Surface from Microsoft

I really thought Microsoft was sleeping quietly, taking 5 years to release Vista, a "little bit better" operating system than was they had before.
Vista is not that great perhaps because they were concentrating on their awesome project "Surface". Taking a bite from "Minority Report" a lot from "Jeff Han" and other multitouch projects. Anyways, the result is there, it is nice, it lets you imagine so much possibility!
The best things I have seen on the demos, is the interaction with devices such as Mobile Phones or Digital Cameras. The movie speaks by itself.


You can also check this video of a live demonstration of the product here.

I'm not sure that the best place for such a desk is in your living room. I would feel quite sad if all gathering between friends would end up with everybody looking at a screen on the short table or on the dining table. More likely in an office perhaps, in my opinion.

What about:
- You put your credit card on it and you see all your latest transactions
- You put your car key on it and you record an itinary that you'll "feed" to your car
- You put your Ipod (...ok, your Zune) on it and it plays the music that's in it
etc.

Recent Video on Jeff Han work from Perspective Pixel

This video has been taken by the famouse french blogger, Loïc Le Meur.
You can see that the multitouch screen user interface developped by Jefferson Han has improved one step further.
Enjoy!

"Qwerty" keyboards against usability

Our "Qwerty" keyboards were invented in late 1870's by Remington.
The layout has been designed this way because the old mechanical typewritters, using an alphabetical order, would easily get their keys jam as typists were typing too fast.
So Remington created a way to place consecutive keys as far as possible one from each other to slow down the typing speed and hence, avoid keys to get stuck together.

So today we're still using a 130 years old keyboard layout that was designed to slow down the typist!
Other companies came up with intuitive keyboards layout but could never make a break out on the market!
Like XPert. Here is their keyboard layout.

As they say on their website:

The XPert Keyboard moves only two high frequency letters, A + N (not six) and adds a second E key (the most common letter at 13%). The change is easy to learn. And it optimizes key sequences to be struck by opposite hands, the fastest way of typing. With these 3 moves, the XPeRT keyboard goes from digraph disabled to speed enabled.

=> Their keyboard layout is not so different from the "Qwerty" layout which would make it easy to learn

There's been also the Dvorak project with a totally different layout.

According to what they say on their website:

Easier, Healthier. Your fingers travel over the keys using only one half to two thirds the movement required with the standard keyboard. Fully 70% of all letters used are on the ‘home row’, and work is shared logically between the various fingers, according to frequency of use. The Dvorak keyboard is designed to naturally draw in to use all fingers of the hand.

Enjoy saving 35% to 50% of both your time, and finger movement. This is 17 - 30 minutes of movement saved, every hour you type. An 8 hour day, translates from 2 hours, 36 minutes, up to 4 hours of typing movement saved.

Here is an interesting chart taken from XPert Website:


Anyways, both of these projects are hosted on extremly ugly websites! If their sales forces are as sexy as their websites, then I'm not surprised we're still using "Qwerty" keyboards.

To close this post and staying in the same subject. I've been amazed to discover some years ago the concept of projected keyboards (as the Celluon one) which allows you to do not have to carry with you a large keyboard to type for a small device such as mobile phones / PDAs/ BlackBerriess...
I'm not sure wether or not it is easy to use, if someone tried already I'd be happy to read his feedbacks.

And bellow is a quick explanation of the concept.

Bumtop 3D desktop prototype

Bumtop 3D has been working on a new way of organizing your desktop on your computer. They started from the idea that people don't want to have all their files on their computer desktops arranged in a neat and grilled way. They think that computer desktops should look like your real desktop with piles of documents arranged in the way you're used to arrange them. So they came up with this very nice and interesting prototype:

There are great inventions behind this prototype. But I believe that the postulate is wrong, you don't want your computer desktop to be as messy as your real desktop, you have a computer in order to organize your documents, pictures, videos... in a tidy way.

It is not the first time that "piles" concept is introduced. There has been some rumors that Longhorn or Mac OS X would get this "pile" concept in their OS.

But they have done some great improvements in the way you can organize your piles and most of all, browse them. You can view them as a standard grid, the fish eye technic is great and the fan-out seems very handy, the leafer is nice too and reminds me of CoverFlow albums covers browsing technic (sold to apple for Itunes).

Giving a weight and a stronger inertia to the files according to their importance is a nice field of research.

GUI of online Newspapers - Case Study

One of the main reason why NewsPapers are striving to move to an internet edition lies in the difficulty to fit in a computer screen the content of a newspaper page even-though the size of most of newspaper have reduced during these last years (in 1999 67% were broadsheets formats, in 2005 only 58% remained broadsheets) and even-tough computer screens get bigger and bigger.

The main French daily NewsPapers, Le Figaro, (350 000 and 450 000 copies daily) seems to have found a good way of putting on the web their entire daily issues by developing a nicely done interface. The challenge of making something readable was great.

As I live in China and am a passionate of news and current affairs, I am registered to their online edition. I'll detail bellow the main structure of their online edition.

Once you entered your login and password you get to the first page of the paper, the actual paper I mean, and as we may guess, the articles are unreadable, you can read some of the titles according to the size of your screen. (See bellow image)

On the right hand-side you have tabs that allow you to chose which page you want to reach by displaying each page in a small thumbnail.
You can also click on the "display all thumbnails to get the entire issue in thumbnails. (See bellow image).

Get to the page you want and you can see that when you point your mouse on any of the pages corners, the corner folds on itself to show you that you can get to the next/previous page.
At the bottom of the interface you have this little menu allowing you to activate many functions. You can hide and show this menu by clicking on the top of it. (See bellow image).

So now I'll show bellow the 2 ways to get a closer look to the articles and being able to actually read the articles.

1) Circle with your mouth the part you want to read or click directly on it. (See bellow image)


You'll then get in a full size window (integrated in your browser window) a close up of the page at the place where you've clicked or the area that you've circled. You then get this view where you can start reading your article, you can move your mouse according to the place you want to read and it will bring you to it. You can close the window, minimize it or expand it. (See Image Bellow)


2) In the full page view, place your cursor over the title of an article and you'll get a bubble with the beginning of the article and its popularity (voted by the readers). (See image bellow).

If you click directly on the title of the article you'll bring a full size window (integrated in your browser window) of the article in a selection-able text block. (See Image bellow)


You can then chose to read it as a block of text or in a 2 column layout. (See image bellow).


So in a general way the User Interface of this online newspaper is quite well done. You can easily browse between the pages of your favorite newspaper and then get to the articles you're interested in. The reading is then easy and not eye-tiring! The nice search features are a plus and the options you have to bookmark your favorite pages quite, a good idea.

Does any reader of this blog has experienced nice User Interfaces with online newspapers? What would be the improvement possibilities? What are the limits?

Multi-Touch interaction

As I was writting in my previous post, Apple created a nice and user-friendly way to scroll up and down, left and right, your documents on your computer without having to move your cursor to one of these small scrolling arrows at the corners of your documents.
This technology is one of the first (if not the first) multi-touch interaction program that has gone broadly public.
We know that apple has released patents on this technology, as these drawings has been seen on the web:

Then they applied this type of technology to their soon-to-be-released Iphone.

This technology would dramatically change the way we would interact with machines. For example, our hands and fingers won't have to fit any more to some fixed size keyboards, menus would completely change according to the type of sofware in use or according to the tastes and customs of each user. This trend would ease the usability of computers by using some simple gestures to interact with the computer.

But Apple is far from being the first one working on this type of user interface. Jeff Han, has shown to the public its fantastic work on multi-touch interaction operating system. The following movie speaks by itself.



I'll post more articles on this subject has I have tones of movies showing some breath taking multi-touch interaction operating systems.

2 fingers scrolling on Macintosh

This post will be my test post. And I was eager to present one of the greatest feature I use on my MacBook. It's the 2 fingers scrolling patented by Apple.
The principle really easy, instead of placing 1 finger on your track pad, place 2 finger and you can get great functions, you can scroll up and down, left and right.
If you keep your 2 fingers steady on the track pad and then you click, you'll get the equivalent of a "right click".
It takes a very short time to get used to it, but once you're done, you really can't stop using it. The "right click" feature is the most tricky to get right.
One thing that tells me that this feature is extremly user friendly is that now, each time I'm on an other laptop that does not have this feature I just can't stop trying scrolling with my 2 fingers, and the experience is exactly the same with all my friends using this great feature!
This might seems small peanut but this is a breliant idea!