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

The world map displayed within the Data & Time system preference panel changes with the seasons.

A nice touch.

The broad spectrum of patents and ideas illustrated in Patently Apple’s three-part series of prophecies about Apple’s product plans support a point made cogently by Joel Johnson at Gizmodo:

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.
— Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple’s Magic, Gizmodo, January 20, 2010

Overstated perhaps, but generally true.

The video looks good to me.

Trying to visit Apple’s TGI Friday promo page here in the United States:

iPhone transition animations are cooler than meets the eye.

Take page transitions, for example. It’s common to navigate from one page to another by tapping an item from a list to see more detail: new pages slide in from the right, while tapping Back slides the old page back in from the left.

You might think that animating in a new page to replace the old would simply slide the two in lock-step, like two cafeteria trays on a serving rail, but it’s more subtle than that. To see that subtlety, let’s slow things down for a closer look.

The pages featured here are from Malt Whisky, my new iPhone app, but the animations are the same throughout iPhone. In this example, we’re transitioning from the Bunnahabhain Distillery page to the pronunciation page to hear boo·na·HAA·ven pronounced.

These 13 frames shown at right (links to larger version) reveal five different animations for five different page elements:

Interested, I rigged up a similar page transition but with a single animation of “new page pushing out old page”, including the navigation bar. The difference was profound: instead of something that felt alive and vibrant, it felt like a Keynote slide transition. A completely different feeling.

The different timing of all five animations coordinate to make the page transition whoosh. You can barely notice the animations individually and as for perceiving them all in combination, forget it. But you’re not supposed to notice them. You’re simply supposed to get a tiny thrill of seeing one page whoosh in to replace the other, of using a device that somehow seems alive.

And you do.

Freek Bijl describes how Apple will revolutionize the publishing business with the potent combination of iTunes+Store+Tablet to address the respective problems of distribution+businessmodel+usability, just as it already has the music and mobile businesses.

Sounds good to me.

In June, Businessweek published Tufte’s Invisible Yet Ubiquitous Influence, an article featuring an interesting slideshow of Edward Tufte’s work, including his sculptures. The sculptures mentioned are all quite large—and getting larger: his 2007 Rocket Science is 32 feet high and 72 feet long.

It’s unsurprising to learn that Tufte cites among his influences Richard Serra, whose Wake is arguably the finest piece here in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Both men think big with strong, clean lines. But where Serra’s work flows organically and naturally as though it just happened, Tufte’s works are studiously composed and cerebral.

It’s inspiring to see Tufte still exploring and growing at 67. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and his other books should be considered required reading for all designers, including web designers.

And the term sparkline is almost as cool as the idea.

Wired reports that Snow Leopard 10.6.2 will not run on the Intel Atom processor, and calls this “a rather petty move from Apple which, if true, will break many netbooks which have been hacked to run as more than passable Macs.”

Petty?

Wait, let me get my violin…ah, there it is… [Music starts]

This should be already clear to any reporter, but Apple sells hardware to run Mac OS. Yes, Apple makes software, but the real profit is in hardware. You buy a non-Apple netbook and hack it to run Mac OS, you’re taking money out of Apple’s pocket. In fact, if you read the licensing agreement that comes with Mac OS, you’re violating that agreement.

Having acted irresponsibly by flouting Apple’s licensing agreement to run Mac OS on your non-Apple hardware, are you really surprised when Apple comes back like an adult and says, don’t do that?

You want to run Mac OS, dry the crocodile tears and get a Mac. It’s that simple.

As nice as it is to browse pages using Safari Mobile on the iPhone and iPod touch, it can be bothersome to view several links on a page in succession: tap the first link to view it, then go back to the original page to tap the second link, then go back…and so on. Unless the original page is quite small, Safari Mobile has to reload it every time you go back, slowing things down a lot.

1. Press and hold on the link you wish to view.
2. When the dialog appears, tap Open in New Page.
3. View the page in the new page.
4. Tap the pages button in the bottom-right corner to return to the original page to load additional pages.

Comes in handy when you’re rushing for a flight and want to cache a number of pages for reading on board.