king talk

It happened yesterday evening. My tummy asked for something to eat and I just wanted to give him a quick and fatty answer. So I just went to one of Munich’s McDonalds at Tal 6. Unfortunately the order point was to crowded, but then I realized these four huge »Easy Order« terminals.

First I didn´t know what to do, but then I realized that this one could be a much quicker way to post a order. I just put in my credit card and the main menu opened up. It´s the same routine like you know it at the standard order point. They even have the same questions like »Do you want it as a take-away or do you want to eat here?« You´ve got the whole card at one touchscreen. It was a nice experience, touching the Big Mac icon and placing your order right there.

I received a little print-out after I finished the order process and received my stuff directly at the vacantly wrapping counter. After all I think that this is a good step in the right direction, the User Interface is much more better than the Deutsche Bahn terminal, but could be improved a little bit in terms of User Experience… continue reading …

We received a mail from a friend this morning, who told us that our Arduino Icon Redesign was brought to life. The Massimo Banzi´s students of CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) baked a cake based on the icon for the Arduino IDE.

And Massimo Banzi seemed to be surprised, but happy. How long did he spent eating this Arduino Mega Cake…?

via Arduino Blog

Does anyone know about the litl? It´s a so called »Webbook«, a tiny computer without anything, just made for browsing the web and reading RSS-Feeds. This gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. The hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by this Boston-based startup, rejects three decades of convention. But what can you do with it? Just browsing the internet seems to be nice, but the developers should asked theirselfs: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? (John Thackara)

If you want to buy a litl, you a get a small computer which is radically downsized for about 700 bucks (!!!). It has a 12″ display, an Atom Processor with 1,6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 2 GB Flash Memory, 1x USB and a 802.11g Wifi chip, that´s it. It even hasn´t enough space for a operating system so they offer you »litl OS« which has two modes. A simple grid view and a 3D view based on the z-axis which reminds me of Apple Time Machine.

In my opinion these product has three main failures. First of all it´s a tool which can only do one thing, browsing the internet and receiving atom feeds. This is a nice idea, but chumby is already doing stuff like that. You can get this small device which is able to play wifi radio, play games and use one of 1500 additional applications for about 100 dollar. And chumby offers you a touch sensitive display,…

which brings me to the next failure. It is the way the user is interacting with the product. You can chosse between a reduced QWERTY keyboard, a touch pad and a remote… Why? What´s about touch? What´s about motion tracking? A radical product like these is screeming for new ways of interaction. The litl offers you a very light weight computer with a small display. A touch interface would be a more direct way of navigating and browsing the content especially in 3D mode. Last but not least…

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Dear friends of the king, may I introduce you to the Pomegranate! The worlds first mobile device that combines a traditional smartphone with handy tools like a mobile projector, a coffee brewer or a shaver. Watch the videos on the website – they are hilarious!

The phone is actually a marketing idea for a part of Canada with a name that I always mispronounce. The bridge between the two is actually sort of weak, but this doesn’t take away the awesome from the device!