RETYPE is a new concept for text input in touchscreen phones/devices. Instead of that huge QWERTY keyboard, which wastes massive amounts of valuable screen estate from your small screen, it relies heavily on gestures. Each key can be used to enter three letters; tap, swipe up and swipe down. It also seems that they have done some optimization regarding the letter positions, the most common letters you can simply tap, the not so common letters you have to swipe.
One potential problem with the concept though: whenever optimized letter positions come to play, the whole keyboard becomes heavily language specific. Now, of course you could optimize the layout for every language but it’s a quite big amount of work. Nevertheless, it’s a intriquing concept.
Check the video from full post
Continue reading “RETYPE the text in your iPhone”
Lots of new things happening. New theme, since the previous one was horrid in usability wise, and someone would say that it is a cardinal sin on usability site. And I would agree. Some minor fine tuning done to the theme, lots of still to do.
Things are happening under the hood also. New blog is AJAX driven (thanks to AJAXed WordPress), which should make the user experience better by reducing load times; for me this was huge leap from the days without no AJAX, since I’m still a prisoner of this dreaded choppy WLAN; load times improved 50-100%. Rather nice, I would say, makes using/updating the whole thing tad more bearable. Also, if the AJAX engine works as it is supposed to be (mainly just loading the content), it should also drop some bandwith usage, since the last surge to Top 10 Usability highs of Mac OS – Debunked dropped the whole site down; one link in mac site and there we are. Next up, SuperCache?
Also lots of general tinkering here and there.
Without content, however, there is nothing. No fear there, things happening around articles too; one “random thoughts/offtopic” article (Offtopic of the day: Viruses to permanently change social networking?) is out and currently I’m writing couple of new articles about certain user interface concept (concept and example). They are out when they are done, can’t really tell about specific time since I am currently writing when I feel like it and I have lots of other things to handle anyways. All I can say that the wait won’t be too long.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned.
Every now and then you just stumble upon something that you just can’t keep your mouth shut, even though it would be completely inappropriate to talk about it in the current context. Don’t you? I know I do. So… Enter the random thoughts part of the blog.
I spent sizeable chunk of today entertaining myself via YouTube. Me being the geek that I am, the entertainment didn’t involve videos that would actually have some entertainment values, instead amongst others I watched F-Secure Labs videos, featuring Mikko Hyppönen. Pretty interesting stuff, like the retaliation function of Storm botnet or the Targeted attacks; Using SQL injection (or any other type of attack) just for data gathering purposes (just like recon in the army), to prepare for the actual attack, thus making it personalized and more effective. Which email would you rather open, a random mail with weird topic or a mail from your coworker, talking about the project that you are working on? It seems to me that computer viruses are evolving on accelerated pace.
At the moment these are just couple of targeted attacks, and even those were directed to companies, the masses are still getting the anonymous “Click here” -link treatment. However, there is certain what if scenario where data gathering and “AI” are meshed together, and this might change everything in social webspace. Permanently.
Continue reading “Offtopic of the day: Viruses to permanently change social networking?”
This time around, though, it’s supposedly complete application platform, the g-speak by Oblong Industries. It’s definately the most impressive video I’ve seen, since the platform seems like complete solution, not just some weird hack, and the hand tracking seems to work flawlessly. The downside being that you need to wear stylish gloves from the future to use it, I guess they could use some consumer style hand tracking.
When the dust settles and all awesomeness is placed aside, I still fail to see how that is actually anything but cool toy (could appear at CNN, though). Compared to display+mouse+keyboard that is just awkward and slow, the traditional combination beating the G-Talk, 10 to 0.
Check the video from full post.
Continue reading “Yet another Minority Report UI, this time it’s awesome”
Yesterday evening was a complete disaster. I’m currently residing at Austria and the internet connection I have at the moment in my flat is.. well, just not up for the task. It’s wireless and provided by one shady D-Link canister, for me and 8 other people, which makes the thing whimper and die every now and then. So you basically have to get up from your ass and do a hard reset for it, every time your internet connection dies. It’s good excercise though. For the body, not for the mind.
That itself is annoying but the actual problem yesterday was that for some reason the FTP (and every other port besides HTTP) is blocked somehow. Either that or the D-Link just collapses every time I try to upload anything bigger than 10 kB. Last evening I made some modifications to couple of files and when I started to upload them only the first 10 kB of every file were actually uploaded(!), leading to incomplete files and myriad of error messages. Tried to solve the issue till 1 AM with no luck.
So, today I spent uploading everything (upgrading the wordpress installation in the process) back to the server and now, finally, everything is again up and running. Finally.
Decided that the default Wordpress theme is… well, default. Some time well spent produced this theme, iNove. Still not what I want but it’s closer. Liking the random posts, I’d guess it’s going to have some kind of impact to the time spent at the site.
Usability wise, still too much small fonts and the header needs to be rethinked but I like the sidebar. So, this is the look now and perhaps the next one will be the one.
The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .
Head on forward for video and more analysis
Continue reading “State of the Union – Multi-touch, Independence Day (the movie) of usability”
