- Send Us Your Thoughts (YouTube) — from the excellent British comedians Mitchell and Webb comes this take on viewer comments in the news. (via Steve Buttry’s News Foo writeup)
- Amazon proves that REST doesn’t matter for Cloud APIs — with the death of WS-* and their prolix overbearing complexity, the difference between REST and basic XML RPC is almost imperceptible. As this essay points out, the biggest cloud API is Amazon’s and it’s built on RPC instead of REST.
- Kinect Piano (YouTube) — turn any surface into a piano. (via David Ascher on Twitter)
- Google Maps Label Readability — detailed analysis of the design decisions that make Google’s labels so much more readable than the competition’s. Fascinating to see the decisions that go into programmatically building a map: leaving white space around cities, carefully avoiding clustering, even how adding an extra level of information can make things simpler.
"kinect" entries
Video pick: The inevitable merging of Kinect and “Minority Report”
Kinect + open drivers + MIT = the future of UI.
A marriage of Kinect and the creativity of MIT has led to this: The first baby steps toward "Minority Report"-inspired interfaces.
Four short links: 8 December 2010
User-Contributed News, Web Services, Kinect Piano, and Designing Maps
7 areas beyond gaming where Kinect could play a role
How Kinect could apply to art, education, health and other domains.
Microsoft's Kinect has implications that go beyond gaming. From medicine to learning to participatory art, Alex Howard considers ways Kinect's interface could shift our computing-based interactions.
Four short links: 1 December 2010
Kinect Hacking, Crowdsource, Lists, and Tablets
- 2 Kinects 1 Box (YouTube) — merging data from two Kinects in real time, to get astonishing 3D information. (via Chelfyn Baxter)
- Crowdsource is not Open Source (Simon Phipps) — there are some businesses that don’t understand this, and exploit community for their sole benefit in the name of open source. Ignorance of the four freedoms is dangerous.
- We Like Lists Before We Don’t Want to Die (Spiegel) — fascinating interview with Umberto Eco. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
- $139.99 Android Tablet at Toys R Us — sales of Android tablets (as well as Apple tablets) could help bolster the after-market accessory opportunity for wireless players, including modem makers and wireless operators.
(via Sylvain Carle on Twitter)
Four short links: 15 November 2010
Prison Blogging, 3D Hacks, Budget Simulation, and Enterprise Sales
- Between the Bars — snail-mail-to-blogs transcription service for prisoners, to make visible stories that would otherwise be missed. there is a religous program here called Kairo’s in the program inmates are given letters and drawings made by small children not one in that program did not cry, after reading the words of incouragement from those kids. An unmissable reminder of the complexity of human stories, suffering, and situations, the posts range from the banal to the riveting. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
- Kinect Opensource News — a roundup of open source Kinect hacks. I like memo’s gestural interface the best. Impressive stuff for just a few days’ access to the open source drivers. (via Andy Baio)
- You Fix The Budget (NY Times) — a simpler version of Budget Hero, which lets you choose policies and see their effect on the deficit. Unlike Budget Hero, the NYT app doesn’t discuss non-deficit consequences of the actions (social consequences, ripple-on economic effects). Like Budget Hero, you can’t add your own policies: you’re forced to choose from the ones presented. Real life is more complex than this simulation, but even something this simple is powerful: by interacting with this, you understand the magnitude of (say) education vs healthcare, and you realize how much of the current debate is froth.
- Meet the New Enterprise Customer, a Lot like the Old Enterprise Customer — Ben Horowitz nails the difficulty of selling to the enterprise, and drives a stake through the “they’ll buy our service with their credit cards, like consumers do” myth. xcellent enterprise sales reps will guide a company through their own purchasing processes. Without an enterprise sales rep, many companies literally do not know how to buy new technology products. (via Mike Olson on Twitter)