The Book Vase

I can’t imagine this is durable or easy to clean, but it looks neat.

- - -

Swipe Keyboard

It’s little wonder that making an efficient and accurate keyboard on a small mobile device is very, very difficult. Here is a video of one which looks promising. These devices need everything they can get.

- - -

The CO2 output of Concrete

Concrete is responsible for 7-10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, making it the biggest climate change culprit outside of transportation and electricity-generation.

An oft-neglected environmental problem is the CO2 created by cement production. This article outlines the problems and some possible solutions.

When designing almost anything, there is a delicate balance between adding features and reducing complexity. The more features, the more complicated and harder to use the end product will generally be. The theoretical ideal design would be easy to use for the novice, but powerful enough for the most advanced user. This nearly impossible to achieve, and every program generally walks a balance between the two extremes of simple on one end, and powerful on the other.

I use the term freebie to denote those rare features that add functionality, but do not make the interface more cluttered or harder to use. They’re generally invisible until invoked. A keyboard shortcut is perhaps the most prominent example. They add very little to the user interface but provide a lot of power for the more advanced user.

Another example would be the two-finger scrolling on my MacBook Pro. Novice users can simply use the scroll-buttons in the GUI, while advanced users can scroll by simply dragging two fingers on the scroll-bar rather than one. Advanced gestures, which Apple has released on the MacBook Air, are even more of a freebie.

This does not mean that interface designers should simply hide their features. Even hidden, the best freebie still adds clutter to the documentation at the least, and can make the program unnecessarily complex even for the advanced users. The goal is to find those little extras that compliment what’s already there, or that provide a different way of doing the same task for users with different tastes.

Abandoned Pools

Walking Turcot Yards has a great link to a photo series of unused pools.

In the Thirties London’s outdoor lidos were at the peak of their popularity.

Gradually tastes have changed, resulting in a drop in attendances,

leaving the pools uneconomical to run.

Many fell into decay and many were demolished.

Only a handful of pools remain today as a symbol of a bygone era.

- - -

Boing Boing TV Covers Long Now Clock

The Long Now Foundation is trying to build a clock which will run without human intervention for 10,000 years. It’s a marvelous and amazing piece of engineering. When visiting the Long Now in San Francisco, I tried to take photos of the prototypes of the various pieces, but low light left me with some grainy unusable photos. Thankfully, Boing Boing TV has a great piece about the various components of the clock, which I can attest were absolutely stunning.

- - -

Reaction Ferry

A reaction ferry is a motor-less barge that is anchored to the shore by a rope or cable, and uses only the current of the river to move back and forth.They aren’t much in use anymore, but they exist in a few places.

It’s the Software, Not You

David Pogues little rant about usability is short, sweet, and hits a few marks well. I particularly liked the anecdote from the days when Palm was doing great usability:

Years ago, I read about a software designer at Palm named Rob Haitani. In designing the address-book program for the PalmPilot, he favored placing the “Add” button (to input a new person’s contact information) at the bottom of the tiny 160-pixel-square screen, but relegating the “Delete” command to a pull-down menu.

His fellow designers argued that those commands are equivalent, and should therefore be displayed with equal prominence. Haitani, however, disagreed. You add people to your address book all the time. But you delete people only rarely–when the die, move away or break up with you. So Add should be prominent, and Delete should be hidden to save screen space.

- - -

Demake

Kokoromi’s Phil Fish coins the term “Demake” to denote a videogame sequel or spin-off which purposefully takes a step backwards on the evolutionary ladder, such as going from 3D to 2D. Includes some pretty great examples.

- - -

GraphJam

There aren’t many things nerdier than looking at graphs for fun and entertainment. Via Flink.

Society often seems obsessed with progress and growth. In this simplified view, technology is seen as constantly moving forward, discarding the old in favor of the newer and better. Oftentimes, though, it can also be fruitful to look backwards, in this case to the days of wind-powered sailing ships.

Sky Sails uses immense kites to help increase the efficiency of ocean-going ships. The sails are able to save as much as 20% of the fuel that would normally be used, and bigger sails could produce bigger results in the future. The first trial run of the Sky Sail was recently conducted, and the results look promising.

Another technology coming along is the use of air bubbles to reduce friction, and therefore possibly save another %20 or so in fuel. Ships are already extremely efficient, per pound of goods moved, when compared to trucks or trains . However, the sheer volume of ocean traffic alone makes these coming technologies indispensable for reducing our use of fuels (and costs). They also serve as a reminder that older ideas, like powering ships with the wind, are not necessarily worth throwing away.

Business Week has a report on a presentation given by Michael Lopp from Apple describing their design process. It’s pretty short, but helps give an overview of their design philosophy.

Not surprisingly, their design process is fairly involved. More importantly, they seem to be able to stick to their methodology. It’s one thing for a designer or company to talk up iterative design and prototyping, but it’s another altogether to implement it and stick with it when production starts.

As I get back into writing this blog, I can’t help but feel the push by current blogging trends to make my posts as short as possible. Hypertextual mediums like blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube seem to be leading to greater fragmentation of information. Twitter and Tumblr seem to be carrying this trend ever further forward. The major blog aggregators are clogged with short links to individual photos, short video clips, or inane top 10 lists. The news has been reduced to 15-second sound bytes. Information seems to be cut-up into ever smaller bits, and creating larger and more complicated arguments seems to be getting ever-harder to do.

As my friend Mike put it: “How short does this have to be for people to read it?”

Yes, there are some reasonably long blog articles, but I feel the overall trend is to push things ever smaller. The iTunes store, which I generally like, is definitely putting a much greater emphasis on single songs than albums. Radiohead had at one point refused to sell their albums on the store, only to change their mind later. If I try to imagine an album like Kid A cut up into singles, the larger, more involved message the band was trying to convey would be completely destroyed. The album just wouldn’t work.

This fragmentation does represent greater choice and granularity, but it also means more noise and more distractions. I think it’s important to balance these short digital mediums with others better suited to showing a bigger picture, like books and (some) newspapers.

A “Virus”, Newton, has just been released for OS X, which had previously been virtually virus-free. The joke is that it’s not really a virus, it’s a combination of prank and art piece. It doesn’t erase or damage anything, but it should be good to catch people off guard. It’s fake vomit for the digital age.