Monotype Imaging today announced a new mobile font suite designed for Android Ice Cream Sandwich devices. The suite, which offers a slew of tools and services for developers and manufacturers, is called "Type Enhancements for Android."
Though some of the tools in the suite have been previously available to developers, it is the first time they have all been offered in an all-in-one package.
One such module, known as the iType font engine with Edge Tuning, promises OEMs better and cleaner text rendering.
In addition to that, the suite offers a greater breadth of language support than within Android's existing capabilities, and a bigger selection of fonts -- both for developers creating their UIs, and for users who want more customization options.
According to Satoshi Asari, Monotype's director of product marketing, one of the most important aspects of these tools is that they all abide by Google's Compliance Test Suite (CTS) for Android.
Aside from wanting to expand Android's global reach by improving its language supporting capabilities, Asari hopes that Monotype's suite will resolve quality issues for low-end devices. This is especially applicable to handsets with small screens or low resolutions, where text does not render well.
But high-end phones can also benefit from "Type Enhancements for Android" too.
"Flagship devices need to have a high-quality user experience across a high number of use cases," Asari said.

Google has released the Android version of an overhauled Google+ app, part of the company's attempt to move to a "simpler, more beautiful Google," in the words of Vic Gundotra, the company's senior vice president of engineering.
The new app catches up with the iOS Google+ app that Google released a couple weeks ago with a new visually rich, photo-first interface. And in some ways it surpasses it, for example in its support for tablets.
Google trails Facebook by far when it comes to the magnitude of membership on the overt social-network Google+ site, but the company is trying to compensate by wiring Google+ social interactions into major properties including Gmail, YouTube, and search. And it's trying to outdo Facebook in features, too -- thus today's app update.
Among the new app's features:

The new interface can get cluttered with busy images combined with text, comment boxes, and the +1 icon.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
• Most obviously, a new interface that puts images front and center, with the text of a Google+ post overlaid on the top. It's supposed to be more visually rich, but I find the new look often cluttered and jumbled.
• The old home screen is replaced by a navigation ribbon that slides down the left edge of the screen. That's a lot less dorky for tablets, which before had five tiny icons amid an ocean of wasted space.
• An ability to +1 a post directly from the stream of posts.
• The ability to start a video chatroom "hangout" from from an Android phone or tablet using the navigation ribbon. Hangout requests also can ring the phone like an incoming phone call.
• An option to directly turn a photo seen on Google+ into an Android device's background.
• The ability to edit your posts from the app, not just from a personal computer.

The update brings a completely new look to the smartphone version of the app, starting with a beautifully overhauled home screen. It not only provides one-tap icons for creating a new note, snapshot, recording, or attachment, but also gives you quick access to your existing notes, notebooks, tags, and places. It's a simple, effective, attractive design.
Navigation has been improved as well: you can now swipe from the home screen to your note list and back again -- a fine improvement over the previous back-button method. Also, you can swipe between notebook, tag, and place views, another welcome tweak.
Evernote's redesigned note list is a little cleaner, with a smarter, easier-to-"figger" toolbar, but I miss the high-contrast section headers. Now everything just sort of blends together. That's one change I could have lived without.
The tablet version, which I tested on a rooted Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, employs a cool tiled interface that's a bit reminiscent of Flipboard. There's no swiping as with the smartphone version, but overall I like its cleaner, more straightforward approach to note lists and management.

A couple of weeks ago, Flickr added a new uploader supporting larger images to its desktop webpage, and now we're seeing the next step in this redesign. The high-res images you upload are now available direct from the photo's main page, if you're using a high enough resolution, with your screen size dictating both the amount of information you see and the size and quality of the image delivered. The new "liquid" design ethos also means that there's no upscaling of images, so your photos should look their best whatever device they're viewed on.

The update is the latest in Flickr's ongoing revamp, and it's clear that each design choice is being made carefully. The page you see is carefully designed to fit the largest possible 4:3 photo (which Flickr says is the most common aspect ratio), so that any smaller images will still fit without the page re-shaping itself every time. The algorithm used also avoids downsampling wherever possible, meaning that if an image is within a given threshold of a size it will be displayed natively. This latest update is available to everyone right now, and the development team says it has plenty in store for the rest of the redesign, too.

Online task management service Remember The Milk has released a major update to its iOS app introducing a redesigned UI for iPhone and iPod touch users and Retina Display support for the iPad. Adapted from the native iPad user interface introduced last year, Remember The Milk 3.0 adds a sliding panels view with a left-hand toolbar and stacked “cards” for categories, task lists and task details and notes; left and right swipe gestures provide a natural intuitive UI to allow users to view their tasks and notes. The update also refines the task details view to display associated notes on the same screen and provides buttons for quick access to complete, postpone or delete individual tasks. Support for batch-editing multiple tasks on the iPhone and iPod touch has also been added, similar to the iPad version, allowing select multiple tasks and postpone them or edit common information such as due date, priority, list and tags. In order to adapt to the new sliding panels interface, a tap-and-hold gesture is now used to bring up the complete tasks instead of the previous swipe gesture, and users can now swipe up from this view to access a postpone button instead.

Firefox is receiving yet another interface overhaul. Dubbed Australis, the new UI (and UX) will span, embrace, and unify the desktop, tablet, and smartphone versions of Firefox. [...] Australis, rather sensibly, is an attempt to build a user interface/experience model that works and feels the same across every platform; Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Starting with the premise that Firefox is “soft, friendly, and human,” Australis is as curvy as a curvy thing. While the desktop version of Australis obviously has more browser chrome (buttons/widgets) than the smartphone and tablet versions, all three share one recurring feature: Rounded corners everywhere. Tabs are positively swoopy (their curves are likened to those of an aerodynamic supercar). The bottom left and right corners of the browser window will be rounded. The tab thumbnails (when switching tabs on Firefox for Android) have rounded corners. Pop-up dialogs, such as Settings or Downloads, have rounded corners. The address bar and search bar are no longer rectangular: They’re rounded rectangles.

Perhaps the best new feature in Firefox 13 is what’s known as “tabs on demand.” Tabs on demand refers to the way Firefox restarts when you have multiple tabs open. Firefox will now only restore the currently selected tab; background tabs are not loaded. Tabs on demand is a welcome relief for those of us who browse with dozens of tabs open all the time. You no longer need to fear restarting the browser since you won’t have to wait while every tab reloads. Instead, tabs will load only when you select them.

Firefox 13 will bring a slightly new look to some parts of the browser; both the New Tab and the Home Page have been redesigned. The New Tab page now has links to your most recently and frequently visited sites. It looks more or less just like Opera’s Speed Dial, which Chrome also mimics. There’s an option to pin your favorite sites, as well as a button for rejecting sites you don’t want to see.

The default Home Page now has links to menu items like Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences. There’s nothing here that you can’t access from the menu bar, but it makes frequently used menu items easier for newcomers to find.

Web developers will be glad to know that Firefox 13 introduces support for Google’s not-quite-yet-a-standard SPDY protocol (technically the last two Firefox releases have supported SPDY, but this is the first to have it enabled by default). The SPDY protocol improves on HTTP and in many cases can significantly reduce page load times. SPDY’s other main advantage over HTTP is that all traffic is encrypted. Once Firefox 13 and the Opera 12 preview arrive in final form the majority of desktop browsers on the web will support SPDY.

The Firefox 13 beta also brings a number of improvements to the new Developer Tools. For example, the Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements — handy for checking out what’s happening in a :hover code block.

Ex-Apple executive Tony Fadell revealed that the company toyed with the idea of equipping the first iPhone with a physical keyboard, but ultimately settled on the intuitive multitouch design that changed the face of the game.

In a Friday interview with The Verge, the former iPod guru said that Apple narrowed down the original design to three prototypes before introducing the handset in January 2007.

Fadell, who officially left Apple in 2008 but was kept on the payroll as a special advisor to the late Steve Jobs until 2010, worked on 18 versions of the iPod as well as the iPhone up to the 3GS before leaving to start "smart thermostat" company Nest.

He notes that when Apple was readying its first handset, the final three designs were an iPod-phone hybrid, an undisclosed version also called "iPhone" and the final model that reached customers' hands.

When asked about his personal opinion, Fadell said that he recognized the potential of a virtual keyboard and would have waited for the technology instead of going with a hardware option. Jobs, who had the final say over what was released, apparently sided with Fadell and pointed out the lack of physical keys as being inherent to the now iconic design.

According to the blog of Mozilla Software Engineer Jared Wein, M.Sc, the Firefox team has just killed off the age-old favicon in yesterday’s nightly build. Wein states that the changes are set to arrive in the release channel in mid-July, and are intended to increase security for users, while reducing overall visual weight.
[...] The follows the Chrome team’s decision to rid the URL bar of any favicons. The question we now have is, will Firefox now include the favicon up in the site tabs as Chrome does? If not, this may be the end for our favorite, low res icons.

Twitter just announced a little agreement that subsequently guarantees it would never pursue other companies that poach its “pull-to-refresh” patented feature, which is duplicated across a slue of iOS and Android applications.
The micro blogging service unveiled the “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” today that assures the world it will not use its patents against competitors, while allowing engineers to keep control over their patents.
“The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended,” explained Twitter in a bog post.
The IPA will affect every patent issued to Twitter engineers in the past and going forward

Former Microsoft employees who worked on the ill-fated Courier dual-screen tablet and started their own mobile-development house have found some early success.
Developer FiftyThree announced on its blog yesterday that its sketchpad and ideas app Paper has hit 1.5 million downloads in its first two weeks of availability. In addition, the company said a total of 7 million pages have been created so far with the app.
"To say the response has been overwhelming would be an understatement," FiftyThree wrote on its blog. "For a tool that we made for ourselves, we're thrilled to find 1.5 million other like-minded creators out there."
FiftyThree was established in the wake of Microsoft shuttering Pioneer Studios, the company that was supposed to build "brand driven consumer experiences for Microsoft's entertainment business: Xbox, Zune, Mobile, and emerging areas." Among FiftyThree's leaders are Georg Petschnigg, co-founder of Pioneer studios, and Jon Harris, a designer who worked on Zune, Xbox, and other Microsoft products.

In an apparent new bid to salvage Chrome OS, Google is now revamping the system to look more familiar to Windows users, with a Windows 7 Start-like app launcher and taskbar, and a new "flexible windowing system" called Aura that provides "rich visuals, large-scale animated transitions and effects that can be produced only with the assistance of hardware acceleration."

Steve rejecting a design five years ago isn’t a huge deal. Steve was well known for rejecting ideas, tweaking them, and turning them into something even better. And that’s a very good thing. One of my favorite parts of working at Apple was knowing that SJ said “no” to most everything initially, even if he later came to like it, advocate for it, and eventually proudly present it on stage. This helped the company stay focused and drove people to constantly improve, iterate, and turn the proverbial knob to 11 on everything.

Former Apple TV UI designer and “Professional Hobbyist, AppleTV” Michael Margolis went vocal on Twitter about the new Apple TV redesign last night.  He says that Steve Jobs himself tossed out the new designs 5 years ago.  He adds, “Now there is nobody to say ‘no’ to bad design.”

It’s all HTML5, CSS and JavaScript!
What makes Gaia extra interesting is that it is all developed in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and you can debug and view the code directly on the device or in a web browser!



This means that the possibilities of tweaking the user experience, in any implementation, but also just for yourself, is a viable option. It’s your device, and you deserve the experience you want!

Gaia is all open!
The wonderful thing about Gaia is that it is developed completely in the open! All the Gaia code is available on GitHub and you can check it out and test or contribute right now! Because, remember? It’s all HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and you can reuse your existing skills in a new exciting environment!

Apple has released a free software update for second generation Apple TV users, bringing the revised new interface demonstrated for the new, third generation Apple TV.
The new update replaces the main horizontal menu with five app-like buttons: Movies and TV Shows (for buying and renting content), Music (for accessing content from iTunes Match), Computers (for connecting to local iTunes libraries via Home Sharing) and Settings (which brings up the standard configuration menus from before).

Chrome's got it. Internet Explorer's got it. Safari's got it. And Opera was the first to debut it. Finally, and currently available in the developer's Aurora build, Firefox users will be able to get a personalized New Tab experience.
Much like the competition, Firefox's version bases the sites shown to you in the New Tab page by the most commonly visited sites in your location bar. Previously, Firefox could only show a visual representation of favorite or recently visited sites in a New Tab through third-party add-ons.
You must be running Firefox 12 Aurora (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) to test out the new New Tab page. Mozilla plans to turn it off on February 16 for testing purposes, but it won't be hard to use beyond that. You can simply type "about:config" into the location bar, and set the browser.newtab.url to "about:newtab" and browser.newtabpage.enabled to "true".
Realizing that the feature is still in development, it's nevertheless a fair bit buggy. It displays sites well but not always with icons, and the Pin feature, which ought to keep a site from being removed, doesn't seem to work. Still, it's good to see that Mozilla is moving to offer what, I suspect, many consider to be a basic browser feature.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball on Monday pointed to a series of Twitter posts (1, 2) outing UI resources that scale to larger sizes in the latest release of Mac OS X Lion, which arrived last week.
The new elements include the pointing-finger cursor in Safari, the "grabby hand" in Mail, and the camera cursor for taking screenshots and a few others. One straightforward reason for the change could be that Apple wanted to improve the look of the Universal Access zoom feature. But, reports from some Mac Mini users outputting to HDTVs over HDMI that upgrading to 10.7.3 caused their system to reboot into HiDPI mode have added to the mounting evidence that Apple is planning for high-definition Mac displays.
Apple added HiDPI modes to Mac OS X Lion last year, but they were previously only accessible by installing Xcode. HiDPI is modeled after the UI resolution doubling that takes place on Retina Display iPhones.

Updates to Dolphin HD for iOS and Android bring notable improvements to the browser on both platforms. Released yesterday, the overhaul of the iOS version's look makes it much more usable, while the Android edition keeps the feature-rich app running in ship-shape.
Dolphin HD 3.0 for iOS has an iPhone version and an iPad version, and the new look brings it more in line with the its appearance on Android. The Speed Dial landing page has been refreshed to make it cleaner, while the Webzine feature for streamlining magazine-style content has expanded its categories and introduced some much-needed customization.
Meanwhile, the new version 7.3 Dolphin HD for Android gets two changes worth pointing out. Dolphin Connect, the browser's synchronization feature, has simplified the sign-up procedure in addition to being faster. Dolphin's battery management add-on, confusingly referred to as both Dolphin Companion and Dolphin Battery Saver, has better integration with its browser sibling and can disable icons in the notification bar.
-> http://blog.dolphin-browser.com/2012/01/05/dolphin-browser-hd-v-7-3-a-new-year-a-new-dolphin-for-you/

The new Firefox Aurora for Android update includes a new native Android interface that we need your help testing.
We need our adventurous group of Firefox Aurora users to help us test these new features and file bugs or provide feedback as we continue to improve performance and features.

For tablet users who want to keep using the new optimized tablet UI, please download Firefox Beta.

The new year is right around the corner, and many of us are in dire need of some organization. Luckily for all you fandroids out there, DropBox 2.0 has finally made its way onto the Android Market. The app has brand new features and a totally revamped layout.

You’ll find a little arrow to the right of each file in the app, which will then lead you to a pop-out menu. From there you can share, delete, and favorite, which is a brand new feature to DropBox. From the main menu, you’ll see three tabs up top including Dropbox, Uploads and the newly added Favorites.

Some files are put into Dropbox simply because they are pictures so cute, or documents so brag-worthy that you need them on all your devices (just in case the opportunity arises to show them off). Once a file is favorited, you can access it even without an internet connection because it’ll be saved straight to the device. That said, I’m willing to bet the Favorites tab will be oft-used.

Dropbox 2.0 also includes the ability to rename files straight from the app, along with bulk upload. Speaking of the Uploads tab, users are now able to upload from and export to local storage, which is a welcome addition.

Past that, you’ll also find a few bug fixes in the update which is pretty standard for a huge roll-out like this, along with support for ICS. (You G-Nex owners were worried there for a second, huh?)

The mobile UX team's recently gone through a big top-to-bottom review of the in-progress native UI for Firefox on Android, sanding down rough edges and making sure that things all fit together. Here are some slides from a walkthrough I'm about to give of the current state of the designs. The nightly builds are getting closer to these every day!

Jan-Michael Cart, known worldwide for his iOS concept videos has announced he has achieved his goal of working for Apple as an intern [...]
We’ve seen a couple other notable individuals work for Apple, particularly those from the jailbreak community. Peter Hajas played a key role in iOS 5 notifications and was hired by Apple, along with and hacker @comex interning as well.

Android handset owners looking to see what apps are available in the Android Market will now have a better way to see what others thought of a respective program.
When users click on an application in the online Android Market store, and choose user reviews, they'll be able to filter those in many more ways. Users can now arrange reviews by star rating, as well as the application's version, though the latter option is limited to "all" or "latest."
Best of all, the store now lets users filter reviews by individual devices registered to their accounts, so they can see what an application's experience is like on the same product they own.

Apple's licensed at least one iOS software patent related to scrolling functionality to Nokia and IBM, and offered a license to Samsung during failed settlement negotiations in November 2010.

The patent in question is #7,469,381, which covers the distinctive "scrollback" behavior of iOS that displays a background texture when you scroll beyond the edge of a document of webpage. Apple asserted this patent against Samsung as part of its failed attempt to get an injunction against Galaxy devices, and the court order denying the injunction includes general discussion of how past licensing behavior affects the decision of whether or not to grant an injunction. The discussion is nestled among two redacted statements shown to The Verge that confirm the '381 patent was licensed to IBM and Nokia, and that Apple offered a license to Samsung in November of 2010 as part of settlement negotiations.



You might remember that Apple confirmed it cross-licensed some patents to Nokia when the two-year conflict between the two was settled this past summer, so we'd assume '381 was among them. What's interesting is that at the time Apple said it had retained "the majority of the innovation that makes the iPhone unique," but it's hard to think of features in iOS more distinctive than its scrollback behavior. (Stock Android and Motorola's skin use a different pulsing highlight behavior to indicate that you've reached the end of a list.) What's more, Apple's sued Samsung, Nokia, and HTC over '381, which would usually indicate that Cupertino thinks it’s a strong patent, and the court agreed that Apple was likely to prove Samsung was infringing with its Galaxy devices. Offering up a distinctive software feature covered by a strong patent indicates a level of willingness to negotiate that we simply haven't heard from Apple in the past — it's a far cry from Steve Jobs telling his biographer that he was willing to go "thermonuclear war" on Google and Android OEMs for infringing Apple's patents.

Web-based demo of the Windows Phone 7 interface, meant for use on other mobile devices.

We have decided to drop the XUL-based UI and re-build the application using native Android widgets. Here’s some of the rationale, from Johnathan’s newsgroup post:
Startup – A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL based UI, since it can happen in parallel with Gecko startup. This means startup times in fractions of a second, versus several seconds for a XUL UI on some phones.
Memory Use – We believe a native UI will use significantly less memory.
Responsiveness – A native UI has the potential for beautiful panning and zooming performance.
Another major change is a move away from multi-process architecture (e10s) as well. The web content process was great for stabiilty, keeping crashes from taking down the entire application, but it also increased our memory usage and created some performance issues. In the new application, Gecko is running in a separate thread, not a separate process.
Quite simply everything you see is a native Android widget. Even the web content is displayed in a native view, very similar to the multi-process layers system we previously used. This allows us to asynchronously pan and zoom the web content, without waiting for the browser to scroll or zoom the actual content.

Today, tap tap tap, the company behind the wildly popular and feature rich app Camera+ has added a feature back into its app that Apple forced them to remove some time ago.

“VolumeSnap” allowed Camera+ users to take photos simply by tapping the volume button on their iOS device. Apple didn’t take too kindly to this and rejected the app’s submission until the company removed the feature.

At the time, here is what Apple said about the VolumeSnap feature:

Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7

Apple then decided it was such a great feature, they added it into its own iOS 5.

In a post simply called “VolumeSnap is back, beyotches!!“, the company posted this animated GIF:

Twitter has begun the rollout, or at least a significant spot test, of the Activity and @USERNAME streams it announced in mid-August. The @USERNAME stream replaces the @Mentions and Retweets streams, combining those with stories about new followers, people favoriting your tweets, and more. The Activity stream shows the follows, favorites, and retweets of the people you follow.

The rollout will convert information previously delivered through email notifications or only visible by expanding tweets into streams that can be viewed from the home page. It will also help Twitter increase the interconnections in its social graph by highlighting who the people you follow are following and giving you the chance to do the same.

PayPal has hired Apple’s Creative Director Sarah Brody as a user experience designer. Brody worked on the original iPhone, original iPod nano, and was a critical aspect in the design of Apple’s MobileMe service. Just to be clear, Brody was a major part of the UI design team, not hardware design. She also designed the product boxes you see above.

Ecco un confronto per immagini di come il software per fare musica è stato adattato dalla versione per tablet ai dispositivi più piccoli di Apple.

Migliorare le performance sui dispositivi con sistema operativo di Google: è l’obiettivo di un nuovo sforzo degli sviluppatori, e di una nuova versione del browser di Mozilla. Eccone un’anteprima

1. Steve Jobs stole ideas from Xerox to create the Mac.

In 1979, Jobs and a group of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC, a famous Silicon Valley research group, for three days. During those visits, the Apple team saw what was then the future of personal computing: Bitmapped screens, graphical interfaces, desktop metaphors like folders and trash cans, Ethernet, printers, mice — the works.
Four years later, Apple shipped the Lisa and a year after that, the Macintosh — both of which used concepts seen at PARC.
The conventional wisdom has become that Xerox PARC invented the networked graphical PC, and Jobs “stole” their ideas. But this is wrong on all counts.
Of course, there’s no question that Apple made major leaps of understanding and vision by visiting PARC. But what Apple created was not Xerox technology.
Malcolm Gladwell clarified this point brilliantly in a May New Yorker piece.
In fact, according to Gladwell, Jobs instructed Apple designers to avoid Xerox’s way of doing things. According to industrial designer, for example, Jobs instructed him to create a mouse for Apple, but specifically to make it completely unlike the Xerox mouse.
Jobs told him: That mouse “cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.” Oh, and one more thing. The Xerox mouse had three buttons, but Apple’s had to have one.

Everything about Apple’s mouse — the materials, the functionality and most importantly the methods by which the device registered and conveyed movement — was totally different from the Xerox mouse.
And, in any event, Xerox didn’t even invent the mouse. Douglas Engelbart and Bill English created the first mouse prototype in 1963. And a German company even shipped the first commercial mouse in 1970.
The idea that Apple stole Xerox’s mouse invention is totally wrong on all counts. This basic scenario is also true for many other Mac technologies seen at PARC.
Of course, some things the Apple engineers saw were in fact invented by Xerox, including bitmapping and Ethernet. But the biggest thing Apple got out of the visit was the big-picture vision of how a networked graphical personal computer and printers might function. The second thing was a whole lot of pointers and shortcuts to the solution to problems solved by PARC researchers.

But here’s the most important fact: Nothing was “stolen.”
Whatever Apple got from those three days was bought and paid for as part of a fair, legal, above-the-table business deal between Xerox and Apple.
At the time, Apple was still a year away from its IPO. Everybody wanted in. Apple was the hottest of hot companies. So Xerox and Apple made a deal: Apple would be granted 3 days of access to PARC in exchange for Xerox being allowed to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock for $10 per share.
Apple went public a year later, and the value of that stock had grown to $17.6 million. Xerox paid a million for the shares, so essentially Apple paid Xerox $16.6 million for showing its research to Jobs and his team.
This monetization of PARC research was vastly higher than Xerox’s Star, which lost a lot of money.
(Also: My back-of-the-envelope calculation, factoring in a stock split, is that those shares would today be worth about $324 million.)
There’s no question that the deal Xerox made was unfair to PARC researchers, who were forced by the suits to reveal their hard-earned intellectual property. But Xerox was a stupid company. Those researchers voluntarily chose to work for that stupid company. That’s not Jobs’ fault.

The bottom line is that Jobs didn’t steal from Xerox. He paid for whatever he got, fair and square.

GoogleTV is so unnatural to use as a web browser that I hardly try any more. It’s so much more efficient to just use a laptop. The Google Chrome app crashes frequently when loading pages (this is nothing like the computer version of Chrome, which is awesome). It is a chore to switch between tabs. First you need to hold down the Home button for a second. Then you need to push on the directional pad. Then you need to push Select. This was truly designed by an idiot. On a computer all I need to do is use a trackpad and click. And as for the Logitech full-size keyboard? It is terrible, too. The trackpad isn’t even half the size of a Macbook’s. You can’t just tap the pad to click. You need to click a separate button. This was also designed by an idiot.

I’m not done yet. What about operating the TV using the Logitech keyboard? It is also cumbersome. I don’t even know how to change the channel. There are buttons in strange places. It really seems like Logitech engineers took a regular keyboard, added a few buttons here and there, and left it at that.

The cover was yanked off the stable version of Chrome 15 today, as Google updated its New Tab page to emphasize Web apps and customizations along with Most Visited sites. Google Chrome 15 stable for Windows (download), Mac (download), Linux (download), and Chrome Frame also made several serious security improvements. However, the ability to synchronize your Omnibox history remains relegated to the less-stable Chrome beta and developer's channels.
The intuitive New Tab page allows you to create custom categories by dragging and dropping apps and bookmarks, and includes navigation arrows on the left and right edges of the page that become more visible on mouse-over.
The New Tab redo launch coincides with a redesign of the Chrome Web Store, Google's clearinghouse for its Web apps. The new look to the Web Store emphasizes a more graphical look, including app-related video, screenshots, and reviews that are linked to the Google+ account of the reviewer.

[...] we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.
As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.
We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That's why we will also be extending Reader's subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.
Your subscriptions
Your shared items
Your friends
Your likes
Your starred items
Like always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To.

Bringing up a User Interface (UI) as fast as possible is a very important goal and benchmark of any application. People don’t want to wait for their applications to load. Most applications on Android show a UI in under 300 milliseconds (ms). Fennec doesn’t hit that goal and is a major concern for us. The problem is that Gecko (our rendering engine) isn’t loaded when Fennec starts. We need to load Gecko into memory, start Gecko, then wait while it renders our UI from XUL. This is a lot of waiting around for us to show a relatively simple UI.

Una versione a parte, dedicata a evolvere l’interfaccia del diffuso programma di navigazione di Mozilla.

CoRD allows you to view each session in its own window, or save space with all sessions in one window. Scale session windows to whatever size fits you—the screen is resized automatically. Enter full screen mode and feel like you're actually at the computer. The clipboard is automatically synchronized between CoRD and the server. For system administrators, CoRD creates a simpler workflow by allowing you to save server information, then quickly connect to that server by using HotKeys or the server drawer. This makes quickly connecting to a specific server easy, even when managing many servers.

Il prossimo sistema operativo di Microsoft introduce grossi cambiamenti nell’interfaccia utente. Oltre a quelli mostrati e discussi in questi giorni, Chip Hazard ne ha scovato uno curioso.

At heart, they say, the revamped service will still resemble the original Delicious when it opens to the public, which [they] said would happen later this year.  But their blueprint involves an overhaul of the site’s design and the software and the systems used to tag and organize links. [...] the new Delicious aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events, like the Texas wildfires or the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the gadget reviews and tech tips.The home page would feature browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. The site would also make personalized recommendations for users, based on their sharing habits. “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing,” Mr. Hurley said.

Tired of boring gray icons, stuck sidebar items and the Devices section being relegated to the bottom of the list? Regain control of Lion’s Finder sidebar with these three tips.

Per il suo servizio di dati “nella nuvola” Apple, come suo solito, è stata attenta all’iconografia e alla user experience, anche quella di aspetti minori del servizio.

Navigon has announced the second generation of mobile navigation apps which include a major screen redesign and a host of new features.The new versions of the apps will be free for current owners, but some features will involve in-app purchases. The new GUI supports multi-touch gestures and easy switching between pages. Points of interest can be added to a route with a tap.Extra cost features will include quarterly map updates. [...] Navigon doesn't have a firm date for the new version. It's expected in "early fall."Meanwhile Garmin, who recently bought Navigon, has finally added an iOS navigation app that has the maps on board, rather than requiring downloads.[It's] called Garmin StreetPilot Onboard,

Sempre essenziale ma con più spazio a disposizione per la navigazione: ecco un’anticipazione della versione di Firefox per tablet con Honeycomb.

The Mozilla Mobile Team is working tirelessly to make Firefox awesome on tablets, and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the design decisions we’ve made with the UI thus far. 

Mozilla, though, wants to make sure that version numbers are buried deep with its browser where only developers, enthusiasts, and sniffing code can call them up. Over on Bugzilla, the always outspoken Asa Dotzler has posted Bug 678775 to get the ball rolling. As Dotzler states, it’s just another step in a process that is already “well under way.”[...] The proposed tweak would remove the number and instead display a line about when the last update was applied and whether or not your install is current.

Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora-based Live USB operating system featuring the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform and designed to fit on an ordinary USB thumbdrive ("stick"). 

That's it. The old Twitter design officially is gone and the New Twitter look and feel is all that's left.
Twitter unfurled a newly redesigned interface last fall, but the company allowed people to use the old interface until today.The microblogging site announced in a tweet this afternoon that after nearly a year the old interface is history.
"New Twitter rollout: complete! All users now have the same Twitter.com experience & can access our latest features," the company said.

If you drag a folder to a location that already contains one of the same name, then it appears the option to combine the folder contents does not show up, and instead you are asked to either stop copying or replace the existing folder. Likewise, if you have two folders in the same directory and rename one to be the same as the other, then you will get a warning that the name is already in use. [...]The only option I have found that will invoke folder combining routines is to use keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste the folders.Even if these are intended limitations of the feature, there may also be some bugs with the process, as it appears to only work with folders that contain unique items. If one of the folders contains an item that is the same name as an item in the second folder, then sometimes the system will resort to either replacing the folder or stopping the copy process, instead of merging the folders and renaming the similarly named files within them.

Your 10.6 Spaces key gets redirected to Mission Control automatically, but there is no option in System Prefs to unbind that key or cleanly reassign it. To do that, you'll need to edit your symbolichotkeys plist:
defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys AppleSymbolicHotKeys -dict-add 75 "{enabled = 0; value = { parameters = (65535, 96, 0); type = 'standard'; }; }"
defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys AppleSymbolicHotKeys -dict-add 76 "{enabled = 0; value = { parameters = (65535, 96, 131072); type = 'standard'; }; }"
Log out/in and your key should be free. 

Lion introduces a long-requested 'copy and move' command in Finder, similar to 'cut and paste' in Windows Explorer. To move files in Finder first press Command+C to copy the selected files, then press Command+Option+V to move the copied files to the current folder. 
[crarko adds: And the Finder menu item changes to 'Move Item Here.' Makes a lot more sense from a UI perspective than Cut and Paste. And it's not likely to happen by accident. Nice little touch.]

[...] Chrome now mimics the behavior of the two-fingered gesture in Safari 5.1, the browser bundled with Lion.Google's made other Lion-related modifications to Chrome, according to notes on the Chromium bug-tracking database.
As of Tuesday's dev build, for instance, Chrome's scrollbars conform to Apple's guidelines, and disappear when not in use.
But for now, Google developers have decided not to support Lion's full-screen mode. To reduce user confusion, they've removed the button at the upper-right corner of the app window that triggers full-screen.

The original Lisa and Mac vertical scroll arrows were at the top and bottom of the vertical scroll bar, and the up-pointing arrow moved the content down. I ran a user study in the early days of Lisa development that informed that design.
Most (but not all) study participants expected to position the mouse near the top of the window to bring the content hidden above the top of the window into view. One reason was that they were looking at the top of the window at the time. Another reason was that they were more likely, as their next action, to select content in the upper half of the window than in the lower half. Consequently, we made the upper member of the arrow pair move the content down. With apologies to computer architects, I’ll call the majority whose expectations were met by this decision the “top-endians”.

a free app for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Leopard that reverses the direction of scrolling. With reverse scrolling, the page content moves in the same direction that you move your fingers, just like on iOS devices and OS X Lion.Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or above

Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle). [...] Like color, which also despite limitless associations has a history of strong associations within a market, shape is a powerful, yet subtle differentiator. Owning a shape isn’t easy – by itself, as demonstrated by Samsung and RIM, a shape is hardly potent. Those who have successfully laid claim to a shape have used it as a building block rather than as window dressing. Use the power of shape to reinforce good design with coherence and identity – and that shape may one day be yours.

You went to Google in '05. What were some of the projects you worked on at Google prior to Google+?Hertzfeld: I worked on a smattering of different things, including the Photo Picker...it was in Gmail for many years, but I think it finally got switched out by something newer. But probably the single thing that (was) sort of my project was Google News Timeline, which launched around April 2009, and it's still available. [...]Which brings us to Google. What exactly is your role? Hertzfeld: My role's been evolving, but really, the Circle Editor was my baby. I wrote a prototype for it singlehandedly and then sort of led its development through to the present time. I was not just the interface designer but the main implementer as well, writing code. [...] I started three or four months ago helping out with other areas of Emerald Sea [and in] the last month or so, I've taken a broader role, trying to make all of it be as great as I can make it.

[...] adding countless features to Gmail has made it an increasingly powerful communication hub, but [the] interface has also become more cluttered and complex. [Thus] we’re embarking on a series of updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful. This is part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products. [...] we’ll be working on these upgrades gradually over the next few months to allow plenty of time to understand and incorporate your feedback [...] We’re kicking things off with two new themes for you to try out as a sort of sneak peek at what we’re up to. Starting today, you’ll see the “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer. 

Opera Software will debut a new, streamlined user interface in Opera 11.5, a company executive said today, that closely resembles the minimalist design now sported by most of its competitors.
The new interface, dubbed "Featherweight" by Opera, features only four buttons alongside the address bar, and loses much of the "chrome" -- a browser's interface elements, not Google's application -- to expand the amount of display space for websites.Featherweight will be the default user interface (UI) for Opera starting with version 11.5, which appears to be close to shipping.
It also closely resembles the UI direction first taken by Google and its Chrome, which Microsoft and Mozilla both followed with their Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Firefox 4 that launched earlier this year.

La differenza con il vecchio Final Cut Studio? SI vede a occhio nudo.

A software programmer who wrote a jailbreak application that would replace and improve upon Apple's own iPhone notification system has been hired by Apple, AppleInsider can confirm.
Last week, word went out that Peter Hajas had stopped work on his "MobileNotifier" application for jailbroken iPhones. That, along with Twitter posts saying he had gone to work for a "fruit" company in California, led to speculation, from sites like iPhoneinCanada.ca and RedmondPie that Hajas was hired by Apple.
AppleInsider was able to independently confirm on Friday that Hajas has indeed landed a job with the iPhone maker. He is said to be working in Apple's iOS Applications & Frameworks division, at the company's corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

Adozione di tecnologie web e del lavoro svolto nel settore "mobile" per ripensare e reimplementare alcune parti del sistema operativo: a partire dal menù Start.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president in Windows Phone shows off some of the new features coming in the Mango release of Windows Phone.

If you look at all these Compact Nav bugs, and most of them areserious usability problems, you will see that it is nowhere near readyto go stable yet.http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?can=3D2&q=3Dfeature%3ACompact=Nav
Also, from this comment, it's clear that the devs are still ironingout the final layout and functions:"... but let's figure out the rest of the [Compact Nav] feature beforegetting into the finer details of aesthetics - how it evolves may ormay not ..."http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3D83552#c2
And searching the buglist for "crash" and "compact" will reveal atleast one bug:http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?can=3D2&q=3Dcrash+compact
Compact Nav still has a long timeframe of development and testing yet to go.

recent prerelease builds of Chrome 13 have an experimental new user interface option that allows users to hide the navigation bar. But Google isn't the only browser vendor trying to shed toolbar pixels. Mozilla Labs has published an add-on that brings a similarly svelte design to the Firefox Web browser. [...] called LessChrome HD, can be installed in Firefox 4. It will cause all of the toolbars below the tabs to automatically hide when they aren't in use. The toolbars will emerge when the user's mouse cursor moves over a tab or when an empty tab is active. It will also show up briefly when the user switches tabs. Unlike the equivalent Chrome feature, the LessChrome add-on doesn't try to reduce the horizontal space consumed by the popup toolbars. [It] is an experiment that is intended to shed light on how this kind of interface reduction impacts usability. There is no plan yet to incorporate it into future versions of the browser, though it could hypothetically happen someday.

By 1979, Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” Jobs was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer. [...] Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley. [...] Considers whether Jobs “stole” the personal computer from Xerox, or whether it is more accurate to say that he and Apple adapted some of Xerox PARC’s ideas for a different audience.

Home is built on top of Sync, acts as a launch pad  to all of your encrypted personal data, your personal Web.   Our goal is to provide a consistent Home experience on every OS, including the classic desktop environments of Windows, Linux and OS X, as well as the mobile environments of Android, Maemo, and iOS:We launched our Home iOS app last July, and the desktop Home app tab is still currently being developed, but nonetheless the two are part of what will eventually be a unified cross platform strategy.  Home will be available on every single platform, including platforms that are restricting us from shipping the full Firefox browser.But home is more than just a consistent cross device experience for users [...]  Going beyond an ever decreasing browser frame, Home provides users with a dashboard to their life online.

Sono i nomi (temporanei) che descrivono le varie pagine della “Experimental new tab page” in versione “touch”.

The most obvious Aqua gloss stripped from Mac OS X Lion involves scroll bars, which are replaced with iOS-like, grey segments that disappear when not in use. The Finder and Mail also drop the use of bubbly, colorful toolbar and source-list icons, indicating a general preference for simpler, monochromatic icons similar to those used in iPad apps.Also missing are the Aqua pill buttons in the upper right corner of windows in the Finder and certain other apps, which currently display or hide the window's toolbar. These have been replaced by the Full Screen control used in apps that support that mode.Across the interface, while Aqua highlighting still exists, much of the "blue gel" has been dialed down. 

Ecco un confronto per immagini dell’interfaccia attuale e di quella che in futuro potrebbe venire proposta sui tablet.

Tab riorganizzabili, aggiornamento del motore JavaScript, conferma dell’uscita a scelta e un antipasto di come potrebbe essere l’interfaccia del browser di Mountain View su un tablet: queste ed altre ancora le novità della versione più avanzata di Chrome