There’s an interesting article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer on Peter Bohlin, the creator of the glass cube in front of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City. Jobs’ vision for the stores was remarkably prescient:

Jobs, who met Bohlin when the architect was overseeing a new headquarters for his Pixar animation studio, was aware that he had never designed a store interior. But he didn’t care about that handicap, said Karl Backus, the principal in BCJ’s San Francisco office who manages the firm’s Apple projects. That’s because Jobs thought of the stores not as retail spaces but as social spaces.

Jobs believed it was more important for the stores to offer a unique and compelling experience, in much the way that a Frank Gehry-designed museum does. Otherwise, why would people bother to make a special trip to buy a product they could order more easily on the Web?

— Old-school architect creates an iOpener, philly.com, March 22, 2010

An interesting glimpse (with videos) of how Penguin Books envisions next-generation books for iPad.

A copy of Pride And Prejucide might conceivably come with videos of Keira Knightly and Colin Firth (the movie adaptation’s cast), he said, but: “We need to understand how much the consumer will pay for that, we need to engage in dynamic pricing.

— First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad, paidcontent.co.uk, March 2, 2010

“Prejucide” made me laugh, but including a video with the book sounds questionable to me. You interpret books as you read them, including envisioning the characters. A filmed version of the book is unavoidably interpretive and cannot help but color your own interpretation, even taint it.

An interesting overview of teases and transitions in Microsoft’s new mobile OS:

[Natural User Interfaces] frequently need to let people know what elements are interactive. (Ideally everything is interactive in a touch-based UI but that’s a different point.) NUIs should encourage exploration and give people “permission” to touch things. Teasing people is one way of encouraging interactivity and exploration.

[...]

Transitions also help communicate interactions. When users move between screens, interaction components fly in or swivel highlighting the fact they are active and can be touched. Once someone taps on these components, they pivot or recede as if they were pushed backward into space. This animation…reinforces the fact they are active.

— Windows Phone: User Interface Teases & Transitions, lukew.com, February 17, 2010