Panic Blog: “Good UI”, July 15th 2010 [follow the link to watch the video]
I don’t know who designed the iOS “Unlocking” UI, but they did a pretty good job. Joby just turned one. (And isn’t alone!)
Laughing Squid: “A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time” by Todd Lappin, April 6th, 2010
“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.
As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.
On the downside, she had the same frustration as many adults, where touching the screen-edge with your thumb while holding the iPad blocks input to all home screen icons. Notice also that she was confused by the splash page for FirstWords Animals, her favorite spelling game: Because the start button looked like a graphic, rather than a conventional button, she couldn’t figure out how to start the game.
Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.”
“Let’s call it ”Wimbledon.” Released in 2004, it’s a romantic comedy about tennis that I could have seen for $8 or so in a theater four years ago or ordered from Netflix, caught on HBO or bought as a DVD for $4 on eBay. But I didn’t. In fact, I only now discovered it in the modest movie lineup on Hulu. After a rocky start during which it was hazed as just another slick effort to upstage the fun, do-it-yourself YouTube, Hulu became great. The Associated Press just named Hulu its Web Site of the Year for 2008.” (more)
Previously on Skandalon : Kevin Van Aelst
 | In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies. |
White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985. Learn more about it on Wikipedia.
| Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said. Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level. The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named. Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. |
| A decade later, there’s a new kind of Tamagotchi out there. And it’s us. New health-monitoring tools let us pay close attention to our state of being, how much exercise we’re getting, how much sleep we’re getting — and they make it easy to set a goal and improve ourselves. In other words, they turn our health into something of a game. And the reward is better health and a better life. These devices are popping up everywhere: The FitBit is a paper-clip sized device that you can clip onto your belt to monitor cadence, calories and sleep. A genius little display shows a flower that grows the more you move, offering a brilliant bit of feedback. The Zeo sleep system uses a rigorous biometric brain analysis to measure overall sleep quality; you can also drill down into the numbers to ascertain how much time you’re spending in light sleep versus deep sleep (the deeper the better). The BodyMedia Fit uses a combination of sensor technology to track cadence and calories, as well as respiration and heartrate. And the Philips DirectLife gizmo turns your data into a personal coaching kit that helps you adjust targets and meet goals. |
“Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired magazine and author of the new book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. As part of the reporting for the book, he had his genome scanned, was screened for more than a dozen diseases, and has tracked his sleep, blood pressure, weight, calories and oodles of other metrics. He holds a masters of public health from UC Berkeley.” (more)
| I’ve been watching with bemused interest as US geeks (apparently 120.000 of them, although I’d take any initial figures with a large grain of salt if I were you) rushed to pre-order their iPads and, deprived of the thrill of actually using it until it arrives, gushed forth on the details of their purchase and reasons thereof as if they were boasting about the pedigree of a puppy that is yet to be weaned and handed to them in a little basket. |
The Tao of Mac is Rui Carmo’s blog:
“I’m someone with a Systems Engineering degree, a decade and a half of overexposure to the Internet, and (horror of horrors to the uninitiated), Marketing experience – as well as social graces that allow me to mediate between geeks and “regular” folk. I’ve pretty much done it all where it comes to the telco world, having been immersed in Wi-Fi, 3G (UMTS) and IP-related stuff at a major GSM operator for several years (ten, actually, going on eleven at the time of this writing).”(more)
“The worldwide number of Internet users surpassed 1.59billion in 2008—up from only 2M+ in 1990, 45M in 1995 and 430M in 2000. Worldwide yearly increase in Internet users is 140M to 145M in the next five years, which means the 2B mark will happen in 2011 or 2012. Much of current and future Internet user growth is coming from populous countries—especially the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China. In the next decade many Internet users will be supplementing PC Internet usage with Smartphone, mobile phone and mobile device Internet usage. In developing countries many new Internet users will come from cell phone and Smartphone Internet usage. China now leads with over 235M Internet users at year-end 2008. The two most populous countries—China and India—are now in 1st and 3rd place in Internet users.” (more)
According to the CIA’ World Factbook there’s an estimated 6,79 billion people in the world (as of July 2009). So a little less than a quarter (23%) of the world population use Internet.
| As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop. The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing. |
Mike founded Mule Design in 2001 along with Erika Hall. Follow him on Tumblr.
First discovered via The Daring Fireball.
| My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?” I was utterly flabbergasted. She NEVER talks about computers or technology. She tolerates them at best. Her attitude is typical of most baby boomers I’ve talked to regarding computers. She wants to benefit from them but is frustrated by the wall she must climb in order to do so. She’s learned how to use email and a couple of other things on the Internet and that’s about it. Her bringing up the iPad was amazing for two reasons. First, someone in her office (she works with other ‘boomers) found out about it within hours of the keynote and shared it with her. That Apple news warranted attention from baby boomers at all is significant. That she then held her interest long enough to tell me at the end of the day is equally significant. After learning a little more information about it, she has decided that she wants an iPad. It actually borders on technolust. |
First discovered via The Daring Fireball.
“How come [Posterous is] eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout? The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company. Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.” (read more)
Chart by Compete:
About Peg on Tech:
“Hi! My name is Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a.k.a. PEG, I’m a Paris-based entrepreneur and the curator of the Paris [Startup Digest]. I have written about these issues for The Business Insider, write about right-of-center politics at The American Scene and have written about the intersection of technology and politics at techPresident. This is my daily blog on issues at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship and business in general. I post more frequently on Twitter and Tumblr, where you should definitely follow me.”
