The Fifth Flavor
While the standard flavors of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter are obvious to us and easy to experience, the fifth flavor— umami—is ineffable. It’s the salience of parmesan cheese, anchovies, dried tomatoes, fish sauce, and dashi. Though it can be oversaturated and overused, umami is an essential taste modifier that makes the sum of its […]
Our Sixth Sense: Wearable Fluid Interfaces
This week at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group showcased the latest work of her students, “a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.” Pattie […]
New Interface Paradigms
It still strikes me as fascinating that the iPhone and the OLPC (or XO) laptop were both released in the last year, and yet they’re such radically different “computing” and communication devices and concepts. I’ve spent some time playing simultaneously with the iPhone, the XO or OLPC laptop, and my regular computer combo – an […]
Book Checkout
Old school book checkout at Adaptive Path.
Ajax the Web
In his essay, Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications, Jesse James Garrett articulates a new use of several existing technologies – XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, and Javascript, which, when used together as an “Ajax engine” could change the nature of web applications. By moving to asynchronous patterns of delivery, the whole paradigm of a […]
Revamped Macromedia site irks customers
A redesign of software maker Macromedia’s main Web site is attracting criticism from customers because it doesn’t work with some browsers, including Apple Computer’s much-hyped Safari. Full story at CNET
Why Good Content Must Suck
This would have been an interesting two hours… Why Good Content Must Suck: Designing for the Scent of Information Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering If you have thousands of pages of really cool stuff on your site, how do users find what they are looking for? Turns out that the content itself has to […]