randomosity

I feared the track­pad. I am not the biggest fan of the track­pad. I gather that my name­sake, the CTO at Syn­aptics is respons­ible for some of the biggest break­throughs as the track­pad gained laptop cred dur­ing the 1990’s and so I feel a little loy­alty if only by asso­ci­ation. How­ever, my favour­ite means of input is the Track­Point — the little red nubby (that becomes less red real fast) that the IBM Think­Pad is most closely asso­ci­ated with. This is a very per­sonal area. I know many users that could just not get used to using a single fin­ger on an ultra-sensitive tiny joy­stick. The cursor and they could not become friends with the Track­Point in the equa­tion. Ran­dom sur­vey indic­ates most people still carry a mouse with them and con­nect it — this is the case for Track­Point as well as track­pad users. I am glan­cing around the cof­fee shop right now and frankly I am the only one rely­ing on the built in track­ing device. There’s a lot of users with big mice and small mice, but mice non­ethe­less. There is even a user care­fully bal­an­cing one on the arm of an easy chair — that can’t pos­sibly be com­fort­able.
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I make quick note of the announce­ment of Nokia’s new Haptikos tech­no­logy pre­viewed at the Red Fer­ret Journal. The tech­no­logy takes the touch screen that we all know (and love ;-)) and coordin­ates aud­ible and tact­ile feed­back that allows for sim­u­la­tion of screen keytaps. The com­par­ison with the iPhone’s mul­ti­t­ouch is obvi­ous, but one can­not but won­der how ges­tures could be vastly improved if you could actu­ally feel the pinch on screen. Ser­i­ously. This seems the dir­ec­tion that Nokia is work­ing and this pre­view explores a few of the little tech­nical details that have chal­lenged engin­eers thus far and still stand in the way of more soph­ist­ic­ated phys­ical inter­ac­tions with the screen. ‘Nuff said…this is an amaz­ing tech­no­logy tra­ject­ory. Nokia has very lim­ited cov­er­age at their ‘Way We Live Next’ website.

Inform­a­tion Aes­thet­ics, a con­sist­ently click­able and not­able blog, has Fernanda Vié­gas report­ing back from the InfoVis Con­fer­ence in Sac­re­mento this week. She has pos­ted a geat sum­mary of the key­note address by Mat­thew Eric­son. Brent Fitzger­ald blogged yes­ter­day about the panel that he, Fernanda, Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg and Hans Rosling are present­ing as well. Tak­ing a look at the con­fer­ence pro­gramme, I could not but wish I was there. Thanks for Fernanda (and hope­fully Brent) for giv­ing us an exper­i­ence as close to being there as possible.

By the way, today is the day of Fig, 7 Bru­maire, An CCXVI.

Update: Some­thing local and excit­ing: Social Net­work­ing Week at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto. Fernanda is speak­ing on Friday.

Per­haps there is an inner his­tor­ian within me. The latest spate of reviews fea­tur­ing the iPhone versus this chal­lenger and that has me think­ing that at the pace that we move today we don’t take enough time to reach a little fur­ther back to con­sider our for­ward pro­gress. This case in point, every­one eval­u­at­ing the iPhone or the iPod Touch (here­after ITouch — as I am sure Apple would have rather called it) seems to be pitch­ing it against the Nokia N95, HTC Kaiser, or the latest Black­berry. All appro­pri­ate for being the cur­rent fla­vour of the mar­ket — and when it comes to cell phones, they have such a lim­ited shelf life. How long does the aver­age phone remain cur­rent these days? Des­pite Apple’s slight revamp of the iPhone, I will go out on a limb and sug­gest that it may have greater longev­ity than most. How­ever, not because for tech­nical prowess, but to Apple’s mar­ket­ing pan­ache. Non­ethe­less, as I look at the com­par­is­ons, I am struck that we might best be able to gauge how much of a tech­nical mar­vel it is by com­par­ing a little fur­ther back.
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It’s always amus­ing and often telling to com­pare where we are now to where we thought we’d be. Whether through sci-fi nov­els, advert­ise­ments for the house of the future, or in this case prints from an exhib­i­tion at the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France (bnf), facets of the future­think can provide a par­tic­u­larly pris­matic view of past pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. Paleo-Future Blog has a nice col­lec­tion of images of life in the year 2000 from the BnF. Nat­alie has weighed in on how pres­ci­ent these illus­tra­tions actu­ally are.
One thing that springs to my atten­tion is the sense that the future was going to free us from con­tact with the ground. Flight seems to make so much more pos­sible.
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I atten­ded a wildly anim­ated, won­der­fully amus­ing and thought pro­vok­ing key­note talk by David Wein­ber­ger entitled ’The Busi­ness of the Mis­cel­laneous’ at the Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing of the CIRA this after­noon. Wein­ber­ger claims that soci­ety has solved the threat posed by inform­a­tion over­load by cre­at­ing more inform­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally, he claims, the blur­ring of the line between the metadata and the actual data has fur­ther eroded the author­ity of the tra­di­tional media and given a new­found cred­ib­il­ity to sources such as Wiki­pe­dia. A cred­ib­il­ity that he asserts that comes from trust built on trans­par­ency.
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Today I had a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion with Fernanda Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg of IBM’s Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes web­site that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launch­ing their site, they have been hard at work bring­ing us new means of visu­al­iz­ing data­sets and provid­ing a social net­work for data­heads. My earlier art­icle I spoke glow­ingly of the atten­tion to detail that the site exhib­ited and wealth of chart­ing oppor­tun­it­ies offered. I also prom­ised I would play more with the site.
In the last few months I have had an oppor­tun­ity to just that.
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I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research mater­ial col­la­tion and organ­iz­a­tion. There are a wide vari­ety of easy to use, free wiki ser­vices online and an increas­ing num­ber of small foot­print, simple stan­dalone wikis. I prob­ably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my exper­i­ences, but an excel­lent art­icle by Dustin Wax at lifehack.org does a superb job of explain­ing the rationale and gives some great how to tips.
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Hav­ing just returned from one of my favour­ite cit­ies in the world, I was fas­cin­ated to find a Paris Metro Vir­tual Exper­i­ence. This media-rich site offers won­der­ful his­tory of the Paris Metro and the oppor­tun­ity to take a vir­tual tour with static images and rel-time soundtrack along a num­ber of lines. Addi­tion­ally, the author of the site has com­pleted sta­tion by sta­tion archi­tec­tural mosa­ics of par­tic­u­lar lines. If you have ever had the oppor­tun­ity to travel on the metro (argu­ably one of the most effi­ciently run sys­tems in the world) this site may bring back some memor­ies.
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I don’t nor­mally blog about Fire­fox exten­sions. I have far too many installed, but this latest one is some­thing that should have been a part of Fire­fox on install. If you are run­ning Fire­fox, you owe your­self to test this one out. Thumb­strips allows you to view your brows­ing his­tory as a series of small screensnaps along the bot­tom of the browser win­dow. This is some­thing so logical, so appeal­ing to our visual sense that I just makes intu­it­ive sense. Its well integ­rated and although I have sense its going to start to con­sume stor­age space over time, it may well make the space trade-off an invest­ment. Check it out!