A long, winding (and fascinating) “Road” at AppleInsider

Interactive Design,
10/11/07

A quick update: I wanted to call attention to a great series of articles on AppleInsider previewing interface novelties in the upcoming Leopard incarnation of Mac OS X. This isn’t your usual Apple fanboy boosterism, however—each article places a single new feature of the OS in historical context, with screenshots from earlier operating systems (I find the comparisons with NeXTSTEP particularly interesting).

Here are links to the articles published in the “Road to Mac OS X Leopard” series to date:

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Finder 10.5

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dock 1.6

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Spaces

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Time Machine

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Mail 3.0

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: iChat 4.0

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: iCal 3.0

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Safari 3.0

 

TENORI-ON is happy-making

Animation, Exemplary Work, Interactive Design, Music,
9/5/07

Toshio Iwai, interactive media artist and creator of Electroplankton, gave a solo performance of his new instrument, the TENORI-ON, last night at a launch event in London. Composer Gary Kibler was there and posted a number of videos of the event. Check out the clip below—there’s a very specific joy about this device that occurs when he creates a loop and then hides it to begin work on another layer. Creating a tangible rhythm out of light, and then hiding the light while the rhythm persists… it immediately engages the maker instinct. The promise is one of building music with smart light, light that’s better than light because it remembers and holds its state in secret while you go to work on another facet of the composition. Great concept, can’t wait to see where it goes.

Source: Create Digital Music

Update: Further reflections on the device from Gary Kibler: Hands On Tenori-On: Close Encounters of the Interactive Music Kind

 

“We get to decide” what is next-gen

Games, Interactive Design, Wii,
8/20/07

This is so right on, I couldn’t pass it up. In a speech at the GCDC in Germany this afternoon (covered in this article at GamesIndustry.biz), Stormfront Sudios President and CEO Don Daglow made some excellent points that deserve to be repeated far and wide.

“If it changes the player’s view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn’t have before, to me that’s next-gen,” Daglow said in a refutation of conventional wisdom that you can’t create a next-gen experience without dramatic increases in processing power. I couldn’t agree more.

The most significant innovations waiting in the wings for interactive art and entertainment are absolutely not about processing power, better algorithms, or any form of rocket science, though they may be enabled by technological innovation (as with the Wii remote). They are simply smart design, inspired thinking, artistry, and most importantly, perspective—an actual point of view on the world that arises from one’s personal experience.

Another Daglow quote: “We’ve spent a quarter of a century saying ‘the machine is holding me back’... The only problem is that now the machines are so powerful, we’ve lost our excuse.” This became really clear to me in the waning years of the last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), when I started to get bored with gaming in general. Everything was a retread; new versions of old games with upgraded graphics. I was shocked out of my complacency, however, when the Wii controller was first announced (evidenced by the fact that as soon as I heard the announcement I immediately estimated the dimensions of the remote and built a Duplo version the same size to start imagining what was possible…)

Daglow defends the Wii as a next-gen platform from the skeptics who doubt that it’s lesser-powered processor qualifies it as such with a blunt truth that should be remembered and repeated:

“Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves.”

Amen to that.

 

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