ZeroN

From the MIT Media Lab:

What if users could take a physical object off the surface and place it in the air? ZeroN enables such mid-air tangible interaction with computer controlled magnetic levitation. 

Via The Verge.

App Switching Redux

Turns out that a bit more browsing on The Verge turned up a post from Appstache suggesting something similar to what I proposed in App Switching.

First, Action Center is a great name for the new area that would appear when you swipe up.

Second, I'm not sure I care for the 'four recent apps in a square' layout. I do understand the appeal in allowing you to keep the same number of recent apps per screen that the current app switcher provides. A coverflow-esque alternative would only give you a clear view of one app at a time.

One thing I don't care for about Appstache's post overlaps with what I didn't care for in the idea of just making the current app switcher taller: it begins to break the clear 'most recent app on the left and older apps moving to the right' metaphor. This seems like less of an issue with screen images than with icons, but it still bugs me a bit. 

App Switching

Some interesting app switcher UI ideas from brentcas on The Verge.

About a week ago a really simple idea hit me as I was falling asleep: the App Switcher in iOS should be taller.

I don't think we'll ever see these exact changes in iOS, and I don't consider that a bad thing. I'm definitely not a fan of everything brentcas proposes, but there are some solid concepts.

My main issues?

  • Although swiping through screen after screen of recent apps is a pain, making two rows might actually make it harder to find what you are looking for. It begins to break the clear 'most recent app on the left and older apps moving to the right' metaphor and starts to look a lot like a regular screen or folder full of apps.
  • To me, the current app switcher has fundamental issues, and showing twice as many recent apps doesn't really address them. For example, I'd often rather see the screen of the app I'm looking for, not just the icon. For a Mac centric equivalent: if I'm looking for an app, I use Exposé. If I want a quick switch to my most recent app, I use Command-Tab. The iOS app switcher does okay for a Command-Tab scenario, but not so well for an Exposé scenario. However, once I swipe past the first four icons in the current app switcher, I'm well past my personal Command-Tab territory.
  • If the screen slides up to 'reveal' the app switcher as it does today, I don't care for the idea of also bringing new content onto the top of the screen. I like some of the options this would provide, but at first glance I don't care for it.

Of the things brentcas suggests, I actually like the revamped settings and music screens the best. So how about something like this:

  • Scrap the current app switcher, but keep the double tap home button shortcut for the new app switcher.
  • Introduce a whole new app switching UI, perhaps similar to a combined Exposé/Coverflow view of the actual screens of your recent apps, but accessed via the familiar shortcut.
  • Use a new gesture (swipe up, roughly the opposite of accessing Notification Center) to pull up the new double height music and settings screens. Add in a new Spotlight screen (and remove the current Spotlight screen to the left of the main home screen) so that a swipe up brings you to Music. Left from Music is Spotlight. Right from Music is Settings.

Transformer

Not a bad attempt at a functional Transformer (via my wife).

I wouldn't be surprised if my future children see Transformers toys that can transform at the push of a button. Of course, I'll probably be the dad who insists that the classic toys where you had to tansform them by hand were better.

Costume Jobs

Regarding the recent stories of Steve Jobs as Willy Wonka (from Insanely Simple via MacRumors), and specifically this bit:

But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.

My first thought was along the lines of this response to the same quote from John Gruber:

Can’t quite come to grips with this bit

However, in the context of the 1944 video news and related background, like this:

Glenn, Mike, and I marched into Steve's office to give him the pitch. Pretty much the way I outlined it in the previous paragraph. Steve's eyes were sparkling through it all. By the time I got to, "and you as FDR," I had made the sale. In the binary universe of Steve Jobs, something is either a zero or a one. This was a one. Instantly. Definitively.

It seems like maybe this was simply a side (probably one of many) of Jobs that was largely hidden from public view. It actually makes me wonder if (or how) things like dressing up as Willy Wonka and FDR might relate to to his decision to adopt his famous standard wardrobe. One thing that doesn't surprise me: the idea that if Steve Jobs was going to do something, he was going to do it all the way.

One-Way Space Man

This is a fascinating read.

Though they termed it “one-way,” Cord and Seale did not propose a suicide mission. They estimated that a rocket capable of launching a three-man Direct-Ascent Apollo mission to retrieve the One-Way Space Man — that is, a rocket with between 1.1 million and 3.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — would become available in the U.S. in the 1965-to-1967 period, between 18 and 24 months after his arrival on the moon.

The early days of the space program often sound incredible to me, and they do note that this plan wasn't really very seriously considered, but it certainly grabs the imagination.

Can you even begin to imagine landing on the moon fifty years ago with the promise that someone will probably develop the technology to bring you back in the next couple of years?

Lyrics Gone

I've spent many hours behind a sound board, and nearly as many behind a computer running everything that appears onscreen during various church events. Anyone with similar experiences will likely appreciate this:

Say what you will about hymnals, they never went blank in the middle of a song. In between verses you never looked down and realized there were suddenly no words on the page. But that happens to worship songs sometimes.

Don't miss some of the great comments. Via my pastor from college, Aaron Telecky (on Facebook).

(Of course, in my family the above quote isn't exactly true. It was fairly common to look down at your hymnal and find that someone next to you had  just flipped it closed.)

WP7

Sounds like a mess, which is a shame. I think WP7 shows some great promise, but confusion like this isn't helping anyone.

Anti-Credit

So, in contrast to my recent Apple praise related to iTunes, there are some distinctly rough edges in iCal (version 5.0.2 on Mac OS X version 10.7.3).

My task? Merge a few calendars that didn't really make sense anymore. For example, I had a calendar for Iowa (where I went to school) and a calendar for Madison (where I live). I didn't want to get rid of the events on the Iowa calendar, but I didn't plan to add anything new to it. Additionally, although the Madison calendar is fine now, it is unlikely that I'll live in Madison for my entire life. So, I wanted to combine those calendars into a single Home calendar that would be applicable regardless of where I happen to be living.

Attempt 1: Drag one calendar onto the other. Unfortunately, drag and drop fails here. You can drag the calendars into a new order, but you can't drag one into another.

Attempt 2: Use 'Select All' to select all the events in one calendar, and drag them onto the other calendar. I had some luck with this, but there wasn't a good way to truly select all of the events for a given calendar. I could select all for a month, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do more than that. Since I'm talking about more than 10 years worth of calendar data, that wasn't really practical. I did find some indications online that you used to be able to use View > Show Search Results with no search term to get a full event list. This doesn't seem to work today.

Attempt 3: Export one calendar and re-import that to the other calendar. I thought for sure this was going to work, and it looked very promising. However, I'm glad I was slow to delete the exported calendar. I have all of my calendars in iCloud, and it seems that importing one exported calendar into another calendar in iCloud just doesn't work. The imported events appear, but then all slowly disappear until none of the imported events remain.

Attempt 4: Export both calendars. Create new non-iCloud calendars. Import the exported calendars to the new local calendar. Delete the exported iCloud calendars. This worked, but it left me with local calendars where I wanted iCloud calendars. That should be easy to fix, right?

It turns out there is actually a decent support article for moving local calendars to iCloud after the initial setup, but I didn't know that until I was done. What I was hoping for was the ability to drag a calendar from the 'On My Mac' section of the list to the iCloud section of this list. Unfortunately that isn't possible. What I ended up doing was turning iCloud calendar syncing off and then back on. This was a bit unnerving (because I hadn't read the above article - and because during the process my calendars disappeared for a few minutes), but it did work.

Simple Tasks

How did I not know about this competition while I was in college?

The team spent more than 5,000 hours constructing the machine that accomplished every task ever assigned in the competition's 25-year history, including peeling an apple, juicing an orange, toasting bread, making a hamburger, changing a light bulb, loading a CD and sharpening a pencil.

Via The Verge.

Credit

I was reminded today that I don't always give Apple enough credit.

My wife and I recently signed up for iTunes Match, partly with the goal of consolidating our music so that we both have access to the same content, ratings, etc. Although this has gone well overall, we were disappointed to discover that the playlist syncing doesn't support nested playlists. This is something that I made heavy use of in my own iTunes setup. For example, I'd have a Christmas playlist based on genre, and then in other playlists include a criteria for 'playlist is not Christmas' to keep the Christmas music segregated. Given that limitation, I've been doing the iTunes version of spring cleaning by creating all new playlists that don't rely on nested logic.

Today I got home from work and Kari was playing music from one of my new playlists, but it was including Christmas songs. It turned out that I had forgotten to add that logic, so this particular playlist was just a list of music by our favorite artists. My new task was to update this playlist from:

Any of
-Artist contains Artist A
-Artist contains Artist B

To:

All of
-All of
--Genre does not contain Christmas
--Genre does not contain Holiday
-Any of
--Artist contains Artist A
--Artist contains Artist B

Adding the genre logic was easy, but I wasn't sure how to take my existing list of artists and move them into the new 'any of' subsection without reentering the whole list. I was extremely pleased to find that this worked with a simple drag and drop. Credit to Apple for making that work just like I wanted it to, but that wasn't what impressed me the most.

I was making these edits on my MBP, but the music was playing from Kari's computer. When I saved my change, we were in the middle of a Christmas song. My playlist change went from my computer, up to iCloud, down to Kari's computer, and immediately excluded the current song from the playlist. Not only that, but rather than stopping the music in confusion, it quite happily moved on to another song that was still in the updated playlist.

It is easy to take behaviors like that for granted, but it is worth stopping to give credit to apps that do just what you want every now and then.

Glasses as Gadgets

I saw this article on Forbes when it first came out. It struck me as being a bit off, but I wasn't quite sure what to say about it. Coming back to it now, I still think it worth a short comment. This paragraph seems to more or less sum up Juliet's point:

Why are Google Glasses a big deal? Because they may be the beginning of the end of gadgets. Today, gadgets like smart phones, tablets, and MP3 players are built from the ground up to serve specific technological purposes. A smart phone exists to make calls. A MP3 player exists to play music. In the future, we'll see more of the opposite: everyday objects that already exist (like glasses) or spaces (like a room) that have technology built into them. As the functionality of gadgets becomes built into these everyday objects, the gadgets themselves start to become irrelevant.
I think my issue with this is two-fold:
  • First, I think the distinction she sees between 'gadgets' and 'everyday objects' only serves to artificially postpone the change she foresees past the end of her article. In reality, the change that she thinks might be coming is already here. It is reflected in the convergence of devices that has been occurring for years. Does an iPhone really exist just to make calls? No, in fact, one of the groundbreaking things about the original iPhone was that it relegated making calls to an app on a device that was equally well suited for other tasks. Similarly, but from the opposite side, are glasses really just an everyday object? Aren't they also a gadget of sorts? After all, they are built from the ground up to serve a specific purpose.
  • Second, the change in question hasn't resulted in the irrelevance of gadgets, only their convergence. My iPhone is a phone, a camera, and an MP3 player (among other things). It may have made my home phone, my point and shoot camera, and my iPod irrelevant, but it hasn't made gadgets irrelevant. It has just created a new convergent gadget.
I guess I might sum that up with this statement: If the gadget of the future further converges with my glasses, my watch, my wallet, or my wedding ring it will be no less a gadget, and no less relevant.

Hoverboard

Looks like Hoverboard preorders have been extended through 3/27/12.

And although full hovering technology isn't expected until 2015, be assured your Hoverboard will gently glide over most level surfaces (it will not, however, work on water).

I'm just disappointed that it comes with the pole already removed.

Speaking of Star Wars

I'm a sucker for real world calculations applied to sci-fi:

But, before you go off to start building your apocalyptic weapon, do bear in mind two things. Firstly, the two million death stars is mostly from the Earth's core which we would all really rather you didn't remove. And secondly, at today's rate of steel production (1.3 billion tonnes annually), it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work. So once someone notices what you're up to, you have to fend them off for 800 millennia before you have a chance to fight back.

Via Forbes.