Ooh, now that’s nice: student Nedzad Mujcinovic has crafted “Livre,” a concept for a leather-wrapped, multitouch-aware electronic book. Check out the photos as well as the overview. Could a large e-ink screen, organic materials, gesture-based navigation, and a minimum of button clutter change the game and make e-books widespread? It would be fun to find out. [Via]
In other cool device news:
- Small format:
- Like sketching ideas on cocktail napkins, but wish they were more expensive and susceptible to water damage? Then perhaps you’d like the Napkin PC. Naw, the concept is cooler than that–especially if you could combine multiple Napkin PCs into a single work area. [Via Jana Sedivy]
- Inchworm brings sketching and painting to the Nintendo DS. It was created by Bob Sabiston, the developer of the “Rotoshop” software used to create Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. [Via Greg Geisler]
- Nokia envisions a future full of shape-shifting phones; peep the video for their Morph concept.
- Multitouch:
- Web developers Cynergy have built a Minority Report-style multitouch interface.
- Meanwhile Mary Jo Foley discusses some of the latest developments in Microsoft’s multitouch Surface project. (This one’s still not setting my hair on fire.)
- In a related vein, Dell showed off their multitouch laptop design. [Via Jerry Harris]
- And, as you almost certainly know already, Apple has brought their multitouch trackpad to the full line of new MacBooks. Wouldn’t it be cool if Adobe apps could take advantage of those gestures?
- CNET reports on startup company CeeLite (note: not the singer from Gnarls Barkley) creating flexible sheets of light, useful for wrapping on buses, poles, and other objects.
- Researchers at Stanford have revealed details on their plenoptic camera work.
- Alienware offers a cool, curved display for widescreen gaming. I wonder how well it would work for design & photo editing.
- Art Lebedev’s Photoshop-savvy Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard (mentioned previously) has started shipping. You can see it being set up, or you can watch the droll Art himself work his geek-fu on a real live girl. :-) [Via Jesse Zibble]
For the DS, you should also check out Colors! at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/
and the gallery at http://colors.brombra.net. Don’t know if you’ve mentioned it before, but the program is not so easy to search specifically with such a name.
[Cool, will do; thanks. –J.]
I rather like the concept piece, the Tactus, on Art’s site:
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/
[Pretty! –J.]
Jack,
Looking at this new keyboard, Optimus Maximus, does this mean one could program keys to photoshop keyboard shortcuts, ie, ctl-shift-I? or any any other shortcuts in photoshop?,
[Good question, but I don’t know the answer. –J.]
Slow in memory,
ken