Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 11:31PM I wanted to share with you a little side project I've recently completed with a good friend. Jigsaw Junior for iPad (iTunes link) is a kid's jigsaw puzzle app we've just released — read more at the official Jigsaw Junior site here.
Definitely got a 'laundry list' of things to improve, so I'd love to hear your feedback to fill in the gaps.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 12:00PM My friend Jessica Enders pointed me to a great story on New York Public Radio's RadioLab. Look for an interview coming soon with Jessica of formulate.com.au Look for the http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21">'Sound as Touch' story.
The interesting result is that there are four 'melodies' that seem common to the voices used by parents to their children across all cultures. What if more applications used these kinds of sounds to communicate messages? For example, Instant Messages always use identical sounds -- what if an "ok" had a certain sound, or a question had a related, but slightly different sound. Logically, a "bye" or similar phrase in the chat would invoke yet another, different sound. The benefit of these sounds is to enable you to choose how soon to respond to a message, without needing to view it. Instant Messaging, by it's very nature, encourages multitasking.. and if you're busy with another task it may be some seconds or minutes before you switch over to the message. If you knew that message was simply an "OK" then you may not switch so fast.. but if it was a "bye!" then you may switch over quickly to be able to say goodbye in return before the other person logged off. There are some attempted solutions out there for this problem. One of the more successful is Growl, which shows small text messages on the side of your screen, no matter what app you're in. The problem here is that this notification is using the same mode as you're probably already engaged in: reading text. So If you're typing away at your document, and an Instant Message comes in, then you need to switch your visual focus to this new area, and read the text. There is no other way to absorb this content. Better would be to map these message's context and content to some kind of animation. An excellent example is the way the icons in the Mac OS X Dock jump up and down to attract attention when an application requires user input. The human brain is optimized for certain tasks, and can handle different types of information at once, as long as it's not in the same modes/channels of communication.animation, audio, children in Announcements 