I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but never got around to it until now. My buddies, the Ten Minute Turns, were recently featured in Billboard! They play a great show and are always fun to hang out with. They do some cool side projects too, like scoring the music for a new Nickelodeon cartoon called Three Delivery. They perform next at Southpaw on Friday, May 16th, 8pm. Be there or be □.

I’d been playing with the idea of trying to hook up more (digital) music in the living room. I wanted something that’s more on-demand and easier to control. I tried my iPod but this doesn’t interact with last.fm (I like keeping a listening history). I tried my iPhone – it’s hacked to run MobileScrobbler and therefore can log to last.fm. But this gives me issues when people call or send me texts. I tried plugging my laptop into the speakers. This was a little awkward because the laptop has to sit next to the TV and the speaker (running the cable all over the place is just not a good idea especially when people are over). And this method just made it hard to do work; I was standing hunched over trying to type emails. I started looking for other devices around the house. The PSP was nice and would’ve looked cool next to the TV – but I couldn’t figure out a way to get last.fm running properly – and syncing music with the system didn’t really fit my workflow. Then, my Nokia N800 volunteered for the job. I found a last.fm client for Maemo called Vagalume that works pretty well – it watches my last.fm radio and plays tracks non-stop. And it looks really cool. Sweet.

I was discussing interface design with a couple of people last week – specifically, gestural or “natural” interfaces and I mentioned the idea of “interface without interface”. It can be described this way: the natural world does not come with instructions – and natural things do not come with buttons to indicate where you must press for an action or where you must look. For instance, an apple does not come with markings on where to bite and a flower has no indication that it must be put up to your nose. These actions either come naturally to animals or they must be learned – nuture.

I think this concept is an important one. It makes for more beautiful objects. We can and should apply such concepts to interface design more often to make for a better experience.

Recently, we’ve seen a great deal of press about touch screen and gestural interfaces. But even these don’t quite highlight this concept because many simply replace a finger for a mouse pointer – and leave all the buttons and scrollbars in a user interface untouched. I think one place you can see this “natural” idea is with documents that have large canvases – maps and web pages. Consider, for instance, how a user can move around a large map with iPhone or with Google Maps online. You simply recenter the canvas by dragging it and moving it around to a more convenient location. Another great example are the gestural controllers built into Toshiba’s SpursEngine. I got to play with it earlier this year at CES. It’s still in the early stages of development, so the experience is a little crude. But the interesting point it makes is that people should be able to interact with machines using gestures they are normally used to (waving hi; holding up a thumbs-up; etc).

One of the best examples of gestures I’ve seen is ShutUp. The use case is specific – but it gets the point of a good gestural interface across quickly. Let’s say you are in a meeting and suddenly your phone that’s sitting on the table starts ringing. The application gives you the ability to silence it by simply flipping it over on its back. It’s a natural gesture – and there was no need to hunt for the “silence call” button.

That’s interface without interface.

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General: “Conan! What is best in life?”
Conan (The Barbarian): “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Supposedly this quote is loosely based on what Genghis Khan himself said once.