The same guys who brought you the bubble input have created a crazy scratch UI that allows you to scratch and tap almost any surface. By sensing the sound and the finding the peaks and valleys in the waveform the system can tell if you’re scratching a shape or tapping on the surface.
Read More
The more time I spend using computers, the more I realize that the ways in which we interact with them suck. Typing is a pain, and I’m very inefficient using a physical keyboard. When using an on-screen keyboard, I’m even less efficient. Until someone invents a really superb way to interact with computers, I guess the best I can hope for is the crocodile keyboard layout for on-screen text entry.
Wow, hats off to some of the eggheads at Carnegie Mellon. They’ve developed a touchscreen that can actually produce tactile buttons by using latex, acrylic, and a little air pump. Imagine a touchscreen-only phone that pops up little keys when you open the on-screen keyboard. It’s like haptic feedback on steroids.
Android is now available—yeah, it’s true—but you’re hard-pressed to find any review that raves about its user interface. (Ryan Block, of Engadget fame, called it “very raw” last week on Tekzilla, which is right on the money, I think.) But, in an alternate world, maybe where dogs walk people, these alternative user interfaces were developed.
The Astonishing Tribe, the same group that developed Android’s user interface, just published a handful of what-could-have-beens, mockups and in-progress alternative Android user interfaces. Some look better than others—Asia Cute looks tremendous, as does Open GLES—but all of them are worth checking out.
Given that Android is free as in freedom, perhaps some developer will create a user interface that doesn’t look like it was designed by committee. One can hope, at least.
via Gizmodo
Some players do not mess around, from Wow Insider
Really good news for serious World of Warcraft players. It looks like Blizzard, starting with Wrath of the Lich King will store all your customized UI odds and ends—dungeon maps, coordinates, threat meters, etc.—server-side. That means if you’re away from your main WoW machine, you’ll still have the same interface you’re used to, and not the bare-bones default one the game ships with.
That’s what someone who’s playing the beta right now claims, at least. It could well be that by the time the game goes gold, Blizzard may change its mind. That wouldn’t make any sense, though, as this is a feature that’s been requested for quite some time now.
Cool. Looks like the HTC Touch Diamond (and presumably the HTC Touch Diamond Pro) can actually do multi-touch. Not only multi-touch on the screen itself, but all the way down around the navi-wheel and buttons. [Update – Apparently it’s just around the navigation buttons that the multi-touch works.] The feature is revealed when using HTC’s Nav Debug Tool but so far doesn’t have any practical use beyond simple testing. However, HTC updates its ROMs on a fairly regular basis so maybe we’ll someday see this feature come to light for normal people like you and me.
From MobileTopSoft:
Here is how it works:
* The area around the navi-wheel is actually a capacitive touch-area with multi-touch
* it may allow using finger pinching gesture and finger spreading gesture (zooming for example) and also implement 2 finger moving for panning gesture for example too.
* Not all capacitive touch-areas are multi-touch at the same time!
* You can try it for yourself at XDA-Developers NavDbgTool.exe, you must have registered account there in order to download
[via Gizmodo]
Starting in June, we’ll see a bunch of ASUS laptops shipping with the Express Gate instant-on UI. The interface was created by DeviceVM and is called Splashtop, although OEMs can apparently change the name to suit their needs, hence ASUS calling it Express Gate. It’s branded as “a light-weight operating system that allows consumers to use their computers seconds after hitting the power button.”
We’ll see more in early June as Express Gate gets shown off at Computex in Taiwan, but the above video should give you a pretty good idea of how everything works.
Here’s some more video of the Touch Diamond’s interface. The various devices I’ve seen have at times been a little laggy with the photos and the tilt sensor — stuff like that. It may have to do with the fact that they’re connected to the Wi-Fi network here along with 150 other people. Hopefully the production versions will be a bit snappier. The device demo’d in the main presentation hummed along pretty well except for hanging up on a particular article of a graphics-intensive car web site.
Higher resolution video available here.
I can’t quite put my finger on it (pun intended) but this interface looks similar to something I’ve seen before. The “Smart Touch” UI by Gigabyte for its line of GSmart phones will be available in Europe “after May,” so there’s no telling if we’ll see something like this here in the US. Actually, we’ll see a lot of stuff like this if we haven’t already, as most major mobile device manufacturers and software developers work to replicate the UI of a wildly popular phone that’s been on the market for a while.
via the::unwired
Esteban and his partner Javier sent us this demo of a $20 multi-touch screen they built as a thesis project. It’s quite cool. This one is a few inches across and can sense multiple inputs and even pressure. He writes:
Javier Jorge and me started with this project one year ago for our thesis. We are Computer Engineer students at the “Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Fisicas y Naturales” of Cordoba University, in Argentina. Our initial idea was to develop a multi touch technology similar to the one Jeff Han did, but trying to make it fit in a LCD screen without increasing size too much.
The prototype seen in the video is a proof of concept of the technology we made. It has an active area (where the multi touch is sensed) of 7cmx7cm.
It basically uses IR light emitted from the back to “see” the objects that touches the screen. We can detect any IR-reflective object, specially, fingertips. The functionality is similar to Microsoft’s ThinSight, but we don’t use the IR detector grid. We are keeping the sensing technology confidentially for the moment.
The technology can be integrated to an LCD screen. We didn’t have the time to do it (but we tested it). Because IR light can go through the LCD, we can place our sensing technology behind it.
The prototype dimensions does not reflect the size that this technology requires, the sensing technology could be 3mm thin and it requires another space to place some processing hardware.
The prototype cost us around 60pesos (~US$20). We calculate that a 20” should not cost more than US$100 (without including the LCD screen).
We are looking for some company that can invest in this technology, we want to finish it and make a product. I think that in 1.5 a final prototype could be ready and in 2 years a product.
Samsung has filed a patent for a phone that is operated with only your hands, but not on the phone. The idea is that you move you hand around and form gestures in the air to control the phone. The patent states that the hand movements would be captured in the phones camera and then translated into instructions for the phone.
As interesting as this technology is, it is only a patent, so who knows when, if ever, we we’ll see products using this on the market.
via GigaOM
Meizu just posted
about fifty pictures of the new MiniOne UI and what we’re seeing is considerably removed from the iPhone-alike it used to be. Apple’s concepts and ease-of-use are fair game, in my opinion. Copying their UI wholesale is just lazy.
Meizu MiniOne UI Updated [Giz]
The Register’s Bill Ray has an article about what we might expect from Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Danger, maker of the popular Sidekick operating system.
It seems that, according to Ray, Microsoft’s looking to shift away from Windows Mobile as a user interface towards Windows Mobile as a platform upon which developers can overlay their own shell-like user interfaces, a strategy evidenced by Microsoft’s interoperability announcement earlier today. He likens it to how Windows 3.1 gave way to a host of alternative interfaces. I clearly remember Packard Bell Navigator as one such shell. That oughta date me. Anyone else use Packard Bell Navigator?
Microsoft may leverage Danger’s expertise in the proxy browsing and messaging areas that work so well on the Sidekick. I used the original Sidekick and the Sidekick II for quite a while and I miss the seamless synchronization of my e-mails and contacts to T-Mobile’s site. We might see something like that out of Microsoft in the near future.
Why is Microsoft dancing with Danger? [The Register]
Big surprise here. The wonderful “multitouch” interface used by the iPhone, iPod touch, and new MacBook Air is; A) not Apple’s invention, B) famous because of Apple, and C) will begin appearing in more and more devices.
I don’t have access to a Voyager at the moment and I’m not sure if this was apart of the firmware upgrade that went out last month. Can any Voyager owners comment? K. Thx.
While this isn’t as sexy as the HTC Touch interface — dig the cube, man — this new piece of software from PointUi mimics some iPhone functionality while hiding the hard mess of WinMo6 under a pretty wrapper. As Michael points out, maybe if I had this on my Shadow I’d answer my phone more, but I doubt it. We’ll give it a whirl once the vodka passes out of my bloodstream. Until then, enjoy the video.
So you’ve got your iPhone and your iPod Touch and your Microsoft Surface, and maybe you’ve got yourself a little pink DS lite. What do these things have in common? Two things: they all share a trendy interface — the touchscreen — and they all will be forgotten in a few years’ time. The touchscreen is a minor blip on the giant radar of human interface devices, and it won’t be long before these fragile, useless contraptions are relegated to the dust bin of history. Why do I take this utterly insane position? The reasons are multifold.
Little is known about these spy shots of a new interface designed for Sony-Ericsson’s UIQ. What I see is a touch-based interface that is half iPhone, half HTC Juno. You would think a guy snapping photos during a corporate presentation would be willing to cough up a little more information!
Durrr… Hi. I’m a phone manufacturer/mobile OS programmer. Durrr… urm…. durr. Hold on. I just had to make pasgetti. So I sawed a man in the Apel stor who had a cool fone called the apelphone. it had a big screen… ICE CREAM!… and it was touch swansitive. You could move your finger on the screen like you were pushing boogers off of the screen and he had a boogie in his nose!
So I made this operating sys called Touch and it is from the future! It has booger movies and takes pictures and its better cause you can use your fanger or your pencil or your peeper! HA!
You are so stupid, apelfone! You don’t have pencil controls! The sad thing is we’ll prolly sell a MILIONGAZILION of these and I’ll be so happy :):):):(:). I can go see Air Bud!
S60 Touch Interface Launched [AllAboutSymbian]
The UI appears to be tiled and whatever it is you wish to see will be brought to the forefront whilst everything else stays in the background. I think it kicks much ass and definitely adds a unique UI to the market that looks very easy to use. Again, we shall see what happens and if this actually materializes. I, for one, cannot wait.
Patent [via Mad4Mobile]
