It’s just a concept at this stage, but Clayton Miller’s 10/GUI project is getting people’s attention. It proposes a way multi-touch might work in the desktop scenario – detached from the screen, like a giant trackpad, or tablet.

It’s hard to see it working perfectly, or being as universally applicable as the trusty mouse, but there’s certainly some good ideas there, some I’m sure we’ll see one way or another in years to come.

XPLANE are well known for their clarity-causing diagrams and illustrations. It’s nice to see them branching out into motion graphics like this one for The Economist’s Media Convergence conference.

Over the past few months I’ve been plugging away at a new project of mine called Make it Share it. It’s a website that lets you easily make a drawing or animation and put it up your own website, blog or profile page.

I’ve worked on a few personal and client projects in the past that have involved drawing tools. They’ve all been really fun to work on and especially fun see what others create with them. I also noticed that although there’s a few drawing tools out there I couldn’t find any that let you create cell-based animations in such a simple way.

One of the things I’ve aimed for with the site is to have as low a barrier to entry as possible. This extends to the drawing tools, the sign-up process and the overall usability of the site. I’ve made it so new users to the site can just dive it and create an animation or drawing and save to the site without having to sign up. After they’ve saved their creation they can decide to sign up or not.

So why not check out the site for yourself. I hope you have as much fun with it as I have had making it.

“By removing the soot and grime from public spaces to create the outlines of nature, Moose makes a poignant statement about pollution in urban spaces and our reversal of the natural world.”

From threeminds. Thx to John for the link.

EcoZoo is a recent addition to an increasingly long line of impressive 3D interactives appearing online. Most of these have been made possible with performance and rendering advances in the Flash Player and 3D libraries such as PaperVision3D which have popped up to take advantage of them.

What interests me is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were scoffing at the thought of 3D interfaces and mocking them for their inherent usability issues and gimmickery. While the gimmick label is still fair, it may not be in the near future. With the barrier to entry dropping by the day, building a 3D interface is no longer the realm for the coding elite. Although we’re likely to see a large amount of experimentation at first, as thoughtful designers with a care for user experience pick up this technology, solid design and interaction patterns should emerge that will raise the bar over time – just as we’ve seen with normal 2D websites in the past 10 years. Although you could argue it’s not fully 3D, ‘coverflow‘ as seen in Apple’s iTunes and iPhone could be seen as an early 3D interface pattern that’s been picked up by the masses and can now be found on a plethora of sites, webapps and widgets.

Although 3D interfaces will only be appropriate for certain types of content, I’m excited about seeing how designers will start taking advantage of this technology in their everyday work.

Practical? no. Cool? hell yes!

There’s something incredibly sad but awesome about this.