Matthew Braga from “BlogTO”:http://www.blogto.com/tech/2009/04/designing_for_touch_and_surface/ came into the office last week to take a peek at our Microsoft Surface. We’ve obviously kept pretty quite about our plans for the platform… but I can say we are working on a few things. We currently have a little game in development, which we’ll be sharing more of in the coming weeks.

Matthew “touched”:http://www.blogto.com/tech/2009/04/designing_for_touch_and_surface/ on a number of the interesting challenges we’ve encountered while developing for the Surface – Designing and developing for multi-touch is quite different than your average browser-based environment. From a design perspective, you need to consider the “360° interface” of the unit, which creates an interesting set of interface challenges. Similarly, C# isn’t exactly like HTML or JS or ActionScript or any of the other languages we typically deal with.

We too shared the same frustrations that “FD kinesis”:http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/24/microsoft-surface-setup-impressions-filled-with-mind-bogglingl/ encountered when the unit first arrived, although ours was actually a little worse (we actually needed a service call to get it up and running). However, the reality is that the platform is still very much in its infancy and there are many things that continue to evolve. However, it’s not hard to see the huge potential the Surface has, which is what really attracted us to the platform.

You can read the BlogTO article “here”:http://www.blogto.com/tech/2009/04/designing_for_touch_and_surface/

Not sure which cellphone is right for you? Fear not, TELUS will help you find your Smart Fit. With a few simple questions, the TELUS Smart Fit Quiz will help determine which handset is right for you. Perhaps it’s a Blackberry Curve, or maybe it’s Just A Phone. Of course, you can also forego the questions and simply compare the handset features. Looking for a phone that has a full keyboard, a camera and comes in multiple colours? No problem.

WIth site development, 3D modeling and animation, rich ads, display ads, and digital signage – Q1 was certainly another busy quarter for us.

Take a look: telusmobility.com/smartfit

A few months ago we were talking about Palm in the office. I was lamenting how much I loved my old Treo. Despite Palm’s inability to upgrade hardware and software at a pace acceptable to me there were many things I missed about my Treo.

At the time of our discussion they had just killed off the Foleo, an absolutely baffling product that had no use to anyone. We imagined a chalk line being drawn around PALM headquarters. They seemed like a company who were once leaders that could no longer compete. A product line that was weighed down with legacy and seemingly no hope in sight or in their pipeline.

Now Palm is going “all in” with the Palm Pre. Their new smartphone that looks amazing.

But here is the truth of the situation:

From CNBC:
“There is nothing left, no goodwill, and very little patience on the Street. Palm has about $200 million in cash in the bank to fund the release and the massive ad campaign to support Pre. “

This is why they will succeed. Failure is not an option… There is no bailout, there is no TARP.

Palm will succeed by putting a product in market that is better than their heavy competition or they will cease to be in business. Some think that it is too little too late for Palm, competition from RIM and Apple is just too great. But I like an underdog especially one who refuses to die.

[Full disclosure: I own shares of PALM. I bought 1000 shares at $6.50]

Limited access to television, icy temperatures, and no amount of distance, held anyone back from watching Tuesday’s inauguration of the 44th president, Barack Obama. Several sites proudly played host to the most web-friendly presidential inauguration to date, spiking internet traffic levels to 54% above normal.

CNN streamed the live ceremony alongside an impressive Facebook tool, which let users update their status, and toggle between viewing live status updates of their own friends, or the general public (consisting purely of Obamania). You could call it a success, an average of 4,000 users updated their status every minute, and CNN reported over 1.5 million status updates through their portal alone.

Meanwhile, not one minute was wasted updating the White House website, literally. By 12:01, the site was Obamafied, and the blog page already flourishing with updates and recaps.

At the Obama-friendly T+L, we were lucky enough to get a mid-morning break to pile into the boardroom and watch history unfold. It was especially exciting for us that the ceremony that captivated millions of people around the world had a much higher priority online, compared to in the past.

We even had some friends from the Globe and Mail join us for a story.

Often times my friends and family ask how we get any work done, here at Teehan+Lax. Based on the stories they hear from me – it’s all fun and games! And guess what? It is. But as it turns out, that’s not a bad thing.

In the new Ted.com presentation (:30 minutes in length), Tim Brown demonstrates how, as adults we learn to fear the judgment of our peers. He explains how professionals need to relearn how to be playful in the work place. Go back to the things we learned as a child: Exploration, Building and Role Play.

Quickly conducting several games from the stage to the audience, Tim demonstrates how as adults we:
* self-edit as we are coming up with ideas – our desire to be original is a form of editing
* forget to be open to the questions: what is it? AND what can I do with it?
* need to use the materials around us to get our point across (lots of great prototyping examples in the last half of the presentation)
* should “try-on” experiences, as a form of role play

I can’t say that in this day and age we’d ever go as far as the Peyote tests conducted in 1960s (another example cited by Tim) to get over our adult habits. But luckily, at T+L we don’t need to.

Here’s an interesting demo of augmented reality from the folks at Digital Pictures Interactive. Using nothing but a webcam and Flash player, they’ve managed to blend virtual content in real time with a webcam feed. The possibilities here are endless and it’s great to see work being done with such ubiquitous technology. The accessibility of this project reminds me of Jonny Lee’s Wii based demos, in which he used a $40 Wii controller to hack together a sophisticated touch screen and a head mounted 3D viewer (still waiting for a killer game from Nintendo based off this tech). It’s exciting to see technology once limited to science fiction making its way to consumer level devices. Augmented reality seems like it’s still in its infancy, but all it needs is that one killer app to break into the mainstream. Whether that comes in the form of a game, or an Android app, I have a feeling it’s not too far off.

15 years ago, Dave Gray founded XPLANE, a visual communications company that has been pumping out beautiful graphical explanations for all sorts of clients, products and services ever since.

His presentation at CanUX kept up the theme of drawing and sketching, but flipped the emphasis: while the other presentations were about communicating design ideas visually, this one was about designing visual ideas for communication. In other words, it was about designing for visual literacy.

Dave’s passion is for explaining complicated stuff in ways that leverage perception, invite collaboration, and spark the imagination. He suggested that although people can generally “read” visual artifacts, most cannot “write.” After a brief primer on the visual alphabet (check out symbols.com for more info), he took the group through a few exercises developed at XPLANE for stoking creative process. The basic premise was that everyone can learn how to draw.

What’s next for Dave Gray? We chatted a bit about his desire to advocate for visual literacy in academic and professional communities. Pretty cool stuff. Check out these links here and here for a sense of where he’s going with this stuff.
 
The idea of visual literacy is one that I’ve been really keen to explore over the last couple years—first from an applied linguistics perspective at school, then from a practitioners perspective as an illustrator and now an interaction designer. It’s a really interesting topic, and I’d highly recommend the book Reading Images as a great starting point for anyone interested.

You can also check out a paper and presentation I gave on the topic of vis lit and web-based graphic design back in grad school…sort of geeky though, so be forewarned!

Best of luck to Greg Bolton and his wife on their new endeavor.

This is pretty interesting. It’s the exact same interface as Apple’s OS visual sorting mechanism but what’s interesting is that it’s been re appropriated to become Searchme’s search results interface, visually displaying the web page associated with your query.

A collection of some of the most interesting, eyebrow raising, life questioning images found anywhere… a must see!