As I was watching the game play video I didn’t even initially realize that the screen was shaking and beginning to break down from the “vibration” happening within the video.  Its very subtle initially.  Eventually the whole thing breaks down leaving a “pile” of pieces that can be grabbed and moved around on the screen. 

Definitely check it out!

First draft beta: cool.  I hope they keep up the creativity and come up with a different spin on it.

I can see that zooming and moving objects around on the screen would be very handy in CS4.  I work with large digital photos and a Wacom tablet right now but having the ability to pinch, squeeze, and spin the image to inspect and work on various parts would be a great feature. 

I wonder who will follow Adobe and be next to see a value in supporting multi-touch.  It certainly won’t be long until PC hardware supports this across the board.

More >> Wired Magazine

——————— From Wired Magazine ———————->

Consisting of five components linked by a tangle of wires, the first integrated circuit wasn’t particularly pretty. But it did prove that a device could be built with all its circuit components on the same piece of semiconducting material — in this case germanium — rather than using individual, discrete parts.

The circuit was the handiwork of Kilby, who was trying to solve the so-called “tyranny of numbers” problem. Though the invention of the transistor more than a decade earlier at Bell Labs had rendered vacuum tubes obsolete, engineers faced a vexing new problem by the late ’50s: All those discrete components — transistors, diodes, capacitors and the like — still had to be connected manually to form electronic circuits. This was impractical for obvious reasons, so Kilby came up with a new solution.

Realizing that the semiconductor was really the most-important ingredient in the circuit stew, he found that other passive components — like resistors and capacitors — could actually be made from the same material as the semiconductor. “I … realized that, since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situinterconnect to form a complete circuit,” Kilby explained in his 1976 article, “Invention of the IC.”

Flock is based on Mozilla and purports to be the browser for the modern Web.  Basically, the concept is that you finally have a single point of view on all your Web 2.0 social apps including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, WordPress.com and more. 

Its terrible frankly.  Maybe its just the UX/IA guy in me but all I see is a hyper cluttered browser with what look like old school HTML frames that contain all of a users’ “must see” information.  The more I play with it, the more confused I get about its value and purpose.  There are times that the browser includes 3 frames, multiple tabs, and several columns of info in the main panel.  Each of the columns in the main panel has what would appear to be a set of arrows for cycling through content but I can’t figure them out.  Half the content on the page changes when I press one.

I don’t mean to sound like a grumpy old man and I realize we’re talking about version 1 software here but it seems like everything Flock wishes to accomplish could be handled with a Firefox plugin or two (if it isn’t already) rather than a 4th browser for me to worry about.  I give it a resounding “meh” or at best a “we’ll see”.

Recently we discussed backcasting after a colleague (Nikki Roberg) had seen a presentation at the IA Summit in 2007.  In this case, backcasting was discussed as another tool or method we could use as IA’s to elicit client needs and set a strategy for success.  Personally, I had in mind a client who has a very complex set of business rules which are largely based upon the historical limitations of their AS400.  Moving forward (and off of this system) will require extreme change in how they do business to which I thought backcasting exercises may help to sort out the differences between business rules based on smart business versus those based on the past limitations they had faced with their IT options.  This would in turn help to create a road map for success that would allow us to work with them more strategically and add value to our services.

Backcasting has its origins, however, in energy planning and sustainability.  This makes perfect sense as a match up for strategic project planning in our case as we are all looking at creating sustainable practices and models that can help achieve success.  This article paraphrases J. Robinson as later saying “…backcasting is not only about how desirable futures can be attained, but that it can also be used to analyse the degree to which undesirable futures can be avoided or responded to”.

So how do all these things come together for me?  Well, I had just happened to be looking at a series of articles in this week’s Economist in which technology and the environment are discussed.  Sure enough, there’s an article called “The Frugal Cornucopian” which is all about Amory Lovins.

Now, I’m off to find more articles about backcasting…

It does make me wonder though, if devices like this start to take off, will we need to create yet another CSS to ensure usability?  It would be nice if a standard could be agreed upon to ensure some kind of cross platform “e-newspaper” standard… Good luck with that.

via Gizmodo:

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

While a lot of the driving force behind design on the Web is sexiness, we can’t forget fundamental usability and accessibility.  Federal guidelines require government institutions and some federally funded organizations to ensure a certain level of accessibility be baked into their electronic information mediums.  I don’t believe that there are federal guidelines for commercial sites, but Target stepped up regardless.  

I know Target takes its position in the community very seriously, it would be interesting to see if settling their case starts a greater trend in how corporations review their site’s accessibility and/or taking stock of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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