king talk

The Economist has put up a very nice web special about the sources of people’s inspiration. While the content is certainly worth a closer look, what completely consumed me was the navigation. Fragments of images are projected on cubes that are arranged in space. The interesting part is that there are certain angles from which the fragments form images.

While this kind of navigation is impressive and great fun to use, I can’t help the feeling that I might have read much more of the content if it was presented in a more straightforward way. The site illustrates just how fine the line between great user experience and distraction really is.

The RIA World conference will take place in Munich on November the 10th and 11th – and I will be there as a speaker. I am still working on the talk, but in general, it will be about the evolution of what is called »Rich Internet Applications«. Once they were the little brother of desktop applications. Today they are becoming more and more powerful and have already started to reach many kinds of devices like desktops, mobile phones and TV sets.

I’ll try to link concepts that are usually considered to belong to the domain of interaction design or installation design to the realm of internet applications.

As you might know, we built our own little schedule for the football world championship in South Africa. Of course, we needed a way to keep track of how many people are downloading it. So we quickly fired up TextMate and wrote a little HTML5 app for the iPad in order to stay up to date on the numbers.

As you see in the image, almost 13000 people have downloaded it, which makes us really proud. By the way, that number does not count the downloads from external sources like chip.de, where we have about the same number of downloads now, bringing the total count all the way up to 25000! Thanks to everyone who loaded the planner! Hope you like it.

Oh, and we recently also added a french version, so you can keep track of the world cup while having a baguette avec camembert!

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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