B1BLOG

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. Take a look at the demo:

More inter­est­ing to me is the book­mark­ing and his­tory concept – also on the Moz­illa page. The inclu­sion of con­text ele­ments to jog your memory is inspired and the timeline design is very pretty.

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:

[slide­share id=504408&doc=thirst-upload-800x600-1215534320518707–8&w=425]

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).

So while the com­pet­i­tion may show­case some of the world’s best slide decks, for the best present­a­tions you’ll still have to look to TED.

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.

Now of course this will be a fresh install on a pretty tricked out machine but as a way of coun­ter­ing the neg­at­ive per­cep­tion it’s pretty good. Now, if only they cre­ated this a year back before the anti-vista ava­lanche gained so much power and sup­por­ted it with a whole range of grass roots activ­ity I think it would have had more of a chance.

And, of course, the sense of hav­ing to be suckered to get the mes­sage doesn’t gen­er­ally go down well – it took just 2 days for this spoof out-takes video to be pos­ted in response.