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Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has a round up of the lat­est think­ing on and pro­to­types for new user inter­faces. Some feel way out there (along with rocket boots and meals in pill form) oth­ers closer to home.

For me, the more suc­cess­ful inter­faces these days are the ones that min­imise the role of the device – that quite lit­er­ally nar­row the gap between the user and the infor­ma­tion they need. Adap­tive Path’s Aurora inter­face, part of an ini­tia­tive by Mozilla Labs, does this quite well in the way it uses rel­a­tive size and perspective/depth to show the most appro­pri­ate infor­ma­tion. How­ever, the stack­ing of infor­ma­tion around the frame and the new selec­tion tool feel too rooted in the old desk­top and mouse metaphor to really move things for­ward.

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The ever-excellent Slideshare is run­ning its annual World’s Best Pre­sen­ta­tion con­test. Brows­ing through, there are some really nice decks with inter­est­ing con­tent. You can eas­ily see the influ­ence Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen and Duarte Design have had (all for the bet­ter) in the war against death by Pow­er­Point. I par­tic­u­larly like the following:

But…

The thing that strikes me look­ing through most of the entries is that the pre­sen­ter is almost entirely super­flu­ous. Surely pre­sen­ta­tions, at their best, are about pre­sen­ters mak­ing a con­nec­tion with an audi­ence – not sim­ply a set of slides that can be read through (how­ever pretty they are).

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As men­tioned here and many, many other places, Vista has taken quite a beat­ing since its launch. At times, it seems that the weight of neg­a­tive opin­ion means that Vista is doomed to fail­ure (prompt­ing reports that Microsoft might sim­ply move on and focus on Win­dows 7). But is the per­cep­tion accurate?

Enter the Mojave Exper­i­ment. Get a bunch of Vista refuseniks in a room, show them ‘the lat­est Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem’ code­named Win­dows Mojave and film their reac­tions. Then tell them they’ve just expe­ri­enced Vista.

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