Crave

The Napkin PC won first place in the Next-Gen PC Design Competition. Click photo for gallery of winners.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's fourth annual Next-Gen PC Design Competition put entrants to the task of dreaming up concepts that not only offer eye-catching aesthetics, but also cater to people's passions.

Check out News.com's gallery on the competition, featuring designs that tap into niches like travel, sports, fitness, cooking, and children. Winning concepts were inspired by everything from napkins to building blocks to the everyday book.

Who would have believed Google's geographic Web services could actually get your adrenaline going?

Granted, these aren't real video games, but two Web sites are pushing what can be done with interactive interfaces to Google Maps and Google Earth.

The first, taking advantage of Google Maps' new ability to work with Flash applications, lets you drive a car, bus, or truck around Google Maps. It won't bat an eye if you drive through a building or into the ocean, but Katsuomi Kobayashi, the programmer from Osaka, Japan, who wrote it, was happy to note that the software can display images at 40 frames per second vs. 20 at best for JavaScript. And it uses less CPU power, too.

This rudimentary game lets people drive various vehicles around Google Maps. Here I'm taking a semi through Tokyo traffic.

(Credit: Geoquake)

Another novelty is a flight simulator for the browser plug-in version of Google Earth announced at Google I/O a week and a half ago. (This is different from the flight sim that works with the Google Earth standalone software.) It works with recent versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Flock, but on Windows only.

This basic flight simulator works with the Google Earth browser plug-in.

(Credit: Barnabu.co.uk)

Again, the software is crude by gaming standards, but it does illustrate what can be done these days inside a browser. I'm among those who are interested to watch Google Earth abilities gradually pop up in Google Maps and in the browser. It's easily conceivable to me that we'll soon be seeing all manner of games that run on the 3D models of the real world that Google and Microsoft are building. Lower network latencies, faster server responses, and higher network data capacity all point in that direction.

(Via Google Geo Developers Blog and Google Maps Mania.)

Update 8 a.m. PST January 14: Sorry, I ran out of invitations, but you can request them from Photophlow's home page. Update 8 a.m. PST January 11: I added links to a couple of helpful videos.

For a Web 2.0 powerhouse, Flickr feels awfully Web 1.0. At least that was my conclusion after spending a few hours in the chat rooms of Photophlow, a start-up that grafts a highly interactive experience on top of Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Flickr deserves credit for pioneering what can be done with photos on the Internet beyond merely displaying photos and albums. Flickr advantages include tags that let members sort and search photos, groups for finding like-minded photographers and sharing photos, and maps to sift through pictures geographically.

Photophlow presents a live chat about Flickr photos that members select.

(Credit: Photophlow)

But Photophlow, which presents a chat room interface to the act of browsing Flickr, makes all those interfaces seem static. For me, the site felt like wandering through a museum with a group of new acquaintances, commenting on pictures as we went from room to room. And some of the rooms featured our own pictures.

The site is invitation-only right now so that Oortle, the start-up behind Photophlow, can keep up with growth. I ran out of invitations, but you also can request one at the site, which is how I got in.

I'm not the only person who's favorably impressed.

'A comfy coffee lounge'
"It really changes the way I use Flickr," said Alex Almeida, who publishes the Phat Photographer blog, who described Photophlow with a different metaphor. With its instant interaction, "it really is like a comfy coffee lounge with a big shoe box of photos where people can chat comfortably and pull any of those photos out of the shoebox and discuss them."

... Read more

Different sound frequencies indicate where on the screen a user is blowing.

(Credit: Georgia Tech)

Perhaps huffing at your computer might get you somewhere if research at the Georgia Institute of Technology comes to fruition.

Shwetak Patel and Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech have published a paper that describes how to use a computer microphone to determine where on a screen a person is blowing. The technique, which they call BLUI for Blowable and Localized User Interaction, can distinguish between the different sounds air makes depending on where the breath is directed.

"BLUI supports blowing at a laptop or computer screen to directly control specific parts of an interactive application, such as blowing at a button to activate it," the researchers said in their paper (click for PDF). The technique requires a period of "training" to calibrate the system--blowing on each region of the screen for 3 to 5 seconds.

The hands-free user interface approach could be useful for situations where a person's hands are busy, or for people who can't control computers with their hands or arms in situations where speech control is impractical. Although speech "is reasonable for complicated or command-based tasks, it is not well-suited for direct, low-level controls such as scrolling, button pressing, or selection," the researchers said.

Of course, the resolution isn't as fine as a mouse pointer.

The accuracy was 100 percent when dividing a laptop screen in to a nine-rectangle region. It dropped to 96 percent for 16 regions, 80 percent for 25 regions, and 62 percent for 36 regions.

The technique also could be used for games such as a basic one in which users blow out virtual candles, shown in the YouTube video above.

(Via John Nack.)

Adobe Systems wants to transform its flagship Photoshop software with an interface customized to the task at hand, a potentially radical revamp for software whose power today is hidden behind hundreds of menu options.

A new user interface will help Photoshop become "everything you need, nothing you don't," said Photoshop product manager John Nack, describing aspirations for the Photoshop overhaul on his blog Monday.

"We must make Photoshop dramatically more configurable," Nack said. "Presenting the same user experience to a photographer as we do to a radiologist, as to a Web designer, as to a prepress guy, is kind of absurd...With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces," Nack said.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom offers a very task-specific interface, with editing modules changing according to broad categories of work.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

In comparison, Photoshop today is unwelcoming and unhelpful. "Today, if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, 'What do I do?' the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, 'I dunno--you tell me.' That's not real cool, and we can do better," Nack said.

A new Photoshop approach could let new users get started faster, help Adobe phase out old features, and energize Adobe programmers, he suggested. But such changes are fraught with peril, too: users can be confused or alienated, automated work processes can be broken, and some strong points can be weakened.

Photoshop's general-purpose value
One skeptic is Mark Rolston, chief creative officer for design consultancy Frog Design and a Photoshop user since before it was Photoshop 1.0. Photoshop fundamentally is an all-purpose tool, and tailoring it to be more task-specific could undermine that general usefulness, he said.

"Its generalized approach of being a toolset is the one thing that's made it popular...You can't be task-specific in a professional application like this," Rolston said.

But Nack said in an interview that Adobe sees the value of Photoshop as a general-purpose tool and won't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

"Can Photoshop be totally general and totally focused at the same time? I think it can, through modularity and extensibility," Nack said.

Modularity raises another risk: multiple versions of Photoshop with different features. With its CS3 versions released this year, Adobe has opened that door by reserving some high-end or specialized abilities for the more expensive Extended edition.

There, too, though, Adobe is aware of possible problems. "There's a great deal of value in Photoshop being an industry standard," Nack said. "We therefore have to be careful about taking steps that would balkanize Photoshop...We don't want to get into a state of where people can't readily exchange files because they're using a dozen splintered versions--Photoshop for Web, Photoshop for Medical, Photoshop for Basket Weaving, etc."

Don't expect faster performance along with a cleaner design, though, Nack said. "I think the benefit will be more in users' perception than in saved clock cycles," he said.

The Lightroom lesson
One interface model Adobe no doubt factors into its deliberations is its new Photoshop Lightroom software released earlier this year. Lightroom, which is tailored specifically for editing, cataloging, presenting and printing raw images from higher-end digital cameras, has a very task-specific interface.

For example, Lightroom presents four major panes for different broad categories of work, and optional panels surrounding a central image present different options according to which mode the user selects. But Lightroom is a much more focused tool.

"Lightroom has shown that presenting just the tools needed at any moment can help users manage a complex workflow," Nack said. "With Photoshop, we'll find a way to offer that approach without losing the generality that has let people push the application in so many unexpected ways."

Another major experiment in user interface has been Microsoft's Office 2007, which added a "ribbon" that presents different options to the user according to what tasks are possible. Microsoft Word and the Office packages suffer a similar plight as Photoshop: although most users probably only use a tiny fraction of the software's features, the collective user base needs all of them.

Laying the groundwork
Nack knows that coaxing users into alignment with Adobe's vision will be one hard part of the change. But he--along with Photoshop programmers--has been working for months to make the change palatable.

In May 2006 came some cajoling. "If you could take away the pain that comes with a large and growing feature set, yet keep its benefits, would it cool the critics out?" he asked in a May 2006 posting. "We need your permission to take Photoshop in new directions, to add features that will blow people's heads clean off."

Then, a year ago, Nack grew a bit sterner, saying Photoshop users bear some responsibility for the software's sprawling state.

"We can add things, but we can never take them away. When we decided to stop maintaining the archaic, seldom-used 3D Transform filter, we made it optional content (not disabled, just moved). The tech support boards lit up with all kinds of complaints," he said.

Making Photoshop better for users also could make it a better project within Adobe, he indicated. "No one wants to work with--or work on--some shambling, bloated monster of a program."

Adobe coders have been working to make Photoshop to enable the modular, adaptable vision with features such as customizable menus and shortcuts, or workspaces that let users save particular configurations of editing palettes.

Also behind the scenes, Adobe has been working to make Photoshop more modular. Several modules--among them the type engine, 3D tools, the Camera Raw system, and the "Save for Web" process--only load into memory when called upon, he said.

"We're already making the code modular so that people aren't running what they don't need," Nack said. "Now we need to follow up at the user experience level, so that people don't have to wade through anything not geared towards the task at hand."