Just a short title, a little graphic if you wanted and some color (not demonstrated here.) This is about actual size which means the icon size strikes a good balance between too much/too little. This icon/button combo always worked for me. There’s something physical about the size and the presentation. You want to touch them.

If you bank with Wells Fargo you hopefully have seen the new(ish) ATM design using the modern-day equivalent of PacerForum buttons:

It’s finger-friendly, the controls are big, almost physical. Minimal amounts of info on the screen means less clutter and more focus. There’s some nice background on the project from one of the designers available too.

Frog’s Celltop project takes the big button concept and shrinks it for the mobile phone.

However this video overview probably does a better job of communicating how it works:

There’s always the danger of taking a perfectly good UI concept and shoehorning it awkwardly into a new environment. The PacerForum and Wells Fargo ATM design succeeded because of what they left out. Celltop took the button and made it a data-rich widget–dense with info and light on context. You no longer think about “touching” these things.

But touch is everywhere now. The iPhone still defines the experience with HTC (Android handsets), Blackberry and maybe even Palm coming up fast. Finger-friendly is only getting more important.

The people over jazzmutant.com have come up with a generic input device for controlling music and video apps, custom things, etc. etc. And it is totally multi-touch. You design the interface and you design how that interface controls your app. Meet the Lemur:

The videos are quite interesting, as is paging thru the manual (PDF).

Here’s an actual live use of a Lemur:

But the person that wired this up back in the 1960s did it. Twice even.

I spent a couple of days trying to make it happen. Different gauge wire, wire lube (such a thing exists!), hacks with hooks, pulling, pushing, whatever. Other than sore thumbs, nothing.

So could applying some practical real-world software engineering experience help? When facing a code problem, the first tool out of the bag is usually the log statement. (Logging helps you get a better grasp on how a particular piece of code works by exposing the inner workings. Very low-tech, very hacky.)

In my case, I dragged out the power drill and starting adding log statements to my lamp assembly. Luckily I just needed one:

That little black hole at the junction there was all it took. Under real lighting I was able to see how it all came together. Once again, props to the original builder, pretty clever. Sure it’s unsightly but like most code bases, that’s life. Anyway the light works now and everything is hidden by the lampshade.

So my first experiment with CF lighting was bad. Light bulb burned out at home, unscrewed it, saw it was a 60w, went to the hardware store, go to lighting aisle looking for a 60w, see nothing, ask clerk, clerk knows nothing but says check the packaging “usually says what wattage they are similar to”, find something that seems to be 60w-ish, take it home, screw it in, turn it on and nothing! Is it broken? Oh wait, now it’s sorta glowing. It has to warm-up? This is crazy. Now I’m bathed in a cool blue chemical looking light. Great. This is progress. So just knowing a wattage doesn’t work anymore. Now you need to know obscure terms like lumens and measuring color using degrees and spiral or reflector and will it dim or not and on and on.

The CF light industry thinks if it just repeats “SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT” over and over again it has done its job. How wrong they are. There’s a growing body of criticism online: Seth Godin weighs in with Why CFL Doesn’t Sell, a piece in the Washington Post last year back about the “wife test” for CFL, Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity, and Steve Portigal has a few posts, e.g. I wanna push you around, well I will, I will, too. Wrong story, bad story, whatever. It needs work CFL industry.

I fear for you CFL industry. Need I remind you of another industry that thought it was OK forcing people to use trivia & jargon? That’s the computer industry. And it’s full of weird words and measurements and spawned a whole new industry, the computer support business, to help everyday folks. Can you imagine a Geek Squad for helping people find & install the right CFLs? How wrong is that? CFL industry, before it’s too late, start working on a new story with a better ending. Educate us, don’t assume.

One in particular stood out.

If only it were green, reminded me of something else.

Antenna are pretty interesting actually, as is the very presence of them. In many products you don’t need to see them.

Some might say that cuts a more elegant profile.

Then again that space-age aesthetic is pretty cool too. Why hide it?

Why do these antennae look the way they do? It all comes down to math, theory and some art. The theory gives you the fundamentals, the math & art give you the physical thing.

So if you take the math that brings you this wonderful example and run it through some exotic NASA-math, you get these little delights.
Maybe that’s NASA-art?