"The key to intimacy is just knowledge. Path pulls that off by allowing you to see who looks at your posts." There's some good thoughts in here about why and how Path is carving out a niche.

"The days before Christmas, friends were sharing photos of the build-up, putting up the tree, wrapping presents, sitting on trains getting to parents houses, cooking hams. To me there was a real sense of flow, connection, joining in of everyone’s experience, a bit like a pictorial version of twitter to some degree. Christmas morning was almost magical.
"The previous year on Flickr was almost as magical, once people had a chance to sort through the 100s of photos they’d taken with their dSLR, pick out the best ones, run them through lightroom and then get a chance to upload them. It was nice to look back on the Christmas mornings that people had, rather than having."

"We redesigned the BART ticket kiosk. Our goal was to improve the user interface software within the limitations of the existing 8-button, ATM-style physical interface. We believe our design offers major usability advantages, especially for infrequent riders." Interesting.

"Someone came out with a Mac OS application that’s clearly a touch UI crowbarred into a point-and-click universe. And it doesn’t work." A good post by Daniel Kennett using Fitt's Law to start explaining why "touch UIs typically simply don’t work in mouse-driven environments", in the light of a bunch of Mac App Store ports by iOS developers. <br />
(Of course, Apple fans have spent the last few years deriding Windows tablets/slates/things for trying to go the other way with insufficient work. We'll see if they're resistant to the inverse.)

"All - we're looking at some short term tweaks to the Save interface today based on your feedback. Stay tuned!" Well, that was quick.

"We want you to try the changes for a while and then let us know your feedback. After any major change like this it’s common to get some negative feedback as people rarely like significant changes in how they use a product." Indeed they don't. As a heavy notes user, it's throwing me every time I find that the third field is tags. Still, I'll get used to it. Eventually. (Or I'll go to Pinboard...)

The notes here are pretty grumpy about the changes to the delicious bookmarklet.

An unofficial app that takes Phil Gyford's Today's Guardian experience and makes it more iPad-ish. Interesting partly for the transposition of ideas, and also partly as a possible proof that native apps still work better than web apps (although would that be less pronounced with equal time spent on both?)

The less complimentary half of Sven-S. Porst's 10.6 review, including a look at the Finder (which I was resigned to finding slightly worse), Activity Monitor (might back up the 10.5 one, there) and Exchange ("apparently the corporates cheer about it. It scares me. I don’t want corporate users in my world. They made quality software like Windows and Office big and seem to be keen on putting all their power and money to get crappy pseudo-solutions."), amongst other things.

This is very funny. I could pull out huge chunks of it as quotes, but I don't think I could stay in the 1000 character limit, and anyway, the whole thing - on Wolfram Alpha, interfaces, usability, AI, compsci, and MySpace - is worth reading.

"Essentially, we are still the same configuration of limbs and sensory organs using the same configuration of display and input devices. It’s when we change either of those configurations that we see where all the real innovation has been."

"Steven Frank’s essay on the current state of the desktop UI reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces." Interesting.

Seems to fit well with the link to the (arcane) commands used on the headphone button (singular). "It’s easy to see signs of a perpetual internal battle at Apple between usability and appearance. [Sometimes] the appearance-driving forces choke usability enough to leak toxic usability flaws into a shipping product."

"What now is going to be killer interesting is will there become a legal fight in the Control layer or not. It did not happen in the past paradigm 'soft keys', when Nokia let the others do soft keys, to the great benefit of humanity in my opinion."

An interesting, and probably largely correct, list of gripes about Tumblr. I suspect I don't find the problems as annoying as Samuel does because I'm not using the site as a does-everything place, any more than I do the same on Facebook.

In constrast to yesterday's news story about a 3D virtual high street, Phil Gyford's look at ebook interfaces on the iPhone has some sensible suggestions for using 3D to give useful cues, without going too far down the road of pointlessly recreating the real.

Oh dear. I'd thought the 3D dock was just a bit of useless, unattractive "eye candy", but apparently not; (bits of) Apple seem determined to hide the desktop at the bottom of a hole, just so they can put the menu bar at the side. Terrible, and terrifying.

I've just realised that this needs to be a slippy map. Scraping all the images and putting it together might be a bit too much work for me, though...

New! Shiny! Part of the front page redesign, which will no doubt be diseccted elsewhere by others.

Oh please let this work. Includes a plist change, so you might need to repeat that after an update, but then that's only to show the icon in the Dock and task switcher.

Shows the links between cities as indexed by Google. Certainly very nice to look at and play with.

It's this sort of thing that persuades me I'm right to reject tabbed interfaces. (Yes, even now, when Terminal has tabs, I don't use them. Not on the Mac, anyway. Windows is another matter.)

iTunes tries to be helpful by unsubscribing you from podcasts you don't get round to listening to, but that's really annoying for digital packrats (hello!), especially when the likes of Radio 4 broadcasts expire after a week.

Tim O'Reilly expects devices to have touch screens, now he's used the iPhone. Funnily enough, I know an 18 month old who's the same.

A wonderful rant about the state of music on the web, on the desktop, and in online stores, from one of the people behind Winamp, Gnutella and Yahoo's online store. Second thing I've seen online recently comparing iTunes to a spreadsheet. Hm.

OK, so everyone's posted this by now, but I liked the failed future feel of bits of it. Like "WriteRoom allows me to turn my whizzy modern computer into my old Brother typewriter and its six-line LCD. Except for the Live Word Count."

'You ask, “How do I solve X with Y?” and everyone looks at you blankly.' You actually want to ask "How do I do Z", and here we find out various Zs for various switchers. Well, I liked it.

"The results suggest that all the years of arguments over the relative merits of the Mac and Windows user interfaces were a waste of time: we're generally convinced that whatever we're familiar with is the best." Remember, "intuitive" is a bad word.

"Microsoft says it will initially sell the unit to corporate customers. These will include hotels, casinos, phone stores and restaurants." $10k computer. Retail. Hmmm.

Don Norman: "What is to replace the GUI? Ah yes, journalists are constantly asking me that[...] it’s already here: search." Reminds me of Wistow's "desktop dipsy" musings from years ago. Complete with login-breaking URL cruft.

When the overly booming voice at King's Cross says "he's" been told someone, who is "he" anyway? Good piece, anyway.