unraveled

Piles, Mirrors and Time

Recently spotted interface goodness:

Piles are a rumored feature of forthcoming Mac OS releases. Bruce Tognazzini described how they work in a previous AskTog article:

Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.

To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open.

This demo by Richard Das might make the concept a little clearer. (via Mac Rumors)

Next, Mirror Worlds, the book that provoked Unabomber Ted Kaczynski nearly to kill its author, David Gelernter, was covered in the good Discover Magazine article, Emerging Technology: Reality Bytes by Steven Johnson. The basis of Gelernter’s idea is a data layer that is mapped to a virtual reconstruction of reality, a mirror of everything going on in the real world. (via Antenna)

Lastly, Thomas Vander Wal spotted Ftrain’s excellent Accordian Time, Liquid Time, in which Paul Ford proposes a new way of measuring time:

You could measure life in heartbeats per mile: infinite beats standing still in the airport, 10-12 heartbeats per mile on the plane, 600 per mile on the train and bus. There must be some way to measure time that is more accurate than seconds or minutes, a way to define liquid time pouring through smaller and larger openings. So far the system is ad-hoc: I am busy; I feel lazy; I have a minute; can I call you back; no, I’m not doing anything tonight.

Thomas Vander Wal notes the importance of understanding time and perceived time when developing interfaces:

A person who normally has time passing slowly may find most information is easily found, but if they are trying to trackdown the address for a date or interview in a relatively short time before the event the persons perception of time may increase. This impacts the perceived ease of finding information or re-retrieving that information.

I can’t wait until grad school.

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