king talk

Some days ago I hat the opportunity to check out Siri, an iPhone app which acts like your personal assistant and can be controlled mostly via speech recognition. It‘s really working pretty good, I have tested it and was really surprised. You can see a real test at this demo video. Unfortunately this App is US only. Siri acts like a real assistant, understands what you‘re saying, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Today, Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask it to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night. Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. This app may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding.

You can converse with Siri through combinations of spoken requests, typed keywords and phrases, or graphical user interface requests. As you express what you want to do in the way most comfortable to you, Siri applies a patented algorithm to sift through multitudes of possible interpretations, applying what it knows about your location, the time, your preferences, and your task context to determine the most probable understanding of your intent. Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life – from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

Siri was finally aquired by Apple two months ago. Now that it is an Apple property, I don’t expect the virutal assistant technology to make its way on to competing devices — especially Android phones. Maybe we will find this gadget in other future Apple devices?

Multitasking UIs in webOS (left) and iOS 4

So, the iOS has joined the multitasking party. Expectations were pretty high, given that Apple has taken a lot of time to deliver this feature and Palm (now HP) has already brought a great take on multitasking to the market with their webOS.

Perhaps it is my experience with webOS that makes the iOS multitasking feel so awkward to me. An I am not talking about the fact that only certain services (like data, location or audio) can run in the background. I am talking about the interface and the user experience – usually fields where Apple is extremely strong.

But this time I am disappointed and I don’t even know what exactly is wrong. With webOS, I instantly had a coherent mental model that was properly represented by the interface. Open apps were windows, when I throw an app away, it is closed and the process will stop.

In iOS, there is no simple way to completely close an app. EVERYTHING ends up as an open app in the app tray when the home button is pressed – even applications that do not have multitasking capabilities and therefore don’t even maintain state. This is especially annoying because it breaks the trust of the user. Also, it completely clutters the little tray.

Even worse, the process of removing a »running« app is very complicated. It involves double-pressing the home button (which potentially kicks you out of your app if you do it too slow), then performing a long press on an icon (artificially slowing down the user) and then tapping the little close icon (which is a quite small target).

Again, the comparison helps. In webOS, you are performing the same gesture two times: swipe up from the gesture area to go to the application switcher and then swipe up the app card to throw it away. Sure, this gesture has to be learned, but so does the interaction that Apple uses.

Wired also has a comparison of mobile multitasking. They take a look at Android as well.

The guys from imaGynize created an Augmented Driving App for your iPhone. The idea is not actually new, but it‘s interesting, that it´s working quite good. If you are often driving on highways or country roads, then you have to check this app (price: $ 2,99) with real-time object detection with up to 10 fps including the following features: Dynamic augmented reality overlays for lanes and vehicles, lane detection, lane change warning, vehicle detection and low distance information.

The system is designed to work in good lighting conditions during daytime for visible lane markings on highways and country roads and for detection of regular cars. For operation, a fix mount is required. You have to follow the safety notes and consider the setup instructions for optimum performance.

Remember iScraper, our iPhone app? Well, it also runs like a charm on the new iPad – and the larger images really enhance the experience. Now I’m looking forward to see people on the street, waving their iPads in the air…

I think I am not exaggerating when I say that I am quite immersed in digital lifestyle. I send and receive tons of email, I use Twitter and Facebook a lot and almost all the news I get are somehow channeled through an RSS reader, Digg or some other kind of syndication. I’m being told all the time that in todays networld, you have to be everywhere at the same time, everything has to be instant and everyone needs to maintain a variety of communication channels at any given time.

Well, I did all that for quite some time and to be completely frank: it sucks. The biggest problem for me seams to be, that I am surrounded by applications that all somehow want something from me. The RSS reader tells me how many really interesting articles I am still supposed to read, Growl and Skype are doing a terrific job at reminding me about who went on- or offline just a second ago and thanks to push email I get notified about new messages in real time because every email could be really important, right!?

I found my enemy. His face: a red badge with a number on my application’s icons. His name: notifications. Over time I started feeling so overwhelmed by them that I couldn’t bear it anymore. So over the past month, I gradually started to take out those little bastards one by one.

Here’s a little list of the naggers I got rid of and why. This might not work for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, right?

Good advice right after the break.

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We wanted to get some feedback on our iScraper application. So we grabbed a video camera, an iPhone and went to Marienplatz, the central spot in Munich. See iScraper in action in the video!

Tired of shooting at virtual people? Come on kids. Daddy got a new toy for your iPhone. Finally you can blast your friends… This game is based on the color tracking method like we used it for Augmented Pong. After you defined the opponents shirt color you can go on playing. I like the idea of using the iPhone as tool which engages you to run through your city instead of sitting at home and playing the Sudoku App…

via engadget mobile

Hey kids! Your new favorite app has arrived at Apples App Store! We call it iScraper and it is our first submission to the store.

So, what does it do, you ask? iScraper is a fun little application that lets you view the worlds ten tallest buildings in a fascinating new way. Just move your device up to see the top of a building. Move it back down to return to the ground. Then just tilt your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad in order to switch to the next image.

You can get it now for free on the App Store.

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

Today I want to feature a really nice project for kids. Although the video looks simulated, the idea is good. Just take the iPhone and put it in a box. By browsing the pages the young user can discover new worlds of interaction. I like the playful approach of that application, you don´t need to read user instructions first, it´s just about touching and having fun. Would be interesting to fill up that interface with some information about natural sciences and publish it for teens. How would that one look like?

via mobileart.jp