interface

You know something went wrong with your Web site's redesign when two people who used to work on it publish detailed, scathing assessments.

Google Reader, revamped this week, falls into that category. Google gave the RSS site the new red-and-black look that's sprouting at Gmail and elsewhere and, deeper down, changed the mechanics of how people can share posts they're interested in.

Former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih took Google to task for a monochromatic user interface (UI) that squanders too much screen space on a header bar and for making it harder to share posts: &… Read more

LONDON--Multitouch revolutionized user interfaces, and if Nokia researchers get their way, a mobile device that's sensitive to how it's being flexed could be the next revolution.

At the Nokia World show here, the Finnish mobile phone maker showed off its "Nokia kinetic device" with a flexible display. Gripped with two hands, it would scroll through music collections or photo albums when twisted. Bowing it inward or outward zoomed photos in and out or paused and played music, while tapping the corners panned through photos.

While it was a real computing device with a real OLED display, … Read more

Someday we may say size doesn't matter for tablets. Researchers from Intel, Microsoft, and the University of Washington have extended the interactive action beyond the tablet screen to the surface where a tablet computer sits.

Portico is similar to existing tabletop computing systems like Microsoft's Surface that recognize gestures and real-world objects, but is more portable and affordable. It re-creates the tabletop experience on a tablet by breaking free of the confines of the tablet's screen.

The system features a pair of downward-facing cameras mounted on stalks affixed to the back edge of a tablet. The cameras enable the system to see the tablet's screen and the surface around the tablet. Portico's augmented-reality software recognizes objects on and near the tablet. This allows interaction to be both on and off the tablet. (See the video below.)… Read more

Four months after it was releaed in June at Apple's WWDC, iOS 5, the next major version of the software that powers Apple's iPods, iPhones, and iPads, will release today. By now, you're probably ready for the handy new features, tweaked UI, new Twitter integration, and everything else (read what we've learned so far of iOS 5), but is your iOS device ready?

To make sure your iPhone is set up for the launch of the latest iOS, we've put together a step-by-step guide for making sure it is primed for the update.

Editors' note: … Read more

Instagram adds real-time filter previews to its apps, Vimeo builds a new, legal music library that video creators can tap, and Facebook updates its interface again to add instant feed updates.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

An awful lot of things have changed about PCs over the past few decades. One that hasn't has been the way we input information into them. We still use the QWERTY keyboard, which was invented by typewriter pioneer Christopher Shoales in 1873 and has been a part of the PC nearly as long as there have been PCs. And we use the mouse, invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963 and popularized by the first Macintosh in 1984.

Other form of input include interesting technologies that have never become huge hits, such as voice input, and ones which essentially amount … Read more

Admit it. There have been times when you've wanted to drop-kick your phone into the next county. But would it be satisfying to use kicking gestures to control your phone? An experimental interface lets you do just that. The idea is to provide an alternative input method when your hands are occupied.

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Manitoba in Canada are developing a smartphone interface that lets you kick to flick, zoom, and navigate menus. The researchers used an Xbox Kinect and tablet to simulate the interface and studied how people do with the kick gesture. A working version would use your phone's camera.

The researchers found that people can reliably kick in five directions and at two velocities, which provides enough variety for useful phone control. (See the video below.)

This could be the first smartphone interface that presents a non-negligible risk of getting you arrested. Kick someone on the sidewalk, and I'm guessing the smartphone-gesture-interface defense isn't going to get you very far with the assault charge.… Read more

A huge update for the iOS Facebook app (Free) released today adds some features users have been waiting for, along with other fixes and tweaks to the interface.

Among the major new features, the updated iOS Facebook app is supposed to improve sharing options, add tagging of friends and places in posts, tweak the design of both Profile and Group walls, and provide added privacy controls on posts that match your settings on the Web site.

Smaller refinements and bug fixes include faster notification speeds, bug fixes for Facebook chat, changes to filter selection in the News Feed, tweaks to … Read more

Cocktail is both useful and fun for inveterate Mac tinkerers and would-be power users (that is, power users who aren't hard-core enough to use the command line).

This multipurpose utility can help you keep your computer happy and healthy, giving you access to scores of tweaks and optimizations pulled together from various utilities, preferences, third-party hacks, and command-line tools. Cocktail can help you with routine maintenance and customization across your disks, system, files, network, and interface. Cocktail is organized around these five areas, with highly customizable options for everything from clearing caches and repairing permissions to changing the appearance … Read more