Please tell me this is emitted by an R2 unit. The concept:

http://youtu.be/aThCr0PsyuA

And here’s the current hardware in action:

For yet more check out the Verge’s up-close report.

[YouTube]

What do you think of this thing? 

It could be cool, but I find myself getting old & jaded. The Leap Motion sensor has yet to take off, and I’m reminded of Logitech’s NuLOOQ Navigator. It was announced some 9 years ago, drove Adobe tools in similar ways, and failed to find traction in the market (though it’s evidently been superseded by the SpacePilot Pro).

But hey, who knows?

[Vimeo][YouTube]

Having an excessive interest in keyboard shortcuts (I once wrote an edition of a book dedicate to this subject), I’m delighted to see some welcome tweaks arriving in Photoshop CC. According to Julieanne Kost’s blog:

• Cmd-comma hides/shows the currently selected layer(s)
• Cmd-opt-comma shows all layers
• Cmd-slash locks/unlocks the currently selected layer(s)
• Cmd-opt-slash unlocks all layers

(On Windows substitute Ctrl-Alt for Cmd-Opt) [Via Jeff Tranberry]

• Tethr bills itself as “The last UI kit you’ll ever need” and “The Most Beautiful iOS Design Kit Ever Made.” I’ll leave that judgement to you, but at a glance it looks like some nicely assembled PSD templates.
• You don’t actually need Photoshop to leverage these templates, either: Adobe’s Web-based Project Parfait can extract content “as 8-bit PNG, 32-bit PNG, JPG, and SVG images.”

I really love the part where it helps 780 million people find the clean water they need. (Er, wait…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvT0MCugb58

[YouTube] [Via]

Hmm—I’m not sold (at all) on the discoverability of this thing, but I remain deeply eager to see someone break open the staid, hoary world of in-car electronics. (The hyped Sync system in our new Fusion is capable but byzantine & laggy. What’s waiting a second+ after button pushes between friends—besides roughly 100 feet traveled at speed?) What do you think?

[YouTube] [Via Christian Cantrell]

Transylvanian non(?)-vampire Sorin Neica has created the “Keyboard-S,” an enormous (yet thin) keyboard designed to drive Photoshop & potentially other apps. It’s sort of a Configurator panel that’s sprung right off your screen:

I have a hard time imagining it taking off, and funding on Kickstarter is pretty anemic to date, but I found the idea interesting enough to share. [Via Gary Greenwald]

On the 7th anniversary of the iPhone’s introduction, it’s interesting to look back and the ground it broke, the origins of some of its innovations, and more:
http://vimeo.com/81745843
[YouTube]

Here’s a great idea, featuring great UX details.

People loved the photo backup/sharing startup Everpix, but it keeled over after netting just ~6,000 paying customers. (That’s hardly surprising in a world where backup & sharing come free with every phone.) It started to popularize a neat feature called Flashback, one that showed photos from your archive taken exactly one year ago.

Now I’ve found Timehop, a free iOS app that finds the images you shared across various social networks, then gives you snapshots from one, two, and more years ago. The daily push notification it sends provides a little treat I’ve come to anticipate.

What sets the app apart, though, is the delight its creators take in otherwise-mundane UI details. The spinning loading indicator is a Back To The Future-style flux capacitor:

(In the app itself it animates.) They’ve also enjoyed making their mascot Abe paw at the pull-to-refresh indicator, seen here captured by Beautiful Pixels:

Well played, guys. Can’t wait to see what you cook up next.

[YouTube]

Lean startup methodology strongly emphasizes paper prototypes: What’s the simplest, fastest, lowest-cost thing you could do to increase learning & decrease risk? To that end, AppSeed aims to let you sketch on paper, then turn the results into functioning, HTML-based app prototypes:

Interestingly, it ties into Photoshop:

Test your design on the phone and edit it in Photoshop through PS Connection.  This creates a Photoshop document that has all your drawn elements on their own layers, giving you the pixel perfect control to move your design into the next stages of production.

[Via]

“Design with Layer Comps… Link screens by naming layers… Open in Interactive Mode.” Sounds promising.

Composite is a brand new way of creating interactive prototypes. It automatically connects to your Photoshop® documents and converts your mockups into interactive prototypes in seconds. No need to export images or maintain tons of hotspots.

While designing in Photoshop® you can also get a live preview of your design directly on your device, ensuring the design works in the right scale and context.

[Via Tim Riot]

3Gear Systems is exploring ways to control Photoshop via their gesture-sensing technology:

Here’s a more general demo of their tech:

Touché is a funky interface project from Disney Research, turning everything from liquids (!) to door knobs into multitouch surfaces:

According to the project site, the technology “can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction.”

We added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids. Importantly, instrumenting objects and material with touch sensitivity is easy and straightforward: a single wire is sufficient to make objects and environments touch and gesture sensitive.

What the what?

WiSee is the first wireless system that can identify gestures in line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight, and through-the-wall scenarios. Unlike other gesture recognition systems like Kinect, Leap Motion or MYO, WiSee requires neither an infrastructure of cameras nor user instrumentation of devices. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of WiSee and evaluate it in both an office environment and a two-bedroom apartment. Our results show that WiSee can identify and classify a set of nine gestures with an average accuracy of 94%.

[Via Bill Roberts]

Interesting. What do you think?

[Via Mark Maguire]

Hmm—I’d imagine this MIT project being less bizarre when applied to a wearable augmented reality interface like Google Glass:

[Via]

Check out this nifty project from Anastasiy Safari (known for his popular color-picking Photoshop extensions). It combines PS with a Leap Motion controller:

“Get excited about making the simple stuff fun,” Stu Maschwitz told me. Seems like the makers of Llumino took that advice to heart:

[Via]

C’mon, haven’t you always wanted to use rock fingers to control your stereo?
I’m kinda skeptical about the MYO armband getting widespread, but the video does suggest a series of fun mishaps (chicken-slicing gone wrong; army robot flailing; and “You have died of dysentery”-style messages you read while expiring after a ski crash). But hey, prove me wrong.

John Gruber once wrote, “In hindsight, I think the use cases for the original iPad are simplicity and delight.” Haze for iPhone nails that mission for weather:

“Is it going to be warmer tomorrow? Don’t read it. See it. The beautifully animated background shows you the trend. Use Haze frequently to unlock colorful themes and customize the look.”

The UI rewards exploration with lots of polished details, and the use of theme unlocking is an interesting way to encourage active use.

The one downside I’ve detected thus far is that the reliance on taps & gestures rather than on traditional buttons & labels leaves some functionality obscure. I feel dumb for not having discovered one of the most basic operations (tapping the central readout circle) on my own. (I hadn’t seen the video before downloading the app.) Even so, the app’s easy to navigate & a joy to use.

Oh, and if you like this sort of thing, check out Summly for news. It crashes too much & the summaries aren’t always great, but it’s lovely enough to explore that I stick with it.

Check out the multitouch music-making interface for Samplr:

I imagine myself trying to compose some Christmas music using this app, then having to quote Norm MacDonald: “Happy birthday, Jesus–hope you like crap!” [Via James Roche]

“It’s the most fun you can have with lasers without a cat,” they say. Hmm—be that as it may, I have a hard time imagining people shelling out $179 and then using this thing comfortably. Still clever, though.

[Via Guy Nicholas]

“What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended in mid-air?” ask the creators of ZeroN. “ZeroN is a physical and digital interaction element that floats and moves in space by computer-controlled magnetic levitation.” One could ask questions about precision and practicality, but… holy crap, levitating balls as UI!

[Via]

Just think of the horrors Andrew Lloyd Webber could wreak with this thing (ideally with a Beowulf cluster of them).

[Via]

My question: if a Wookiee pushes you, do the stars turn into a bunch of lines?

[Via]

Interface designer Neven Mrgan made a good point on Friday:

Touch gestures are the new keyboard shortcuts, but the difference is delight: no one ever saw ⌘⇧S and thought “awesome!”

To which I say: Well, no normal person, maybe. 🙂

I remember learning Photoshop and discovering that holding Option would turn Cancel buttons into Reset buttons.  “They didn’t have to do that,” I thought–delighted.  Later when I learned After Effects, the teacher showed that Shift-dragging did one thing while Option-dragging did another.  I asked how one would do both things at once, and though he didn’t know, when I combined the modifiers, sure enough, it worked as I wanted.  “My people, my people…” I thought. And just the other day, I took enormous pride in persuading the Photoshop team to get the semantics of a new shortcut just exactly right.

It’s craftsmanship that counts*, and delight flows from the feeling of speed, power, and control. Whatever the surface, let my fingers–and my brain–fly.

J.

* As Photoshop godfather Mark Hamburg observed, “People pay for features because it’s easier to justify the expense. People adore polish because it makes the product feel good, and that adoration will carry you farther in the long run than features.”