"affordances" entries

iPhone rants and raves

On twitter, @mparekh (Michael Parekh) lamented the other day: Had my 3G iPhone Crash 5 times so far, hanging up on boot screen. Full Restore every time, each taking 2 hours. On 6th restore. Anyone else? … On 3G iPhone crash (cont.), using Mobile Me sync, and have over 60 paid and free Apps installed. Last hang up was while…

Radar Roundup: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)

The Street as Platform (Dan Hill): amazing essay by Dan Hill (yet another genius formerly at the BBC) about the invisible cloud of data in a city street. "We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. […] This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and…

The LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen

The coolest thing I saw at our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference last week was the LiveScribe SmartPen. This amazing pen includes a microphone and an optical sensor that synchronizes the audio with any notes you take on special microdot paper using the pen. Touch the appropriate point on your notes to replay the relevant section of the…

Sandy, remind me about that New Year's resolution @sms

Rael Dornfest's Sandy, an email and sms-based personal assistant (whose name, I should confess, was inspired by Sandy Torre, my executive assistant at O'Reilly when Rael was CTO here) has just added what I think is a killer feature. Rather than setting Sandy to send all your reminders to email or SMS, you can now ask Sandy to route reminders…

Finding opportunities

Tim Bray has been analyzing forms of communication. He's been looking at twitter, mail, IRC, etc. in terms of immediacy, lifespan, and audience. He says, "I’m going to keep fooling with this. You see, if you draw the right graph, maybe you’ll see the gaping hole in it, the Next Big Thing." He's got some cool graphs, but I think…

Chart Junk in the New York Times

Checking out the New York Times's infographic on the housing bubble, I thought "wow! Look at how much prices climbed!". Then I read the fine print and realized they've completely distorted the vertical scale to make the increase look enormous. The Y-axis is the house price. 100=the 1987 price of a house, so if in 1992 the line of the…

Clever UI: Subway Map for Intranet

"A Map-based Approach to Content Inventory" caught my eye. I love the aesthetics of subway maps, the clever way in which they distort space while still presenting a more aesthetically true representation of the relationships between places. Patrick Walsh used the subway map metaphor to understand the gnarly structure of the intranet he was redesigning. (found via Matt Jones)…

What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?

Over on Genuine VC, David Beisel has written a thought-provoking piece entitled What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital? about the future of advertising in public spaces. Here are some of the tidbits he includes: figures on the growth of the outdoor ad market from PQ Media ($1.69 billion in 2006, 27% growth) "Is there a day…

New Content Preview Features on oreilly.com

Allen Noren, our director of online marketing, just let us know that the Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink feature is now live on oreilly.com. While this feature is designed to make it easier for us to handle reprint requests via user self-service, the same tools we used to provide the preview for RightsLink purchasers also makes it easy for our readers…

Ten Things I Want From My Phone

Ian Hay wrote an interesting cell-phone-related blog post entitled Ten Things I want from You, the result of a survey he sent out to a number of friends (including those of us at Radar) about what people want from their telcos. Ian's takeaway: What strikes me is that there is a lot of talk on Voice2.0, Fixed Mobile convergence, the…