I just read and enjoyed this:
The format, made popular by Snapchat and Instagram, is the native genre of glass rectangles. This caught me off guard. I have been ignoring Stories for years, deeming it a trifle for young people.
Read “Why ‘Stories’ Took Over Your Smartphone”
I just read and enjoyed this:
There’s no doubt in my mind that augmented reality is going to be amazing and that people will build incredible new experiences with Apple’s ARKit, version 2 of which was announced earlier this week at the company’s annual World Wide Developers Conference. But in order for that reality to come into focus, developers—and designers—are going to need to bring greater thoughtfulness and creativity to the new medium, or at least more than was on display during the LEGO demonstration portion of the keynote.
Two cool research projects I wanted to mention on here before I forget and that I’ll just lump in here together:
The LumiWatch is a new projector smartwatch prototype from Carnegie Mellon University. Unsurprisingly Chris Harisson is involved, who’s been working on similar concepts (cf. Skin Buttons, SkinTrack, OmniTouch) for quite some time now. In some sense the LumiWatch seems to be bringing a lot of these earlier concepts together.
Then there’s Microsoft’s Project Zanzibar smart mat, a new hardware device enabling tangible interaction through a combination of capacitive sensing capabilities for touch interaction and NFC for object detection and recognition. I’m reminded of Microsoft’s tremendous output in the fields of earlier multitouch and tangible interaction research within its Surface research group, before they appropriated the Surface name for their lineup of consumer products.
I just read and enjoyed this:
I’ve been using Kindles on and off ever since they launched. Our relationship has been contentious but I’ve always been seduced or re-seduced by their potential. At their best, they are beautiful devices. At their worst, infuriating. They are always so close to being better than they are.
I’m a big fan of my Kindle Paperwhite, but I would like it a lot better if it had hardware buttons for page turning. There are a number of interesting observations regarding the UI design implications of the Kindle as a single purpose device for reading (in comparison to multi-purpose smartphones or tablets) in here as well:
When is a generic hardware bucket great? When the objects placed into it are unpredictable. And more so when the purpose of the objects is unpredictable. Hardware buttons inextricably tie you to a specific interaction model. So for the iPhone to be a flexible container into which anything can be poured it makes most sense to have (almost) no hardware controls.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Nearly 60 years ago, in the modest college towns of Urbana and Champaign, Illinois, an educational computer system, built with federal funding acquired amid the space race, took its first formative steps toward existence.
The PLATO System probably isn’t quite as well known as Sketchpad, NLS or the Xerox Alto, but I consider it one of the great inventions in the history of HCI.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Machine learning (ML) is the science of helping computers discover patterns and relationships in data instead of being manually programmed. It’s a powerful tool for creating personalized and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions. That can be a little bit hard to understand if we only judge tech as a set of consumer products that we purchase.
I just read and enjoyed this:
The standard way to talk about autonomous cars, shown in this diagram, is to talk about levels. […] This seems pretty straightforward, until you start thinking about how you might actually deploy this – and about the fact that some places are easier to drive in than others.
[If each iOS device] would be unlocked using a 4-digit PIN, the time to bring them into use would be about 2 seconds. Expanding to a 6-digit PIN would probably increase that to perhaps 2.5 seconds (accounting also for failures due to input errors.)
[…]
It turns out that, based on the installed base numbers, moving to the more secure 6-digit code would add 2.8 billion hours to the total time to unlock the world’s iPhones and iPads. That’s 321,000 years of waiting added for every year of use.
Fortunately we got Touch ID to replace PIN entry and the time to unlock the iPhone/iPad has decreased to perhaps 1 second, saving 5.6 billion hours of unlock time vs. 4-digit PIN.
Reminds me of an interview with Larry Tesler in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction, where he said the following:
If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer’s job easier.
I guess it’s no coincidence that Larry Tesler was an early Apple employee, back when Steve Jobs argued that decreasing Macintosh boot times would save lives.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
