by Andrea Bauer
The touchscreen era now hits finally the desktop computer. One month ago Microsoft presented a show case on a 3D desktop screen. The screen becomes an interface between the real and the digital world, while the interaction is based on the recognition of the movement of your hands. We think it is worth seeing!
See Through 3D Desktop, from Jinha Lee on Vimeo.
Pingit, Barclays new service for sending money via smartphone, is seen as the next big thing in personal finance. The app, which will be extended to all UK banking customers by early March, is free to use. To send money via Pingit you need a smartphone handset – an iPhone, Blackberry and those using Android software; to receive payments you can use any handset.
Users call the recipient’s mobile number via the Pingit app, key in an amount between £1 and £300 and hit send. The money is moved between the two current accounts using the Faster Payments service, and takes as little as 30 seconds.
Adobe’s decision to increase their investment in HTML5-related efforts created perhaps the final piece of conclusive evidence that HTML5 is the current go-to technology for creating ubiquitous user experiences regardless of device. SuAnne Hall, a user experience designer at EffectiveUI, reflects the situation.
Codecademy took something that scared people, learning JavaScript, and turned it into a game. And when it’s not intimidating, it turns out that learning how to code is something that a lot of people want to do. In its first 72 hours after launching this summer, Codecademy signed up 200,000 people for coding lessons. When it launched a New Years resolution class on Jan. 1, Code Year, it signed up 97,000 people in less than 48 hours to receive emails with weekly coding lessons. By the end of the week, more than 170,000 people had signed up for the class.
Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.
Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.
A charming interactive story app from Moonbot takes a pre-linguistic dystopia as the setting for a adventure tale about the invention of the alphabet. Following Moonbot’s first story “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” Numberlys also takes a literary angle of a more cinematic quality. In part an homage to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” the goose-stepping society of the Numberlys is less than intimidating as its citizens waddle across the frame.
Numberlys is available on the iPad and iPhone through iTunes.
It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural shift driven by the more civic minded millennial generation.
This report was commissioned in an attempt to learn the lessons from the past and to provide a framework for understanding the many different approaches to complementary currencies and other platforms for reciprocal exchange.
Jared Spool explores the key differences between “normals” and tech early adopters.
Instead of thinking about “early adopters” and “normals” as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the release timeline.
Sondre Ager-Wick, Nokia’s Head of Design Strategy and Foresight, discusses the evolution of mobile design.
He sees major trends in:
- DIY design
- Electronically enhanced senses
- The smartification of everything
- Less digital bling. More content first.
- Getting serious about play
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