when gestural interfaces go bad

Mark it zero, Dude.

It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.

“Monotony” is the quality an interface has when there is only a single way to do something. The name “monotony” sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a good quality. There’s only one “middle C” key on a piano. Super Mario Bros. only has one way to jump: the A button. It doesn’t have a “jump” menu item or a “jump” keyboard shortcut. Lack of monotony complicates an interface, as well as taxing your brain by making you decide which method to use each time you use it.

"Apple's online store certainly played a role in this achievement as retail sales data shows that Mac sales were up 21% year-over-year in the months of October and November. So it's interesting to note that Apple's primary online sales channel (Web-based checkout) was redesigned during this time"

fake interfaces for films

"Over at mBricks my colleagues have put a lot of work into the device database (we work with WURFL data and contribute back as well as we can). I took the opportunity to take a closer look at screen size trends. The data I have covers about 400 different device models sold from 2005 to today."

"QuickUI (Quick User Interface) is a framework that simplifies the design, construction, and maintenance of web-based user interfaces. The easiest way to describe QuickUI is that it lets you write HTML as if you could create your own tags."

slide-y faceted searches

a long sigh to the unnecessary acronym...

"Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)"

more interaction patterns...more!

different control methods for iPhone games...the winner, in this case: surprisingly, swiping

some insightful numbers on "web 2.0" use in the "real world".

from Luke W.'s forthcoming book

via Smashing

"A UC Berkeley Resource for Building User Interfaces"

"The project enables users to transform film sequences into interactive, virtual objects. This transformation is based on the camera parameters relevant to a particular film sequence on screen: (movement, perspective, focal length)."