deGravity

Calling these "philosophies" is probably marketing fluff, but the dichotomy is definitely a real thing in interaction design; interacting with a computer as an agent (querying, dialogs, etc.) vs interacting with a computer as a tool (physically manipulated interfaces). All of the companies cited build products in both categories, but Google (and now increasingly Facebook) definitely skew towards the computer-as-agent applications, and Microsoft and Apple towards computer-as-tool.

At an organizational level I'm inclined to agree with you that the altruism ascribed by the article is far too optimistic, but I would imagine that there are individuals in each company who do think along these lines and try to design along them. (I do, however, find Google "giving users back their time" a bit hilarious as their business model is precisely to get users to spend as much time as possible looking at ads - maybe they free us from mundane tasks so we have more time to browse ads).

I think that's a bit harsh. The documents at that URL were understood to be freely available to the public.

As I physical analogy, I'd think about it more as one of those restaurant straw dispensers. He got tired of pressing the button each time for a new straw, and instead opened the lid and grabbed a bunch out.

It's a nice set of guidelines, but why the snail on page 15?

Have cameras take pictures of the interior before and after each ride. You then have a verifiable record of what state the car is in, and you don't have a bunch of data-privacy issues around recording activities while someone is inside the car.

Check out Joseph LaViola's work at UCF (formerly from Brown). http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/isuelab/research/pen.php

The latest work, MathBoxes, uses the recognition engine from the starPAD sdk http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/pcc/research.html#star...

It's a great toolkit for building pen-centric computing tools (especially math recognizers and tools), but unfortunately it is heavily tied to the old Windows 7 tablet APIs and so isn't easily generalized. I've been hoping to port it to work on newer hardware for the past few years, but have not yet found the time. If anyone wants to take on that project it would be incredibly useful (especially since there seems to be a resurgence of pen-centric computing on the near horizon).

You can find more pen-math work on Brown's website: http://cs.brown.edu/research/ptc/FluidMath.html

I talked to the author about this - apparently Kevin Spacey's lawyers asked them to change it.

Thanks for sharing!

Small grammar nitpick: In the last sentence of the "Cheap and risk free" section you use the word "years" twice where "year's" would be the appropriate usage.