I was just updating my Airport Express settings and noticed this rare Apple UI fail. Bad number sorting.

Windows UI is so broken. Look at the hoops developers have to jump through to get people to just install a plug-in.

Unfortunate but amusing combination of the subject line and Mail.app shortening the sender name from Amazon Associates.

Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future devices and the way design agencies need to shift to a much more multi-disciplinary way of working if they are to survive.

I’ll just point you to “Talk to the Hand: Dan Saffer and Gestural Interfaces” on Core77 rather than spill more beans here.

I’m on the interactive jury for the Art Directors Club Awards this year, which I am very chuffed about. Not least because I get the chance to go to New York for the first time ever.

Of course, the USA’s Department of Homeland Security being what it is, I have to give them plenty of personal information via one of the most awfully designed forms ever. But the real alert box abuse is this:

User experience FAIL.

Thought I had posted this weeks ago and found it loitering in my scheduled posts.

Entertaining set of preferences descriptions for Fenec, Mozilla’s new mobile browser.

Just spotted Amazon’s Christmas-themed shopping cart. Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference.

It’s the gloves again.

Part of me wants to believe G-Speak is really is a fantastic “spatial operating environment”. The mouse and keyboard are awkward, clunky and out-dated with plenty of problems and it’s time for a change. G-Speak is about freeing ourselves from those shackles, about working in space across multiple screens.

I wanted to scream when I saw the tired reference to Minority Report, but it turns out that one of the team, John Underkoffler, was the science advisor on Minority Report, so they can get away with it given they he ripped off his own ideas for the film.

The video and some of the interaction looks great.

Except for the gloves.

It’s the gloves (and the headset) that made VR so lame. That and being tethered to a machine, so at least that part is no more.

Yet regardless of how much of a paradigm-shifting breakthrough g-speak is, I can’t see people donning the dorky gloves every time they want to work. I can’t see many people devoting that much space to one person’s screens either and I can’t see many people having the stamina to stand with their arms out-streched and wave them about all day. A two-hour yoga class is hard enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a go and experience it for myself. I’m sure there is a whole of interesting interaction going on there.

I really want to be wrong about this. I really want to know that it’s not just a technical triumph from a group of talented tech guys whose blog has the most heinous URLs. I really do.

I just don’t want to have to smell the gloves.

(Via Bren).

In keeping with the seemingly American obsession that more data one has the better (especially on TV), Sprint have launched a viral campaign called the Now Machine Widget.

Kottke says, “I don’t know what this is or how it works or why Sprint is involved, but man is it fun to just let the data just wash over you.” It’s kind of fascinating, but also a totally overblown data overload and the kind of thing that would be unusable in any practical sense. (I often wonder how traders manage to spread their attention across so many screens. My guess is it is an illusion and that they can’t – it just stops them having to bring different windows to the front.)

The design of the Now Machine was by Mike Kellogg for Goodby, Sliverstein & Partners.

(Via Kottke via Airbag).

Is it just me or does anyone else find LinkedIn’s new design tweaks weird on the perspective front?

This rounded-corner box has a couple of random shadows at the bottom. The impression is that the bottom corners are lifting up, but the box remains square and the top has no shadows. Logically, that can only mean that the background curves away from the box, except it has no gradient or shadows either.

It really niggles me for some reason and does my eyes in like some crazy M. C. Escher picture. Or am I being too anal?