I read this in the OS X reader reports section on Macintouch, and it really seems spot on:

My one gripe about the UI changes in Aqua is the apparent disregard for the kinesthetic sense that went very deep in the classic Mac OS. Things remained in the same physical location. Menus stayed in the same place. Folder tabs at the bottom of the screen stayed put. Disks represented on the desktop had an apparent physicality to them... In OS X, items in the dock move as things are added or deleted. The File and Edit menus shift right or left depending on the length of the name of the Application menu. As a kinesthetically oriented person, this is very disorienting.

Stewart's having fun raising questions like what is copyright violation, how is information's interpretation altered by its presentation, and just how much free time does he have?

He's temporarily patterned his site after Google's, with interesting results.

Hmm: AD&D... ADD... Coincidence? If you were ever a DM back in junior high, you know that there's got to be a connection...

Thank god they didn't have ritalin back then. I don't even want to think about it...

To me, the most thrilling thing about Mac OS X is that it's so primitive. The altered paradigms are a little difficult to grok, and there is a lot of room for new ideas to creep in.

In short, it reminds me more of System 1.0 (back in '84) than Mac OS 9. While OS 7.5, 8, 8.1, 8.5, and 9 were all adding complexity to a full boat, OS X is sophisticated yet clean, trashing a lot of the interface cues, and reducing the bloat. This is exactly the culling which makes things difficult now, but will mature into something truly amazing over the next five or six years.

I don't know about y'all, but Atlantis is the first animated Disney movie in five years that I've been really excited to see (and I've really wanted to be excited by so many...).

June, 2001

The emoticons of the new millenium, iMood stickers can be as innocuous () as they are revealing (), a speck of insight () into a person, with a dash of TMI ().

Actually, while a lot of people are putting these on their web pages, automatically updated with their current mood whenever they visit iMood, I think this is just the beginning. I see a future where people start embedding the graphic in their .sigfile, so the reader knows, not how the person felt when they sent the letter, but how they feel now. You read their flamemail but notice that, at this moment in time, they're . Maybe you're going to make a pass at that girl at the mall (6 years from now), but your glasses heads up display warns you that she's .

taking it a step further, what if you did have a wired pair of glasses (or contacts, corneal implants, or straight up implants in your visual recognition system)? Wouldn't it be nice if everything had tooltips? Stare at something or someone for more than a second or two and:

Now imagine that this overlay is the only computer interface you ever use...

If you follow Jakob Nielsen's views on web design, you'll find this article from Untitled Document (the UK's answer to The Onion) very funny.

If you don't know who Nielsen is, you'll probably find it funny anyhow.

User Interface Design is one of the hot topics in the industry today. A sign of this is that Intel has donated the use of 50 thinkpads and wireless cards for my CS160: User Interface Design class. Each student gets one for the semester, and we're encouraged to bring them to class and use them.

I'm in class right now!

Either chalk this one up to shoddy journalism or nefarious scientists:

A story on CNN.com describes a new Palm virus 'discovered' by antiviral researchers at McAfee. Unlike the previous virus (actually a trojan horse), this one actually infects other apps, and can be spread by IR transmission of infected apps. Interestingly, the article states:

"However, as the virus has not yet been found outside controlled environments, the researchers at the company's McAfee Avert unit have given it a low risk assessment, the statement said."

So... what then? They caught the only copy of the virus in the wild? A hacker created it and handed it to them? Or did they invent it themselves? Curiously, the screen shot on the article shows a palm app actually called "Phage", which is the term they use for the type of virus (neither a virus nor a trojan horse). Was this a mock-up shot, or the constructed app?

More ironic is that they're supplying a vaccine for this virus that hasn't been spotted in the wild...

So most of my posts here for the last several weeks have been technical or net oriented, but it's not usually that way. (Sorry if you've gotten used to it!). Since mid-August I've been expressing my less formal side on SURVIVORblog. The competition's getting tight there though, and today's another voting day, so it's completely possible I'll be outta there tomorrow or next week. Then of course I'll be spouting all my drivel here, instead of just the techie stuff.