Fascinating as the chorded keyboard is, its confinement to the ghetto of “crackpot technology” is but a symptom of the underlying disease: <a href="http://www.loper-os.org/?p=316">the total victory of the technological business model which caters primarily to the unskilled</a>.

Looking at the intriguing question of why the chorded keyboard never took off as an input mechanism.

Conrolling defaults in user interface design can make people very much more wealthy.

Yesterday we <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/14/windows-8-user-interface-confusion">showed you Chris Pirillo's father using Windows 8 for the first time</a>. Now here he is using Mac OSX for the first time, and trying to find "the internet".

Fascinating piece of user interface film: watch this before you judge users. (Pirillo senior is a confirmed Windows user, though he has used iPads and iPhones.)

Andrew Orlowski:

Metro is a user interface designed for smartphones, which I have praised generously, and which looks good and works well on small devices. It may yet mature into something equally attractive and useful on iPad-like tablets. But welded onto a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, it represents a huge negative for the majority of Windows users.

Ballmer never thought he’d be in this position — not only porting a gaming peripheral to his beloved Windows machines, or even opening it up for commercial development by other software companies, but owning it, taking control of it, and positioning it as a key component in the future of the company.

Considering that a little over a year ago, Microsoft was threatening to sue and/or prosecute anyone who wanted to develop for Kinect on a PC, it’s a remarkable turnaround.

A Tumblr looking at UI inconsistencies or weirdnesses in Ice Cream Sandwich (aka Android 4.0). If you're presently on Android 2.x, you'll probably find ICS like moving into a new house where all the rooms have been rearranged. So, is there a similar Tumblr for iOS?

"There are inherent problems with binary social networks. The idea that someone is either full-on in your life (and therefore has access to everything about you) or not at all is not how it works offline. You tend to share certain information only with certain groups of people. Only some people will be interested in photos of your new puppy, whereas those same people will probably not be interested in blog posts about your work.

Google Circles aims to solve these problems by allowing you to drag and drop people into distinct buckets, and letting you only share what you want with each circle. And yes, the UI makes it really easy to do this. It’s great design."

But it's impossible for that great design to make up for the fact that you can't maintain the listing of who belongs in which circles (or overlapping circles) for any length of time.

Truly, a website design that sticks two fingers up at you from its lair in the mid-90s.

Paul Thurrott, whom nobody would describe as an Apple fan, isn't very keen on the new Windows 8 Explorer ribbon idea: "The Microsoft post describing the new ribbon UI goes into great detail about telemetry data, which provides the company with information about what users are really using in Explorer and elsewhere in Windows. And according to that data, the top 10 commands represent over 81% of all commands used in Explorer. The bottom 18% of commands (by usage) include such things as Open, Edit (Menu), View Toggle, Organize, New Folder, Send To, and Edit. <br />
<br />
"And yet, looking at a Microsoft screenshot of the new ribbon, what do I see in the default first tab? A bunch of commands - including Open and Edit, by the way - that are not in the 81% most-frequently used commands." Huh?"<br />
<br />
He also described Apple's Finder as "much cleaner and less busy". That's really quite scary.

"Alon Laudon spotted a new experimental interface for Google's results pages. The most important change is that most navigation elements continue to be visible even when you scroll down. The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position, which means that you no longer have scroll to the top of the page to edit the query or switch to a specialized search engine."<br />
<br />
Is it bad that a first reaction was "I wonder when that was patented?"

"Apple's Lion is perhaps the real beginning of the end for PCs, in the sense of a computer that rudely, personally, puts its demands ahead of ours. Scroll bars? They're not natural and have no counterpart in the real world. We normally just touch a document directly and move it around with our fingers — a tablet way of working that seems more natural and is now part of Lion. There's still that mouse or touchpad - working with large vertical screen needs compromises ‐ but the interface is one that can start to work when there's nothing but a display of some sort. When the computer itself, in other words, has gone away. <br />
"Combine that sort of move with, say, projectors built into walls and the sort of optics that let them throw an legible image anywhere; motion sensors that know where fingers and hands are; a connection into the cloud; documents you never need to explicitly save because they're just there, always... where, in this picture, is the PC?"

"I mean, does anyone still think the mouse isn’t dead?<br />
"I can understand that after Apple put a gun to the head of the mouse with the release of the Magic Trackpad, people were skeptical. 'Apple has basically no market share!' was the basis of most of the basic arguments. The bigger point was that we’re moving into a world where touch is king, lead by the smartphones and tablets. These devices are going to start influencing our more traditional computers, not the other way around.<br />
"But still, many were quick to argue that the PC will never go mouse-less. Which is silly. In fact, it’s going to next year. And Microsoft — yes, Microsoft! — is leading that charge."

A 52-word three-sentence "tip" where if everything's going well, you answer "No".