As you may know we have many well known DJ’s at Cordovan (and of course a couple of DJ wannabees).

So we thought it would be a good idea to let you all in on our playlists.

So, here’s the playlist for February 2010 - Enjoy!

If you’re as old is I am (born in the early 70ties) you might remember computers without a mouse. It’s crazy, but in fact, it wasn’t until 1992 that we started using “mice”. A couple of colleagues and I went to a seminar on touch screens held by Darja Isaksson from Inuse last week. According to Darja, the next step after the mouse revolution is the touch screen.

What we see is a shift from GUI to NUI (natural user interface). So, why are NUIs or touch screen solutions such as iPhone soo popular? Well, it’s simply because they are just that, natural, and thus easy to use. Using touch screens is so much more intuitive because it is physical, you use your body to browse and move stuff around – almost as you would in the physical world. Darija described a project where Wii-stations were put in retirement homes, and the result was a lot more active older citizens. They had no trouble learning how to use the Wii, even though they’re supposedly digital illiterates. Why? Because it’s intuitive.

So as we’re entering the era of touch screen, here are some expressions you can start forgetting:
- Double click
- Right click
- Cursor
- OnMouseOver

The Gartner institute predicts the future and states that 50 billion devices will be networked in 2020. We already have a lot of devices that can talk to each other but it’s too complicated (security, cords, log in, etc) so we don’t use them for that. Hopefully, in the future, applications for sharing information between devices will use NUIs and be much more intuitive and simple to use. And, you know what? We discovered that the future is almost here as Darja showed us some really cool examples of that.

Alan Kay, a renowned American computer scientist made the statement that I used as a headline for this post. I’d say yes and no; yes it’s easier to invent the future that to predict it. On the other hand, I think that by predicting the future you’re actually inventing it – it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, especially when Gartner is the prophet.

/ylva.

Remember that bit in Star Wars (the 1977 one, not the crappy ones from the 90’s and 00’s) where Chewbacca is playing Chess against R2D2? And he gets all angry ’cause he’s getting his hairy ass whipped… Well, that scene always stuck with me ’cause of the wee 3D chess players. Guess what?  There is a company doing just this…

http://www.vizoo.com

You MUST go in and look at their showreel!  What do you think?  Cool as plums eh?