Johnny Chung showing off

I’ve just seen something uber-interesting over here but I need a shower so give me a sec… Right there we go. Ok I think I’m ready. No, wait. I think I may stall on this post till I consider the implications of my words…

Ok so after a bit of digging I’ve come to the conclusion that somone, somewhere (Cupertino or Redmond) must have this in development. If not I’ve a couple of well placed emails and I’ve written it on a newspaper and taken a photo and all that crazy stuff! First off, a little background:

Interface design is interesting. Fact. After all, most of us use a computer. I personally became interested in this field with the release of the iPhone. Now it’s no secret that I went and got one of these little numbers (in fact I turned out being the first person in the UK to win one, courtesy of The Cloud) the day of release, and I was amazed. The interface is pretty much the most intuitive and natural thing I’ve ever seen. I truly believe that in five years time we’ll all be sitting about thinking ‘remember using a mouse, how weird was that?’. however I saw a recent blip on the scanner, Apple released the MacBook Air. It features the same multi-touch technology in the iPhone but on the famously large Apple trackpad. Now I’ve not tried one of these bad-boys yet but I’m pretty damned sure the thing that makes the multi-touch interface work is the premise that you’re getting the instant feedback from the screen under your finger or ‘touching your music’ as Jobs puts it. Seeing as you’re looking up at the screen on the MacBook Air I imagine a lot of the magic there is lost. Now, onto the interesting bit.

As previously mentioned here lies a very interesting guy with an interesting idea: Take the worlds most successful console, featuring the worlds most interesting piece of hardware, and run with it. However I think we’re missing out on something here. I propose we build on this multi-touch concept… and I think that it’s only a short stop from the now.

Apple laptops have, for years now, been fitted with an iSight camera. Apple are also pioneering multi-touch user interfaces. In fact they’ve allegedly given the thumbs up to the MacBook Touch as reported here. I suggest a competitor, and intend to come up with a prototype soon, here we go…
* Higher resolution iSight camera.
* Two additional infra-red LEDs in the corners of the top case.
* A few changes to OS X in order to use the existing multi-touch interface on the MacBook Air.
…and boom! There we have it, an all singing, all dancing, truly responsive multi-touch user interface that would be minimal cost for Apple (or other vendors) and can be incorporated into their product line as it stands. Steve Jobs: where’s my R&D contract?

Busy busy Dashboard

So here goes my first little hint, I tried to post this on OSXHints but, for the life of me, I just can’t find out how to. Anyway. If you find yourself religiously checking your facebook in order to see if anyone has posted on your wall then you have one option: a) Sign up for email when you get a post on your wall. Which is irritating at best. In order to alleviate this problem, which when combined with the usual amount of email that we all get is ridiculous, I’ve found a neat little trick using the new 3.0 ‘web-clip’ function of Safari on OS X Leopard, giving us another option: b) Create a web-clip of your wall from iphone.facebook and ensure that the cookie which keeps your login is kept somewhere safe. So that’s that, dashboard facebook updates as quick and easy as you like. Equally you could do this with your home screen but I would advise you to use the iPhone version of Facebook as you’ll have to log back in with the regular version, thus defying the point of a quick update. As an aside you amy want to put your computer’s screen saver on password lock to mitigate some of the security problems…