Thoughts on systems, engineering, AI, technology and life.
With Gmail, Google introduced a couple of peculiar ways to deal with email. One of these is the “search vs. sort” approach to finding emails of interest or finding related emails. Instead of going with the common approach of sorting by column which is typically done to easily find related emails (by author or by … Read more
The best user interface is the one that combines visual (GUI) and natural language. And the closest, cheapest thing to natural language is the command line interface (CLI); the ideal natural language medium is voice. This ideal user interface also applies to mobile. The folks at Humanized, a group of folks who are totally thinking … Read more
Sun Microsystems surface computing, the Starfire (1994 concept): >> See Sun Microsystems' Starfire concept video (complete with drama, heh) Surface computing today, Microsoft: >> See Microsoft's Surface video (Popular Mechanics) ceo
Gosh, I always wanted one of these true surface desk-tops computing interfaces, since the day I saw the movie Tron back in 1982. While the desk-top surface user interface at Tron wasn't touch-screen (that I can remember) or as advanced as the Microsoft Surface, I always liked this type of human-computer interaction, where the workplace, … Read more
Tom wrote about an important topic on UI design – UIs and the Fun factor. We can't argue about the importance of providing the right balance between “features/functionality” vs. “usability” vs. “pleasure/fun to use” — very important indeed. So why is it so difficult to deliver such balance? Well, some people just don't get it. … Read more