This amazing demo of a interactive, 3-D magazine spread designed for iPad shows some of the real promise of the platform.
Read about the development approach and how the interactions, photography, and text were all composited.
VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.
Perfect – who doesn’t want one of these?
Built for students but probably better for wage slaves! Via the design blog.
Love this stuff. Great subtitling too.
Kudos to Microsoft for launching a new free personal energy management service-Microsoft Hohm.
The new app (still in beta) allows you create a customized energy report based on your home profile, geographic benchmarks, types of appliances you use and more. This is an interesting and potentially useful service; it’s great to see Microsoft providing these web services free to users.
The data entry process is daunting! I was surprised at how little I knew about the heating and energy attributes of my condo…but perhaps that’s one of the points of this new service.
We’re working a couple new projects focused on gestural and touch UI at RDVO. Some of our work may be applied to future Microsoft Surface table applications. We’ve found that actually procuring a Surface isn’t easy, so in its absence we developed a cool simulator using projectors and sensors we had lying around. Works pretty good, too.
Click on the image below to see a larger version.
I recently noticed that my monthly pending on iTunes has spiked to over $30.00—more than double than my previous monthly average. Not surprisingly, the increase correlates precisely with the time I’ve owned an iPhone.
If that wasn’t enough, I also noticed that there was a 3X increase in the number of purchases in July and August. I’m usually careful about my spending and I didn’t notice any real additional spending; the iPhone’s purchasing experience is dastardly clean and effortless.
Is this common among new iPhone owners? Apple has been vague about the amount of profit made from iTunes—mostly due to scrutiny from the entertainment industry. If you look at their Q308 financials, they indicate a 35% over the year in “Other Music Related Products and Services.” I’ll be interested to see if the numbers increase in Q408 with more iPhone 3G users.
I may be an anomoly, but it’s clear that the iPhone makes it much easier (and transparent) to purchase from iTunes, and I’m curious to see if this becomes a real boon to iTunes.
Diagrams from Apple’s leaked patents for a multi-touch tablet give us a glimpse into some interesting new developments in the evolution of touch UIs.
Some of the cool elements include iPhone-like scroll wheels and lots of touch-and-zoom experiences.
But perhaps most interesting is the full-screen QWERTY keyword. It will be interesting to see how Apple implements this feature. As an iPhone user, I find typing on the screen to be difficult–mostly because of the lack of tactile response. I wonder how this will play out on a more expansive interface with full-sized keys.
There are some insane developments in the works in Dubai.
According to World Architecture News, a concept will soon be revealed for the Ziggurat, a carbon-neutral super structure that could house over 1 million residents all connected with a public transit system that runs both horizontally and vertically. New energy management technologies enable the entire pyramid to be self-sustaining and completely off the grid.
While a structure like this is clearly decades away, many of the technologies and concepts have been patented and are in development. Is this a glimpse into the (not too distant) future?
