Category: Technology
-
Interaction Design Style (My IA Summit 2007 Presentation)
It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style. Many people came to…
-
Are Some People Just Visually Dull?
—
by
Everywhere you go, you see 16:9 widescreen television screens playing regular 4:3 video programs stretched out to fit across the whole screen. You see these in airports, banks, bars, and offices. Maybe you even see this in your own home. Presumably, the owners of these TV screens can’t bear to see all those extra black…
-
SXSW 2007: Class Dismissed, or How My Panel Went
My SXSW panel, High Class and Low Class Web Design, is over now, and I can now share a little bit of about how I and a few others think it went. Some bloggers who attended the panel have already published their own notes and reviews, too, so if you want to skip what I…
-
Stop Putting Dates in File Names!
You know who you are. You are my friends, colleagues, and clients. You’re really smart about how to use computers and stuff. You’re great people. But I just can’t stand it when you put dates in your file names. Whether you put dashes between the numbers, use two- or four-digit years, I still can’t stand…
-
C.R.E.E.P.
I had the creepiest IM conversation recently, from an IM handle I have never seen before (handle has been changed to protect, um, whoever) : (11:01:18) M****N: hi (11:01:28) Christopher Fahey: who’s this? (11:01:31) M****N: hi (11:01:36) Christopher Fahey: who’s this? (11:01:41) M****N: m****n (11:01:47) Christopher Fahey: obviously (11:01:53) M****N: ok (11:02:00) M****N: i dont…
-
Talking to Myself with SimulScribe
Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that: Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)… wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file… and then emails the raw…
-
Aura of Inevitability (or: When a Technology’s Time has Come)
New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example.…
-
Stop Surfing!
Not me. I’ve had enough of the term “surfing” when talking about “what we do when we use the web”. It was a terrible metaphor when it was first invented, and it’s only gotten worse. This morning on the radio I heard a journalist describe a terrorist using a computer to view terror videos with…