Einar Thorsen

Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

Publications | Conferences | Teaching | Projects

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OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, enter the iPhone

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Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple’s Next Macintosh OS:

The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning — and in the market — the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.

Enter the iPhone.

Courtesy of John Gruber.

Gestures

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Lukas Mathis:

Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface.

[…]

The gesture is the verb. This works if the gesture is intuitive, but breaks down if there is no «natural» gesture for a verb. And since there is no intuitive, natural way of moving an object by one pixel (or skewing it, or mirroring it), we have to learn that command, and memorize it. The user interface doesn’t tell you how to nudge an object by a pixel; in fact, merely from looking at the application, you wouldn’t figure out that this feature even exists.

When natural user interfaces resort to non-obvious gestures, they essentially regress into a really pretty, modern version of the quaint old command line interface.

External link

GameChanger: providing tools for citizen sports journalism – Online Journalism Blog

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    GameChanger: providing tools for citizen sports journalism – Online Journalism Blog

    Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on GameChanger, a new iPhone app for citizen sports journalism:

    "Using the tool, scores and stats, as they happen, can be tapped into an iPhone by coaches, fans and parents. This is translated into a “gamestream” that appears on the Gamechanger site instantaneously so fans can access live updates, box scores, and play by plays.

    […]

    So GameChanger provides an application to the community surrounding a team, which, in turn, allows the community to provide data from the field to GameChanger. In other words, it is crowdsourcing with organized content gathering.

    […]

    If such an application can make data gathering, analysis and distribution easier in the case of simple scoring of a little league game, could it find potential in other, more complex issues? Such as election results, exit polls or the statistics of climate change? […] Such a foolproof application would increase participation and minimize error."

    Del.ici.us tags: iphone citizenjournalism sport crowdsourcing