Back in May of this year, I posted about a wonderful redesign project by Dustin Curtis who took it upon himself to redesign the American Airlines website. Dustin’s reasons for doing this were to hopefully inspire American Airlines to do something about their barely usable site and to generally give them a better online presence in the midst of competition from people like JetBlue (who have a great online website).
As the story goes, Dustin was then contacted by somebody — Mr. X, as he is known — who worked at American Airlines and wanted to clear the air with some knowledge of how the design process works at AA.
Well, Mr. X volunteered that information and then AA fired him for apparently breaking a non-disclosure agreement which is unfortunate because Mr. X seemed pretty passionate about what he did at AA in his letter to Dustin.
I’m not going to go into who was right or wrong here, but I hope American Airlines gets over their red tape and thinks about what they’ve just done.
Here’s proof from CrunchGear that the Zune HD is going to blow the socks off of its biggest competitor, the Apple iPod touch, simply because of its superior user interface. It already looks better than the iPod touch, that’s for sure.
Holy crap. Gizmodo has a hands-on video with the Microsoft Zune HD and it is NNIIIIIICCEEEEE!
I’ve always said that the UI on the Zune was great and it looks like that has carried over into the Zune HD as well. If Microsoft makes a Mac client for this — or somehow makes it so that it can sync with iTunes — I’d buy this over an iPod touch without hesitation!
I use Adobe applications on a day to day basis and I run into little things here and there that have gone unnoticed by the people who write the application. Over at Adobe UI Gripes, there’s a whole list (with pictures!!!) of various Adobe mistakes that drive lots of people mad. Things like misplaced menus, stupid errors, and calculation mistakes.
The one above resonates with me the most so far because it happens to me ALL the time. I hate it. It doesn’t do what you think it’s going to do.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Minority Report, you’ll know that Tom Cruise’s character makes use of a very neat interactive computer setup to help him figure out when and where crimes are going to happen.
Over the years, I’ve come across a couple of companies hoping to emulate the same computer experience, but none so far have been successful in matching the look of the computer in the film.
As it turns out, one of the advisers to Minority Report are also the founders of the incredible project in the video above from Oblong Industries. The operating system above is called G-speak and it fully immerses the user into the computer environment by making use of real-world space and geometry. The result so far looks beautiful and extremely fluid, but who knows when this will be available as a consumer product.
In case you forgot what the computer looked like in Minority Report, here’s a video of it below.
