We have trouble controlling our consumer impulses, and there's a gap between our decision and the consequences. This is magnified by the digitization of money. When we pull a product off the shelf, do we know what our bank account balance is, or whether we're over budget for the month? Our existing senses are inadequate to warn us.

The Proverbial Wallet gives us that financial sense at the point of purchase by un-abstracting virtual assets. Tactile feedback reflecting our personal balances and transactions helps us develop a subconscious financial sense that guides responsible decisions. In addition to providing a visceral connection to our virtual money, tactile output keeps personal information private and ambient.

This is a project by the Information Ecology group at the MIT Media Lab. Read more at eco.media.mit.edu/proverbialwallets/

...a tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the café, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone's eyes.

"What's with the close / minimize / maximize buttons being vertical in the top "toolbar" of iTunes 10 (see example at right)? As I stated to my cohorts here at TUAW this morning, doesn't that fly in the face of 10 years of experience with OS X and even violate Apple's Human Interface Guidlines? Fortunately, there's relief. A tweet from @rudyrichter showed how to fix this -- pop into Terminal and type or paste in "defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1", press Return, relaunch iTunes and life is back to normal."

Yeah, j'ai bossé dessus :-D

By now it’s generally agreed that iTV is coming on Wednesday and is likely to be iOS-​​based.

Many folks have assumed that “running iOS” means “running iPad apps” directly, or iPad-​​style apps via another App Store. This raises a lot of ques­tions about the inter­action model; how do you manip­ulate an app that’s beyond your reach? If we expect any new iOS device will run existing apps from smaller screens, we run into the “focus” problem: if you can’t touch directly, you have to have context for the “noun” you are about to “verb” with the next tap.

There are a few ways to address focus.

A direc­tional controller (d-​​pad or gestural touch surface) can navigate a straight­forward, recti­linear menu interface as most TV inter­faces (including Apple TV) do today. Or that same controller could move focus between more arbi­trary active regions, as with many DVD menus. Jon Bell and Dan Wineman are excited about gestural touch surfaces and their potential here. After all, the Remote app for controlling your Apple TV from an iPhone has a similar touch surface approach for navi­gating menus.

I’m not convinced. Even though it is common to confound gestural touch surfaces and direct touch UI, this is still an indirect focus controller. I cannot imagine Apple adopting a discretely-​​shifting-​​focus UI akin to DVD menus, and the best alter­native seems to be intro­ducing a cursor for arbi­trary focus. Once you’re using a direc­tional controller (gestural or not) to control a cursor on a screen (decoupled from the controller surface)… well, that’s a pointer. You might as well have a mouse.

"Since the time data and subjective ratings showed no significant differences between the navigation methods, we didn't use that data in our decision. Instead, we focused on the accuracy/error data. The Yahoo-style and Drop-downs were identical. Therefore, we needed to look at the pros and cons of using each method.
Yahoo-style

Pros: The entire site structure is spelled out in the menus, so users can see everything at once. The user can click directly on the target link, without having to select the link from a sub-menu or interim menu-like page.

Cons: This method takes up lots of screen real estate, and requires vertical scrolling to see the entire menu, which ends up "below the fold," even when the browser window is maximized.
Drop-downs

Pros: This menu takes up far less screen real estate that the Yahoo-style, thus leaving more room for actual page content. Making additions or changes to the menu doesn't change the amount of real estate required for it. It does not require vertical scrolling to see the entire menu.

Cons: You can't see the entire set of selections without at least mousing over each header. The window may need to be maximized (depending on the actual control used to implement the menu) to see the full set of menu headers across the page without scrolling. "