – it really is amazing how all the different kind of blogs and web portals turn into something beautiful and consistent. And it does more than just RSS: Twitter, Facebook posts and all sorts of social networks can be plugged into Flipboard – and become magazines on your device.

For Android users, Flipboard was always something to miss, but now it seems like the app is coming sooner than we think. For those of us who couldn’t wait, there already is a leaked APK on the internet. (And it works like a charm.)

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Hacker shine

Updated

Programming used to be a hacker thing: men in black sitting on the floor, bending over a laptop that has some key parts missing (or even wires coming out), and the only source in the dark room at 3 am in the morning is the dim light from the monitor. Nowadays though, programmers get some shine.

Codea is a touch-based programming app for the iPad, that lets developers create games and simulations. Of course, it’s more a toy than a heavy weight development environment (and since the current kit doesn’t support any kind of publishing, the final games will never leave the iPad itself – I was awfully wrong! See below). Not like it’s a big deal, no one will cry over missing out those “amazing things” created with Codea.

So the time is not now, yes, but the damage has been made: as more and more development tools will come out, eventually, programmers will be changing their black bricks into shiny toys – just like journalist did some time ago.

Whoha-hoo.

Update: as @TwoLivesLeft said on Twitter, there is a solution to turn apps made with Codea into native iOS apps, and the code for this is already on Github. One example app in the App Store is Cargo Bot, available for free for iPad.

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Berry dreams

RIM debuted the BlackBerry 10 platform today, which has been a long awaited move, and which might be a game changing event. After the first look at the specs, game changing it might be – but only for the company.

It’s hard to write down a manufacturer that has the amount of cash Research In Motion does, but sooner or later they should actually produce something exciting. For that, they might want to find a focus first – which they apparently didn’t manage in the last year or so.

If you remember BlackBerry’s leaked future vision from 2011, their idea was to amuse the corporate world; they tried to reach that with devices and software that already has been invented, but nevertheless, the goal was clear. (The Youtube video disappeared in the meantime, but here’s an article on Gizmodo to get the picture)

It wasn’t the best vision to have at all, but the fact that the new BlackBerry announcement ignored it completely shows some more fundamental problems with the company: if you don’t have a focus, you can only produce mediocre products. So they did: the interface is a bad rip-off of Microsoft’s (otherwise brilliant) Metro UI, and instead of matching the enterprise’s needs, they introduced secondary features for everyday customers.

The announcement today had some promising news though: the new development kit will support HTML5 – something, that BlackBerry needed for a long time: I remember spending two days to install the old, badly supported and very buggy SDK under OSX with virtual machines and hacked ports for the simulator. With HTML5 and a strong developer community, BlackBerry could have the chance to provide something for phone owners they want. Well, for the Playbook it wasn’t enough, but again: RIM has still loads of customers and resources, and a good example how to break out the declining curve — at the end of the day, Nokia already was pretty much in the same situation.

By the time RIM finally finds out what to do, the current BlackBerry users have at least one hope: IT department buyers may consider getting different handsets for them.

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