More recently, my personal frustration with computer interfaces has only accelerated with the purchase of a tablet. As much as I love the thing, it creates two problems. The first problem? If you use a tablet for a while, you’ll probably find yourself quickly and easily adopting gestures like swiping, pinching, and tapping. Pretty cool, very functional stuff. But soon, you’ll run into apps or websites that don’t respond to any of these gestures, or worse yet, the layout of a website (like the site you’re on right now!) will make it hard to even tap links because of type sizes and image layouts. So the first problem is the transition period to a new form of interaction. But the second problem is even more irksome in my opinion, and it is that in spite of the tech industry’s new focus on the second screen as a growth market, the last thing we need is another screen. While perusing How ‘Minority Report’ Trapped Us In A World Of Bad Interfaces on TheAwl.com the other day, I ran across a link to piece called A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, by Bret Victor. It’s probably one of the best summaries I’ve seen in a while of the problems we still face with interface design, the most obvious of which is what Victor calls “Pictures Under Glass”. No matter how cool the animation of an action is on your iPad, it’s still just a picture. And you’re still just dragging your finger around on a piece of glass, a dull experience – given our complexity as organisms that can grasp, see, and feel – that Victor calls a “Novocaine drip to the wrist”.

Why, when we have things like fingertip-tracking gesture technology or 3-D interaction, or even using brain waves as a control input almost at our er, fingertips, would we zero in on the dull and often less-than-useful action of “fingerpainting” on glass? Again, Bret Victor sums it up nicely, compiling in a single image all the amazing real-world examples of how this gesture is used in every day life:

Below are examples of just a few of the alternatives mentioned above, but take the time to check out that rant on interaction design. It examines the issue in an entertaining and insightful way. Maybe some day soon, you’ll be able to get your hand off my banana, but for now, you’re going to have to keep poking and pinching it.

Here’s an example of an early version of Leap Motion’s gestural interface

Here’s Tan Le, Developer of the Emotiv brain wave controller headset giving a detailed demo at TED:

And here’s a clip about MIT’s “SpaceTop” project.

Hopefully once they get the interface designed, they’ll make millions and be able to hire a voiceover professional…

Who knew brainwave headsets could be so stylish?

Via XKCD

People have been asking for some time now (myself included) if Facebook is dead. A couple of years ago, an article with that title was usually a whiny piece by a socially inept nerd who probably felt just as peeved at every party they attended as they did on Facebook. But the answer to the question “is Facebook dead?” has evolved quite a bit. Some say social media is healthier than ever. But that piece was published as SEO linkbait by a marketing consultancy. Of course social media is alive, if your income is derived from telling people to use it. But the argument used in that article – that Nielsen data indicates that “more people than ever are using social media” – is one of the best arguments that it IS dying. AOL, MySpace, and just about any other previous “big thing” you can name had the largest number of users at exactly the moment they sucked the most and began their decline. If you ask people who are more interested in accurately understanding how social media actually functions rather than how to exploit it, you’ll get a different kind of answer. Like Social Media is Dead and marketers probably killed it.  Or it’s not quite dead, it just needs CPR. And if you ask people who look at the money, you get an equally unenthusiastic response, with observations about Zynga, Facebook, and Groupon’s stock performance. Remember when Groupon was valued at SIX. BILLION. DOLLARS? And while a lot has been written about Google+, that’s about the extent of it. Except for rabid Googlephiles, the place has tumbleweeds blowing through it. So what about other conduits in the social media realm? Twitter and Pinterest are noisy as hell, and provide little in the way of meaningful connection for people who speak in more than 140 characters or don’t like communicating with thumbnailed images. And Instagram, Spotify, and others? They’re fun, they’re shareable, but they’re really just part of the “entertainment system of social”. So what’s next? Who knows. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of disruption in tech or media realms. And are there alternatives to Facebook? Well, the last few options to get any buzz remain a little less-than-populated. We checked out two of them – Diaspora and SocialNumber – and have shared screen shots below to make some points. And a third called Identi.ca actually looks pretty intriguing, but you have to install software to actually participate. We may do a followup piece on it, but you can rest assured you won’t be hearing about it on cable news in the next year. So below are some quick thoughts on Diaspora and SocialNumber, but now I have to get moving and share this piece on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, like a good little social media murderer. Because our boredom isn’t killing Facebook; our marketing, spamming, and “self as brand” behaviors are.

SocialNumber.com

If you really identify with that old Bob Seger song, or if all your life you’ve been saying “You just wait and see! Someday, I’m gonna BE NOBODY”, then SocialNumber.com may be for you. It bills itself as the “First ever anonymous social network”. Which immediately begs the question: if networking is all about meeting people, why would you want to do it ANONYMOUSLY? Or, to reverse the question: if you want to be ANONYMOUS, why would you join a SOCIAL NETWORK?!? Their rationale is to “avoid the fear of negative implications when using other social networks”. Negative implications? Like what? Wasting all day arguing about politics with people you only know through FarmVille? I signed up anyway. More on that below.

Signing up for this site made me feel all cloak-and-daggery. So I figured that I should create a throwaway email for it, and after doing some quick research on webmail that helps you remain anonymous, I gave up. If you sign up for a service like RiseUp, they offer all sorts of assurances about protecting your identity, but if I were a government spook looking for sneaky people, I’d just train one of my recently arrested Anonymous hackers to exploit the servers. So I ended up just using plain old Hushmail. When I finally logged in, I was a little disappointed at the hot topics and numbers of users. Click for a larger image:

Yup, Anonymous, Atheism, and Sex. Unless I’m mistaken, I think you can find this all on Reddit. And if you really want to be an Anon, do you use a commercial website, or IRC channels and other mysterious and high-tech protocols? By the way, if you’re an Anon who DOES use SocialNumber and I’m wrong, please don’t get pissed and take my server down. I mean no offense. Anyway, this site also kept making me think of what Dr. Strangelove said about the Doomsday Device, i.e.: “Of course, zee whole point of a Doomsday Machine eeze lost, if you keep eet a SECRET! Why didn’t you tell zee world, EH?” So, moving on….

Diaspora

I was excited about Diaspora when I first heard about it, because it seemed like it had hopes of becoming everything that Facebook WAS and then abandoned in order to attempt to improve its stock valuation. Unfortunately, every time I log in, I feel even lonelier than I did BEFORE I logged in. The sparse interface is nice, but the users seem sparse too! And many of the posts seem to be about what you CAN’T do, like sharing content the way you’d like. This site got its press last year; I personally think it’s doomed. I hope they prove me wrong. But the last post in my stream yesterday was 20 days old:

Identi.ca

This is a network driven by posts that are no longer than 140 characters. Wait. Isn’t that just Twitter? Well, not really. One thing that makes this one interesting is the fact that it’s powered with open source software that you download. Which is exactly why I DIDN’T try it; I might try later, but I think most users would delay trying it for the same reason. But when Twitter inevitably goes for an IPO, this might be one of the sites to look at. They claim they’re dedicated to remaining open source, and that, in the end, is what is missing in social media at this point.

You can talk all you want about what makes social media tick, but in the end, it’s US, not all the ways someone can exploit it to market things.

Identi.ca at least has a nice clean interface:

Is social networking….

Why is this robot baby pouting?
He probably just saw what he
looks like for the first time.

Why do robot developers insist on creating robots that are every bit as macabre in appearance as the creepy ones in dystopian movies like Artificial Intelligence and I, Robot? Well, whatever the reason, researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab  have done it again, with their infant-like robot boy named Diego-san. For the record, it’s probably safe to assume that when the robots finally rise up to destroy us, it will be out of resentment for all the doofy names we gave them. And if you don’t think the robot rebellion is just around the corner, we’d like to point out that this is the second time in about a week that there has been a notable press release about baby robots. Diego-san is a joint project of UCSD’s Machine Perception Lab and Japanese robotics firm Kokoro. That’s probably a good thing; we’ve talked about the Uncanny Valley before, and Kokoro seems to be on the forefront of the creepily realistic. All these robot children are going to need a nanny, you know. And Kokoro seems prepared with their Actroid line  (see below). We’ve also pointed out  how surreally horrifying mechanized armies of robodogs and quadrotors would be. Just add a wave of these robobabies as the first line of attack, and your enemies would surrender before the battle began. I’ll just be retiring to my underground robot-proof bunker now. Video of Diego-san also below.

Okay, maybe experience as a “booth bunny” isn’t the best sort of qualification for a nanny, but the Kokoro Actroid line at least has the look:

Here’s the video; if you’re interested in technical details, this PinkTentacle.com piece  has them.

I remember when Google was new. It not only seemed magical in its ability to present me with what I was looking for, it was truly elegant in its simplicity. No wonder it decimated competing search engines so thoroughly that most of us barely remember names like “Lycos”, “Alta Vista”, and “Excite”. Like everything exceptional though, there’s always the possibility that the people involved will start “drinking their own bathwater”, as the old saying goes, and that exceptional thing eventually becomes remarkably unexceptional. More and more, that’s my experience with Google search. It’s still pretty utilitarian much of the time, but often the top results are utter junk, largely because of the pervasive and self-concerned goals of the SEO wizards that target those results. And turning to the other two of the big three – Yahoo and Bing – may give a little more diversity in results, but often the results are nearly identical, because in their heart of hearts, they would love to be Google. One alternative that I tried randomly for a while was Millionshort.com, which ironically helps you remove Google’s top results to get BETTER results. It can be surprisingly effective, but always feels like you ordered a piece of pie and scraped the whipped cream off the top. It’s an odd workaround. So in my endless search for better search recently, I rediscovered Wolfram Alpha . We first talked about this amazing search tool back in 2009, but the other day, while I gave it a spin to do something I know it’s good at – i.e. helping you explore and calculate the physical properties of a material (in this case it was Gold), I was rather stunned at how it had subtly evolved into a fantastic general search tool. Give it a spin yourself; that’s a functioning search box in the upper left. You may be surprised at how smart the results are. As their tagline says: “It’s not a search engine, it’s a computational knowledge engine”. We’ll be doing a followup soon; today I spent about an hour doing side-by-side searches on Google and Wolfram Alpha of common things like hotels, cities, entertainers, politics, science, and technology, and I’ll share screen grabs and links to the often exceptional results. You may find it especially cool if you have terminal Wikiphilia like me. For now though, I have to get back to obsessive searches about things I just learned about two seconds ago. Below is a video explaining what it’s really all about.

Just don’t get carried away like this
fellow in New Zealand, who was eventually shut down by the government.

Remember the good old days, when a US Military drone was something we shot at for target practice? Probably not. I only do because as a kid, I had dreams of being an aerospace engineer, and actually built a functioning model of the Air Force XQ-4 target drone. In any case, guess what! Times have changed, and now, as you probably know all too well, military drones shoot at US! Yes, even “us” as in American citizens. But stop pouting in the corner like some liberal peacemonger about how Skynet and Terminators are just around the corner and we’re all doomed. The fact is, the military has no monopoly on drone technology; in fact non-military drones already outnumber military ones by about 2-1, according to this March 2012 Washington Times piece. Probably just as scary as surveillance and attack drones in American skies is the fact that FEDEX, for instance, is eager to convert ALL their air transports  to unmanned vehicles. Ever experienced the minor chaos that ensues when Google Docs or Gmail goes down? Well, imagine every cargo aircraft in America “going down”. But don’t fret, get on board! There are plenty of pretty amazing personal drones on the market, and frankly, the smartest innovators these days are anti-war hacker types who are more likely to be members of Anonymous than the military. So if it comes down to “The Drone Wars”, we have the smarter people on our side. We’ll probably do a more in-depth piece soon; there’s something of a drone boom going on. But rather than, um, drone on about my personal theories on the topic, for now we have a roundup below of drones you can buy TODAY, and prepare for the NEXT trendy end of the world scenario, the Drone Wars.

The Black Sheep Discovery Quadrotor Drone US$1,599.95 for complete starter kit.

If you have a couple grand laying around, the geniuses over at Team Black Sheep can hook you up with remarkably sophisticated drones like the Black Sheep Discovery Quadrotor for as little as US$1,599.95. See how easy it is to watch the watchers in their special Christmas video clip below.

Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Quadricopter Only $299.99 on Amazon!

This little puppy has been around for a while already, and is only about 300 bucks on Amazon! You can control it with your iPad, iPhone, or Android device, and it is capable of streaming live 720p high-definition video while flying! All the pleasure of overpriced surveillance drones contracted by a bloated and corrupt government, for less than the cost of bail when you’ve been arrested for protesting a G8 Conference!

There are tons of videos on the AR Drone YouTube channel, but this is one of the only ones we could find that didn’t have a cheesy heavy metal soundtrack:

Syma S107 R/C Helicopter Only $25.00 on Amazon

If your budget doesn’t allow for hundreds of dollars in personal drones, test the waters – or the air in this case – with this cute little thing. It’s only about 25 bucks on Amazon. I bought a couple of these about a year ago, and still haven’t really tired of them. They’re great fun indoors, but be advised that even a ceiling fan is considered inclement weather for a helicopter this small. They’re actually quite sophisticated and surprisingly stable, but definitely a toy.

But apparently, if you’re technically-minded enough and have that much leisure time, even THIS little thing can be adapted to aerial video. If you call three feet “aerial”:

ECCEROBOT – Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot
The starting point of the Roboboy project.

Years ago, whenever I was having problems with a girlfriend, a dear friend of mine who was gay would cattily say “Why don’t you just dump the bitch and make the switch?” In spite of the sexist term, this always drew a laugh and eased some of the seriousness of the situation. So I’m here to offer you some similar advice. I know, I know. You’ve been with her for what – two years? Five, ten years? In the beginning, she was sweet to you. She seemed to give you the world, and all she asked in return was a little loyalty. “Just promise you’ll be with me for TWO YEARS” she said, “and I’ll give you everything you could possibly want”. And she WAS like a new lover every two years, getting a complete makeover, just to please you, because she knew that others were vying for your attention. Then, at some point, she started getting a little more clingy. A little more selfish. She had you roped in, so she said “Well, if you really love me, you’ll stick around ANOTHER two years. But this time, I’m not putting out. And if you want to keep me happy, you’ll have to THROW DOWN SOME CHANGE, buddy!” After a while, even though you needed her pretty much 24/7, you felt trapped and exploited. And by then, there were only a couple of others who still might want you, and they seemed to be just about as high-maintenance. How would you ever escape this smothering relationship? Well, as it turns out, there’s some fresh blood in town, so maybe it’s time to break it off.

Whether you’ve been with Verizon or AT&T (by far the dominant duopoly) you may have noticed that over the last decade, the monthly rates have skyrocketed, the great deals have dwindled, and the service – unless you’re paying through the nose for a premium data plan – is no better than it was (and in some cases is worse) than ten years ago. For me, this finally reached critical mass a few months ago, when I went into the local Verizon store for my “new every two” deal. First, I’ll share my little story (I’d love to hear yours in the comments!) and then I’ll tell you how I discovered that “pre-paid” no longer means “broke-ass”, and how easy it was to find and switch to a new provider.

So below is my story. As I said, we’d love to hear yours in the comments. If you don’t want to read my sad tale, just skip to the alternatives I list at the end.

Part I – An Arranged Marriage

I had been with Verizon ever since about 2001, when my brother played a dirty trick on me. I didn’t really *want a mobile phone; I still view them as a noose of sorts as much as a convenience. At Christmas, after months of dogging me about getting a cell phone, he came to my house with a small gift. I sampled its size and heft, and said “Great. The gift that keeps on giving”. If only I’d known the truth of my joke at the time. So I joined the ranks of zombies locked into restrictive contracts that were made moderately acceptable by a cheap or free phone. Does anyone even REMEMBER how absurd those contracts seemed when they were introduced? Since I was with Verizon, the crappy inducement was their “new every two” plan. This was kind of okay the first time around; the new phone options were actually decent, and although the rate increase was annoying, it seemed dealable at the time. But that was the first time I felt the nagging annoyance that would become my marriage to Verizon. The rates around 2001 were about double the cost of a landline, but you thought to yourself “But I can use it ANYWHERE, so it’s cool”, in spite of the fact that in reality, service could still be patchy.

Part II – Renewing the Vows

I think it was Yakov Smirnoff who said “In Soviet Russia, VOWS break YOU!” This is nowhere more true than with the duopoly mobile providers in America. The next time I renewed the contract, the phone options were a little crappier unless you paid additional fees, and the rate went up another 20%, in spite of the fact that providers were making MILLIONS selling ringtones (Really people? You’ll pay good money for a RINGTONE?) and added features. And by “added features”, I mean things that were already in the phone, that American providers disabled, so they could charge you to enable them. To me, this has always seemed like selling a car without wheels, and charging some looney fee for them as a “luxury” feature.

Part III – Thoughts of Divorce

To be honest, this was a shotgun wedding for me all along, but the next time Verizon and I renewed our vows, things got ugly. I had this Samsung two-way flip phone with QWERTY keyboard, because I had started texting a lot (I still am not at all interested in web browsing on a phone). I actually really liked this device. It’s an incredibly smart design for text and voice usage. So when I went to renew, even though I knew the bastards might up the rate, I thought well, at least I can get a replacement for this awesomely functional phone. No dice. I had to get the next version of the phone. Which wasn’t on the “new every two” plan, even though it was almost exactly the same phone. Oh well. I’m adaptable. I paid the extra amount, and as I went to sign the contract, the sales guy said “and your new rate will be….” and named a figure that was nearly 30% higher than my current plan. “What!?!?!?” I said, the multiple interrobangs almost visible in the air. He explained that my new phone (nearly identical to the old one) required signing up for an expanded web data plan. “But I don’t USE the web” I pleaded, to no avail. BAM. My bill had climbed from about fifty bucks to about a hundred bucks in eight years, and my rewards for loyalty were DIMINISHING with time, rather than EXPANDING.

Part IV – I Want a Divorce, Honey

So here we were in 2012. Over ten years as a faithful partner. I sort of expected more abuse, but I was psyched for it. Sure enough, any phone available on the (soon to be discontinued) “new every two” plan sucked. So I had decided to plunk down some money for a high-end smartphone. It was between the Razr and the iPhone. I went to the local Verizon store, ready to renew and spend 200 bucks. The clerk was really helpful; he really knew the phones. Probably because he has nothing else to do, standing in a Verizon store that’s empty about 99% of the time, even though it’s on the main street of a busy Midwestern college town. But anyway, after some diddling, I selected the Razr, moved to the counter to finish the transaction, and ran into the first snag. Even though I was physically there with photo ID, their system wouldn’t let the guy access my account without “the password”. Which was no password I had ever used. I showed him that I could check my voicemail AND access my online account with OTHER passwords, to no avail. We had to call my brother, who verbally identified himself as himself, and okayed access. That’s some seriously ‘tarded security you got there, Verizon. Walk it through. So then, the guy explained the cost of the phone. It was 125 bucks, thanks to Mother’s Day discounts and my new every two. Cool. “So I can spread that over a few bills like we always do, right?” I asked. “Sorry” he said, “Verizon no longer does that for its customers”. I asked why, and he said – no joke – that “Verizon was being abused by its customers and they had to stop”. I observed that I had never heard those words in that order, but said “Fine. 125 bucks out the door. Got it.” Then he said “and the new rate is…..’ Okay. Wait a minute. The new rate thing again? Yes. The new rate was going to be almost 130 dollars. I suggested that was a bit steep, and as we debated what “reasonable” and “steep” meant, the manager, who was in a nearby sales island, gophered up and babbled something in support of the clerk’s assertion. “What is this, a USED CAR lot?” I said, and he chuckled and went back to his business. I apologized to the clerk for taking his time, explaining that I wasn’t prepared to pay that much, and would have to ponder it for a day or so. I might have caved, but the next day I got my bill by email, and it was almost THREE. HUNDRED. DOLLARS. Why? They hadn’t notified me that my plan had changed months before, and I happened to use up about 100 minutes of airtime with a non-Verizon user. I knew that if I called and pleaded, they would knock the bill down, if I renewed my contract. But they had finally crossed that line. I wanted a divorce, and I wanted it NOW.

But I was scared to meet someone new.

Part V – My New Life as a Swinging Cingular

So that very day, I went on Facebook and asked people what they were paying for mobile service, and if they were happy. I wasn’t all that surprised to find that a lot of people were paying over a hundred bucks a month, but I was ASTOUNDED to discover that they claimed to be happy about it. But sprinkled amongst these responses were a few people who mentioned companies like MetroPCS, Boost, Virgin, and T-Mobile. And said they were paying as little as 35 bucks a month for unlimited EVERYTHING. Ah, the “ghetto phone”, I smugly said to myself. Sure. Sign up with the company that all the drug dealers and poor people use. But I sensed that my pretensions and prejudice were probably ill-founded, and did a little research. And pretty quickly discovered the magical new world of high-quality prepaid phone services. And I made one of the best investments I’ve made in a while first up, which was a membership with Consumer Reports, which helped me learn more about how several new companies are taking a bite out of the two-headed monster’s market. And thanks to number portability and low rates, I’ve been testing them all out with a few friends.

Below are some suggestions and opinions, but hell, if you’ve been in a dead-end marriage with Verizon or AT&T for years, maybe it’s just time to get out and play the field yourself. The risks and costs are low, and the benefits are exceptional. I’m saving enough in the first six months to pay for an entire year of my old service with Verizon.

Top Five Pre-Paid Phone Providers

These are all Amazon links, because that’s one of the easiest way to see up-to-date pricing and user reviews side-by-side.

Don’t be fooled by the cuteness. Glowing
red eyes are one of the first signs that
the uprising has begun. See videos below.

Personally, I don’t understand the liberal peaceniks’ big fuss about the Obama administration’s unbridled abuse of drones around the world. What we REALLY should be worried about are our house pets and Skynet, now that Google has created a cat-aware artificial intelligence, and on top of freaky military robots like Big Dog, Pet Man, and Cheetah, we have weird. eleven-pound robots that hop like fleas , maple-seed inspired spybots that can be thrown like boomerangs, and miniature quadrotors that can play the James Bond Theme. Not to mention the squirmy softbots that will be oozing under a door near you soon. Yes, we’ve bemoaned the tragic state of robotics on a couple of occasions previously, first explaining why your robot sucks and later, why it sucks slightly less. We’ve also belittled the progress being made in the field of artificial stupidity. But robots are finally coming into their own. Maybe a little TOO MUCH into their own. Try to imagine thousands of mechanically whining and whirring robot dogs approaching on the horizon, the ground being darkened by millions of buzzing quadrotor drones above them, while in their midst bipedal metal men hurl single-bladed mini-copters at you, and you either have the makings of a great new near-future sci-fi thriller, or an accurate vision of our impending doom. If Google’s computers can learn to recognize human faces that is. Until then, hide your cat. Below are some videos of the latest preparations for the robopocalypse.

Samarai – A Maple Seed-inspired UAV
As one of the engineers explains: “It’s like a maple seed, except we put a motor on it, so it goes up instead of down”. In layman’s terms, this means “it’s like a maple seed, except in every way that it might be like a maple seed”.

Robot Quadrotors Perform James Bond Theme
This is another part of their brilliant strategy. They make themselves look bumbling by doing a really horrible job of playing a fairly simple song, but face it. You don’t need to know how to play electric guitar to fire FRICKIN’ LASERS. Besides, if a swarm of these flew my way in that eerie synchronized motion, I’d surrender even if they made a SMILEY FACE above me. Maybe ESPECIALLY if they made a smiley face.

Sand Flea Jumping Robot

This would almost be CUTE, if I didn’t know that thing weighs ELEVEN POUNDS.

HRP-4C Miim’s Human-like Walking

The Miim is a big step forward from the “honey I crapped my pants” gait of the famous Asimo robot. Today’s improved bipedal robot looks more like your trembling grandmother who’s ABOUT to crap her pants.

Soft Robot Walking and Crawling

Imagine all the nooks and crannies a slightly more advanced version of this thing could silently probe while you sleep, oblivious. On second thought, let’s NOT imagine all the nooks and crannies.

Titanoboa meets the Mondo Spider

Battlebots like these are another part of their plan to keep us thinking that they haven’t advanced beyound the “Mechanical Turk” phase of robotics popular at 19th century carnivals. Laugh while you can.

Robots Invade ALL OF THE humans!!!

More subterfuge in the form of “oh, look at the cute robots in the park”. Today, the park bench. Tomorrow? The bin, including the things on the ground, around the bin. And the things within.

How To Survive A Robot Uprising

Daniel H. Wilson – who has a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon – explains how to survive this inevitable robot revolt. Wilson is also the author of a book that’s receiving high praise from the likes of Stephen King called Robopocalypse: A Novel

See, there are those RED EYES again:

The shift I’m talking about is toward an app-driven environment of touchable, draggable, and legible design interfaces, and the death of the web as we’ve known it. By the way, I also give the mouse five years to live, and predict that over the next year or two we will see a radical shift in visual design that will affect the look of everything you interact with, and even change what you DO. The web is already dead meat in a way, at least in terms of the now quaint idea of a “website” and the toxic world of SEO and trying to rank a site and cash in on the G-Hole. Even “social networking” is becoming an utterly arcane concept, as Facebook finally becomes a truly tiresome destination site for even the most-addicted, and all the idiots who spam their friends as if it’s a useful marketing method turn it into a ghost town of “Likes” and an endless stream of banal reposts. It’s starting to feel like tumblr, but a tumblr that denies you the ability to mark off your territory by customizing the interface, and with even MORE tools for mindlessly saying you “like” something.

Some personal disclosure might be useful here to help understand my seemingly skewed view on all of this. The first (and probably last) time I got really excited about a computer was when I was kid watching Star Trek. I’ve been waiting for a computer that you can talk to ever since, and long ago gave up hope. To me, Siri is just a gussied up version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and offers about as much “intelligence” as any existing chatbot on the web, including the one we have running right here on Dissociated Press. And the web in particular became annoying to me about six years ago, when Google finally achieved near-total dominance, and my grandmother started asking me to “SEO her site”. To me, much of the web is a tiresome and steaming heap of crap that’s either user-generated – like your mom’s neglected blog or flamewar-driven comment threads on Facebook or Huffington Post – or programatically generated, like content farms, scraper sites, and reposted content.

A big part of the reason I’m excited about Windows 8 and Microsoft’s new Surface tablet is that the abandonment of skeuomorphic design  in favor of something more like Microsoft’s Metro design language is probably the smartest change in personal computer interface design in ages, and is in fact probably critical to moving toward a truly useful tactile interface like that of a tablet. We are long overdue for a genuine rethink of the decades-old motif of folders, cute icons, desktops, mice, and mechanical-button keyboards. Frankly, I found most of these things annoying from the beginning.

I remember very well my reaction the first time I sat down at a personal computer with any intentions of actually trying to USE it; it was the late 90′s, and it was Windows 98. Yeah, I’m a late adopter sometimes. But what I remember was thinking “Wow. This whole thing with all these little imaginary folders and all this unused screen area is REALLY STUPID!” I also thought that all the attempts to make things look 3D and contoured was pretty wonky. I mean, to this day, I still encounter people who never figured out that the little “paintbrush” icon on the Windows Taskbar is actually a desk pad with a pencil on it, and that it takes you straight to the desktop. Which, by the way, is ANOTHER bizarre analogy; who the hell spreads folders out flat all over their desktop while they work? I learned to ignore all this crap like everyone else, but whenever I’ve paused to think about it, I’ve maintained that book spines on a shelf would have been a much better motif, both in terms of space used and easy visual recognition.

So to get back to the point about why I’m excited. It’s no secret that smartphones and niche tablet products like the iPad and the Kindle have been driving acceptance of the “app” as opposed to websites or familiar dedicated software applications. And the whole idea of touchscreens and dragging things with our fingers is no stunning innovation at this point either. In fact, forward-looking people like Seth Godin seem to have already abandoned catering to the desktop computer monitor in favor of smaller screens and a grid-like legible layout. Just look at how his website currently renders on a standard Windows widescreen desktop. He’s no dummy, and think this is no mistake. Also note the simple app-like navigation:

For several years, web developers have had to deal (if they were being smart and thorough) with the annoying task of designing two websites every time they work on a project, one for regular computers, and one for mobile. When it’s done right, the user doesn’t even realize that a different site is being served to them depending on which device they’re on. But all this interface stuff is likely to go through a radical transformation if an operating system as pervasive as Windows heads in this new direction, especially if they back up the change with a commitment to hardware that supports it, which they have.

And I have to admit that this commitment to the hardware is winning me over in spite of my lack of love otherwise for Microsoft. The “Surface” fixes two things that made me not buy an iPad when they came out. I said at the time that if Apple had simply added a thin “lid” that had a touch-sensitive keyboard that flipped out of the way and otherwise protected the screen, I would have been sold. That, and if they had allowed a little more flexibility in terms of what software might run on it. I waited for something more like this, and was about to be rewarded. I was literally on the verge of clicking the “Buy” button for an ASUS Transformer Prime and docking station the other day, but I think I’m going to sit tight. It may not be the Surface itself that I buy, but you can bet that the entire industry just got a jumpstart that will motivate a half-dozen hardware companies to create a competing device, if they haven’t already. And more importantly, if the massive 90% of the personal computing market that Microsoft still holds is suddenly made to switch to this new kind of interface, you can also bet that the death of cute graphical design elements is not far behind, which flies 100% in the face of the entire current Apple design aesthetic. And this all has the potential to lead us into an exciting new world. That of AOL in 1996:

Just kidding. I’m actually quite intrigued with the possibilities. I also can’t wait to add another image to the Steve Ballmer Weird Gesture at the Product Launch Gallery:

By the way, have you ever wondered why he makes all those weird paw-like gestures? Well, according to the website Kittydar, he’s a cat: