Lovely things:

1. The knocking machine: "You put it on a table and knock on the table: the device detects the knock through a shock sensor in the bottom, copies and repeats it till you hold the hammer to stop it."

2. Beautiful barcodes - that actually work.

3. FlickrGraph - is there no end to the wonderful windows that Flickr users are opening onto that service?

4. Planes that never got built.

5. Networked pac-man - a lovely mod to the original game. Coincidentally, we've just implemented a similar sort of thing for a client using Bluetooth; maybe I'll be able to post about it one day...

Getting Real: "Functional specifications documents lead to an illusion of agreement. A bunch of people agreeing on paragraphs of text is not real agreement. Everyone is reading the same thing, but they’re often thinking something different. "

I'm not sure what the answer is, here. Certainly UIs need to get more prominence in the development process (see Palm, Apple, Sony for reasons why)... but this needs to be done within realistic parameters - there's no point in designing a user interface which can't be implemented.

I also believe that, especially with mobile, it's difficult to design an interface without playing with it - without actually having it on a target handset so that you can feel what's right and what's wrong about it. Such things can be difficult to articulate or document.

Romancing the user experience

Anyone know where I could track down a copy of this film? I posted a while back about my interest in seeing what happened to Riot-E, and would love to get a copy or see it...

Shit. There go my train journeys...