theStatus.com is one of those great ideas that restore my faith in the web. It is a site where patients facing or recovering from a difficult medical intervention can create a private page that keeps others updated about their status. It is simple – it has none of the fancy features of a social network site – but it has the important things like a guestbook for friends to leave messages and areas for the administrator to leave updates.
Category: Interface Design and Usability
bastwood.com: Aphex Face and transcoding
bastwood.com has a good page on images found in sound starting with the demon face in Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker”. It turns out the demon is really an inverted version of the Twin himself. The site goes on to discuss how to find such images and how to create sound from images using common software.
There are some uses for image/video sonnification tools other than putting surprises in tunes. See the The vOICE synthetic vision software site which sells systems for the visually impaired.
Thanks to Alex for the link.
Top Ten CSS Gallery/Showcase Websites
Form the Programming Designs Forums, Top Ten CSS Gallery/Showcase Websites is a good list of web sites about Cascading Style Sheets. The CCS Zen Garden, where you can see the same HTML rendered differently using CSS is there, for example. This is thanks to Greg.
evolt.org – Browser Archive
evolt.org – Browser Archive is a collection of archaic browsers (if archaic is the word for tools hardly more than a decade old.) Adrian Roselli has put up the archive of executables. He explains it in a post Browser archive now live. Thanks to James for this.
Many Eyes
Many Eyes is an IBM site for shared visualization and discovery. If you get an account you can upload data sets and then try different visualization tools on them. Others can create visualizations from your dataset and/or can leave comments on a visualization. See for example this visualization of bible names.
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project. (From About Many Eyes)
What is interesting is the “democratic” nature of the site – a sort of Flickr for visualization.
Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.
Office Inteface
The DigiBarn Computer Museum has a collection of amusing Screenshots Funstuff including this shot of Word with so many toolbars turned on that they frame the content. Toolbars gone wild.
iPhone: Is it magic?
Mike Elgan has an article on iPhone: 20 things we don’t know (Jan. 12, 2007) in Digit a magazine about “the future of digital design”. In particular I agree with his questions about the touch screen interface and virtual keyboard – will it be responsive enough for Blackberry users who do push e-mail?
One way of asking about the iPhone is to think about the Newton PDA which was also supposed to be a magical reinvention of personal computing. Like the iPhone, and unlike the iPod, it tried to do lots of things and as a result didn’t do anything well. The Palm Pilot got the PDA market right by doing fewer things very well and in a small enough package to fit in your pocket. As pretty and desirable as the iPhone is, I worry that it will be a delicate and fat phone; a slow and poor Internet device; and an expensive iPod with little memory.
That said, it will shakeup the cell phone business. If it doesn’t take off, someone else will get the need for new designs and digital integration right.
Update: Shawn pointed me to an article Apple Ushers in Era of the Fluid UI by Om Malik. Malik correctly, I think, identifies the fluid interface as the important innovation.
GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery
GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery is a great resource on the history of GUIs. It has great charts comparing things like component icons for text editors across time and across different GUIs. It documents the evolution of GUIs from the Mac OS to historic ones like the Amiga OS. It has ads, sounds for Windows (like the startup sound) and links to articles. It only has a couple of applications documented (iTunes and Photoshop), but it is still a must see.
Don’t Click It: Interaction Research
www.dontclick.it is a site both about research into interaction (and clicking) and an example of how one doesn’t need to click to interact. You navigate the Flash site using gestures, it discusses the question of clicking and alternatives, and it tracks mouse movement.
There is a nice moment when it asks you a quick survey which, of course, I clicked on, at which point it reminds you not to click.
This is thanks to Nick.
Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history
Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history is a site that presents a timeline of browsing history emulations of different browser interfaces. It tries to give you a sense of evolution of the interface. Of course there is the Internet Archive if you want to see old site designs.