Students(?) of Maryland and Berkeley have whipped up interesting concept of e-book reader: dual displays linked together to form book-like structure. Although the concept of using dual screens as pages of the book is nothing new in the idea apartment, the actual realization in question seems rather interesting. One can flip pages by performing flip gestures by either of the book covers, the displays can also be.. um.. un-linked so that they form their own, individual, papers, which is rather neat when working with multiple documents.

Whitepaper (PDF)

Check the video in full post

New Scientist
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Oh, wow! Finally something to get aroused on. Ok, ok, not THAT aroused. Maybe just mild joy then. Yey.

My favourite Linux flavour, Ubuntu (and Canonical) has just released MID (Mobile Internet Device) version of it’s biggest hammer, Hardy Heron. It has redesigned UI, which is a must for small screens like them MIDs have. But wait, there’s even more: it is supposed to use Clutter (what a disappointing  name for something that should make UI’s better), which should mean OpenGL accelerated GUI. It seems that they have thrown in pretty much everything but the kitchen sink; the damn thing has GPS and digital TV integration, VoIP and instant messaging softwares, licenced media codecs (finally!), integration with Web 2.0 sites (Like Facebook, MySpace, Youtube etc) and it should be easily customizable for OEM manufactures etc. Which should fit my project just nicely. I’ll be damned if this thing won’t be taking off.

Now, if I just could get that spankin’ sexy Dell Mini-note MID and slip this one in. Now, that would be sweetness.

Read from ubuntu.com

There seems to be a problem with WordPress and it’s ability to sort the posts with tags. It looks like quite common problem and yet still no fix for it. It seems to cache the pages so it would take a while for new posts to appear (go figure) and because of that people seem to go with “clear your cache, wait” doctrine, which is, in my case, doing absolutely bubkus.

So, in the mean time, while the people at WordPress figure this out, if you want to chech posts dealing with i.e. gaming you just have to bite the bullet and browse through the posts (they are not that many, after all). Sucks, I know.

Edit: Nevermind. It’s now working

Microsoft has been able to seduce Adobe Lightroom’s user interface/experience designer, Mark Hamburg, to become to something quite a mouthful; the team lead with “future operating systems user experiences”. (Though I bet that would make a killer business card.) Also, something what sounds like opportunity of a lifetime, so I guess no-one can blame Mark, even though it would mean Lightroom is heading downhill from now on. Not that I have ever used it. The UI looks nice, though.

If one can make any conclusions from the Lightroom design goals; Personality, elegance, grace and style, Windows should be heading towards whole different path. Which would be nice, since I’m not that big of a fan of the whole million-million-million colors coloring book scheme.

All the best for you, Mark! May the Bill be with you! (Though, it should be noted that we do expect results.)

Read more from Jeff Schewe’s blog, also check Cnet’s news of the issue at hand

Garmin finally came through with their Nuvifone handheld. The UI, at first sight, looks ok, but it’s nothing too spectacular; The home screen (seen here) looks nice, as does the (iPhone inspired) keyboard, that however is about it. The rest of the UI uses rather crappy icons and confusing array of different control methods; you got your scrolling lists, side tabs, buttons, couple of different lists, even tad weird side-by-side lists.

Two more pictures after the jump

Head to Laptop Magazine to check out the rest of the pictures

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I originally started to write this article about six months ago, far beyond the blog ever even existed. Just knew I had to get things out from my head, to get them organized. Then I saw a video which bummed me, since it presented pretty much the same thing and I scrapped the whole article. However, later on I’ve realized that the execution in the video (sadly, I can’t seem to locate this) was a bit saggy and not even about the thing I was about to write. So, here we go; posture input and games.’

More after the jump

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As Firefox is heading towards mobile space it’s pretty obvious that the user interface, which is designed for mouse driven computer screens really can’t handle today’s touch-screens and whatnots.

The initial impression is that this really looks nice as far as user interfaces go. However, if you want to go heuristic on this, in the light of usability, the lack of visual clues in the default view might become a problem. However, if proper tutorial/tips are provided this shouldn’t become a problem.

Also I’m not sure if, in the end, I like the drag controls. Sure, it’s nice with such small pages but what if the user navigates to a page which is far wider than the mobile screen can handle? After all, such pages are hardly uncommon in the internet.

Not to mention the user interface has two completely different operations in the same direction drag (drag to right/reveal left – either browser controls or back to all tabs view), only the length of the drag defines what happens. However, with proper execution and clues I think this could be handled;

50% screen (or less) drag/reveal = browser controls
90% screen drag/reveal = back to all tabs view

This way user could rely on muscle memory when using the interface, thus using it faster and more reliable, instead of conclusions based solely on visually observations.

Video after the jump.

Read: Aza Raskin’s blog or Mozilla Labs blog

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