Two types of gestures
Now, I think you can split gestures into two categories. One is of the pull-down-to-refresh kind. These are gestures that are discoverable and explanatory. The other kind of gestures are like tapping-the-status-bar-to-scroll-to-the-top, or swipe-to-delete (or swipe-to-reply in Tweetie). These gestures you won’t discover on your own except by accident. These are not discoverable, and they are not explanatory.
This second class of gestures can exist (in my opinion) because they are not the only way to accomplish a goal. In the case of tapping the status bar, users already know how to scroll to the top manually. It’s slower, but it’s possible. In the case of swipe to delete, users already know they can tap on a message and then tap the trash button. So knowing the gesture isn’t necessary.
So when you’re inventing new gestures, it’s important to think about whether the gesture is required to use the app. If it’s the only way to accomplish a goal, you better be sure it’s discoverable and explanatory without needing to read a manual. If it’s the other kind of gesture, go nuts!
Tweetie Reloaded: An Interview with Loren Brichter
Paper Nets
Here’s a possibility to turn around in your head: print isn’t dying, so much as it’s becoming much less interesting and useful. Buying a magazine that’s two-thirds ads is not interesting, nor it is often terribly useful. Buying a magazine that’s two months behind the internet is neither interesting nor useful. Buying a magazine that is simply shitfuck ugly is neither interesting nor useful. Buying a magazine so bereft of content that it doesn’t outlive a single sitting on the bog is neither interesting nor useful. Right there, I’ve tagged a lot of magazines on your local newsagent’s shelf. But that does not eliminate all magazines.
The Referendum
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. [...] We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
The Referendum – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com
Ten Common Phrases That Could Soon Be History
Posted previously: Ten things mobiles have made, or will make, obsolete
Situated Audio Platform
SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.
And there’s one mandatory requirement: “No Touch The Screen” – I’d love to build a mobile application that doesn’t demand you stare at and stroke it the whole time. To me the attention-hogging aspects of most games has found perfect embodiment in the AR craze. They want to impose another screen between us and the world. There must be a way to harnass the power of pretending to create something that you can play with while walking around, that doesn’t want you to look at the screen all the time. [...]
So we made a Barely Game prototype – The Situated Audio Platform, a browser for geotagged audio files. The idea is that it only has one button, the whole screen, which you use to switch it on, and then you never have to look at it. You can leave it in your pocket, monitoring the world for tagged files, quitely pinging, while you listen to your music. Then if it detects something, you hold it at your side and sweep the area until you home in on whatever it’s found. You could browse AudioBoo with it, or get it to read geotagged wikipedia files to you.
From Russell Davies’ Playful ’09 presentation.
Camille Utterback’s interactive art
Interactive Art Pushes Boundaries of Viewer, Artist:
Digital artist Camille Utterback makes installations that combine cameras, projectors and custom software to create interactive, playful paintings. [...]
In these artworks, cameras track the movements of people standing in front of them, computer software translates those movements into abstract imagery according to a defined set of rules, and a projector throws the ever-evolving digital painting onto a screen in front of the viewers.
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com
Ten things mobiles have made, or will make, obsolete – Recombu
HTML5 Geolocation Demo
I’ve been fooling around with the new HTML5 geolocation API and i’ve put together a small demo page for learning purposes. Well, technically speaking the geolocation API isn’t really part of HTML5 i think, as it’s defined by a separate working group, but most browsers will implement this alongside HTML5 so it probably makes sense to lump them together. The demo is basically the equivalent of “hello world” for geolocation apps: it will map your current location using Google Maps.
Using the geolocation API is surprisingly simple, it took me about 4 hours to put the demo page together, with limited Javascript programming experience and no prior experience with the geolocation API, the Google Maps API and jQuery (lots of learning opportunities here). I had not done a lot of web front end development with Javascript before (mostly just HTML and CSS) and it was surprising how much you can do on the client side (and how easily). The demo page is pure HTML + CSS + Javascript, with no serverside processing whatsoever. This means that the whole source code of the demo page is just a “view source” away. This also means that no location information whatsoever is sent to engadgeted.net when you click that button on the demo page. Your location is (obviously) sent to Google Maps, but since Firefox asks Google Location Services about your location in the first place anyway, i suppose that doesn’t really make a huge difference.
Two pieces of unrelated geolocation news
- Twitter now supports geocoded tweets. Disabled by default, API-only for now. Considering that people already built interesting mash-ups with the older and much more limited geolocation facilities, this should be interesting. It’s also kinda scary though. Thankfully you need to opt-in (and i personally wouldn’t recommend doing so).
- Foursquare has rolled out their service in 50 more cities, and Vienna is among them. Unfortunately i’m out of town until tomorrow and won’t get a chance to try it.