Here is an ingenious way to illustrate how many people like, or don't like, a specific page on your site. A crowd of animated people will gather around your browser window if a page is popular. And if not... well...
We have already seen a ton of touch based screens, ranging from ones with a simple input method to very complex multi-touch and multi-sensor displays. Now you can do the same with mirrors.
Here is a foldable triple screen MacBook concept from Mac Life, TriBook for short. It is brilliantly combining a small form factor with the big screen user experience. I want one.
Wouldn't it be great if you could simply flip open your mobile phone to make the screen bigger? Samsung have created an OLED prototype that can do just that.
The webcam is turning into an ever more powerful addition to our computers. We have already seen what you can do with PlayStation Eye. Ray-Ban has the virtual mirror, and now you will soon be able to control your computer via your web cam too.
I love sketching, but sometimes I would really like to be able to sketch in 3D. You know, to get the feeling of dimension and shape. More importantly, wouldn't it be something if you could sketch in 3D as easy as if it was 2D?
3D printing has been around for a long time, but it is still far too expensive for small businesses or personal use. But now a new online service makes it very affordable for everyone.
Epaper technology has been around for a long time, but has not yet reached the right level of sophistication. It is used in popular devices such as the Amazon Kindle, but it only works in black and white, and page updates are fairly slow. That, however, is going to change.
Ivan Tihienko has created a very impressive concept for how we can use the computer, without having to sit in front of it. He is envisioning a holographic projection system that place the projected image in front of us as we go about our business.
The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish company that specializes in creating mobile interfaces, have been experimenting with different kinds locking and unlocking mechanism on mobile phones. Interesting (well, some of them...)
People are always a making a lot of fun and interesting concepts. Some of them have real potentials, some are just extremely cool and then there are concepts like this one, which is something we all want, but are not going to get anytime soon.
A number of my readers have pointed me towards Swype. It is a new way to input text on touch based devices, such as phones and tablet PC's. Instead of tapping your finger on each character you simple swipe over each character in a word. The software will then translate the path you made into words.
The whole field of Augmented Reality (where we mix the virtual world with the physical one) is simply mind-boggling. And you don't have to be a scientist to explore its potentials. All you need is a PlayStation 3, and buy the PlayStation Eye, which is basically just a good web camera. What you can then do is to play games like the ones in the video below.
Yesterday was a day full of exciting new announcements. First we got Adobe CS 4, and later in the day, T-Mobile also announced the first Google Android phone.
One of the most important tools for people in my industry is Adobe's Creative Suite. I probably use Photoshop more than any other product. And today is the day adobe released CS4.
The fashion industry is one of the fastest moving businesses in terms of new trends, but the new trends are mostly in the details. The colors, the material, and the dimensions - that sort of thing. It is actually quite rare to see new innovative things designed specifically for the fashion industry.
I have been talking a lot about multi-touch, and I am very excited about how you can use it to directly manipulate something - as opposed to having a detached interaction. But the time for most of the wild experiments are over. We have indentified which areas that don't work very well and now multi-touch is moving into mainstream use. It has matured.
Today, Google officially launched its contribution to the browser market, with its new browser "Google Chrome". I will not go into all the details about it, because I already wrote about it here, but I will talk a bit about the performance.
Google is working on something called Google Chrome. In short, it is how Google is going to fix the browser. Take a look for yourself, this looks mighty interesting.
Braid is a new game on XBOX Live Marketplace. It was something I bought because I was bored, but I was completely blown away. It is fabulous.
KDDI AU and Yamaha have been exploring how to get music into a mobile phone. You might think that this has been done before; every mobile phone can play music - right? But not like this. This is not about listening to music. Instead it is about creating music.
Researchers at MPI Informatik have developed a new kind of lens that pushes the boundaries of what you can do with images.
Mozilla Labs is asking us for help determining how we are going to use the browser in the future. Aza Raskin came out with his vision about a month ago, and now Adaptive Path has made theirs.
It is amazing that what used to be science fiction is now pretty much reality. The inventions have already been made, the innovative ideas have been put forward, the technology is more than capable, and the cost is not a problem either. So what is the problem? Why don't we yet live in the sci-fi future we dream of?
People have been talking about the mobile internet revolution for many years. And even though almost anyone owns a mobile phone, mobile internet has not been that spectacular. That is until now. The mobile internet revolution has begun, and very little stands in its way.
Researchers from University of Washington have developed a technique to drastically enhance video clips using high-res photos taken of the same scene.
Robert Winter (and colleagues) has looked at how the next generation GPS's could work on devises such as the iPhone 3G. And it has a number of nice features to it.
Water is a very common thing, and not surprisingly it is also the subject of many interactive experiments. Here are some of them.
Have you ever wanted to have your very own multi-touch table? So far this has been an extremely expensive endeavor, but now you can get a "do-it-yourself" multi-touch kit.
Aza Raskin, the user experience chief of Mozilla Labs, have published a video about how he envisions Firefox on a mobile phone equipped with a touch screen.
Opel is introducing a new safety technology that reads the traffic signs and displays them on your instrument panel in your car.
We were all amazed when the Wii controller came onto the market. The ability to swing a virtual tennis racket, play golf or bowling similar to the way we do it in real life was quite spectacular. But a company called Softkinetic has taken this a step further. Now you don't need a controller at all.
This interaction concept by Chris Woebken explores how we can interact by flipping, wrenching or bending the screen - as opposed to using multi-touch or keypads.
A group of people from Toronto University have come up with an ingenious way to manipulate videos. Traditionally this is done using some kind of "bar", but what if you could simply drag each element right in the video itself.
Lacoste is celebrating their 75th anniversary with a look another 75 years into the future - or to be more precise - a look at what the game of tennis will be like in 2083.
Flickr has finally opened up for the one thing that, in my opinion, was holding it back - video.
About a year ago I was told that Adobe was going to create an online version of Photoshop - and that was big news. It is relatively easy to create an online mail application (it is just text), but an online version of Photoshop? That would be a spectacular example of advanced application design.
Internet Explorer 8 (beta) is now available for download, and as I predicted in my web trends "the web community will love it - nobody else will notice any difference."
Edward Tufte is exploring how to improve the iPhone's interface (see the video).
Regular readers know that I always advocate efficiency, and this is definitely no exception. I give you Boom! - a much faster way to search the web.
It is 2008 and time for my annual look into the foggy future of the thing we call "the web"
Johnny Chung Lee, from Carnegie Mellon University, is making wonders with his Wii remote. First of all he has turned it into a multi-touch receiver that you can use for whiteboards - or practically any surface you can think of.
As you have probably seen, YouTube has changed the way it visualizes related videos. Instead of a nice list, that you can understand, they have created a bunch of blobs?
You have already seen Microsoft Surface, and the incredible interaction it brings with it. But one of the really big problems (literally) with Microsoft Surface is its size. Wouldn't it be great if you could move the technology to smaller and much thinner devices?
Akamai, the number one provider of high-end hosting (including HD video hosting) and Verizon FiOS (a high-speed ISP) has launched an HD site to showcase the potentials with HD video.
Adobe has pre-released a new version of the Flash 9 Player which includes support for HD quality video including hardware acceleration. This is big news for video on the Web but how close are we really to HD in our browsers? The short answer is... not that close.
There has been a lot of buzz about Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight and many people are experimenting with it. Most of these experiments are... well... just "an experiment", but some are actually very cool.
Microsoft Research is looking into an age old problem. How do you hit small targets on phones and PDA's when you got fat fingers? ...or even with regular sized fingers.
Microsoft and Adobe has both been putting out a tremendous amount of new technologies, development tools and varies types of applications. But many people seem to be confused of how they compare to each other - not to mention what function each of them holds. Thankfully Ryan Steward has written an article that makes it much clearer.
Darren Barefoot pointed me towards RobotReplay - yet another tool to measure how people are using your website.
He he - a new service from Google - Free in-house wireless broadband internet - trough your toilet
I have been talking a lot about WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), because I think it is really pushing us to make applications at a completely new level of user experience. We see a lot of cool things on the web - but they are all built in this low-definition environment.
2007 is here, and so it is time to look ahead and provide some wild guesses as to what will come.
When you one evening are bored out of your skull, and the only shows on TV are zillion year-old reruns, you get into a mood that can only be described as a Monty Python sketch gone wrong. If you then happen to start your favorite web development application you know that the results will be mad, pointless and utterly useless.
RSS feeds are one the things that I really like. It allows me to get the information I want, the way I want it. There is just one problem. Not every site offers an RSS feed, and those that do are not offering the right content.
Have found something that does not work, or do you need something new? This is place to tell me (in the comments).
Update: Apple iLife 06 products has turned out rather undone. Read the update.
2006 is just around the corner, and that means that it is time to bring some (vague) predictions for this web business we are in.
We have taken the best things about cats, and removed some of the worst. Then we created the world's first life-like robotic cat. Intelliau/2 Robotic Cat will not feel like a robot, it will feel like a real cat.
News feeds are a wonderful thing and it might very well be the next generation newsletters.
Before I begin I would like to point out that TypePad is by no account a bad product. It fully supports what it is intended for - being an easy to use, hosted, blog solution. I was very impressed with TypePad during beta testing and I am still impressed how easy it is to setup blogs and start writing to the world.
Keith, over at Asterisk* asked the interesting question of the usefulness of font-size widgets. Those little things you can use to adjust the font size of your web page.
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