Countdown to a spanking

XP: Are you SURE you don't want to restart now?

A constant thorn in my side from our use of Windows XP as our primary workstations is the Automatic Updates feature. In explaining my frustration to others, I've inevitably compared it to very similar behavior in Mac OS X, which for some reason does not drive me insane. I've been unable to put my finger on the difference until just this morning. Where OS X also presents a modal (non-closeable) dialog that requires an action, Windows floats that dialog above everything else, forcing the issue. With OS X, I can happily continue about my day, and decide to restart only when it is convenient for me. XP on the other hand, requires a 'Restart Now' or a 'Restart Later' before it gets out of my way, and choosing 'Restart Later' begins a Sisyphean cycle of misery until finally the computer has had enough of your sandbagging and counts down an automatic restart, like a mother counting down the time you have left before you get a spanking.

What a difference being able to click away makes.

Foldit: distributed gaming as research tool

Foldit, a game made by two medical researchers in collaboration with some computer scientists and with consultation from some game designers, taps into people's intuition where raw computer processing power isn't enough. Think distributed computing like the Stanford Chemistry Department's Folding@Home, but instead of donating idle CPU cycles to perform scientific research, you play a game that helps researchers understand human pattern recognition.

According to UW associate professor of computer science and engineering Zoran Popovic in Science Daily:

Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score. They can't even explain what they're doing, but somehow they're able to do it.

One of the most interesting parts is that they've incorporated competition into the game: between gamers playing for a high score, and actual research groups trying to solve problems. I think a lot about how graphic/visual/interaction design could similarly channel human energy in productive ways. There's got to be another example of this somewhere, right?

Typography and the User Interface

There is a quiet issue that nags at the computer industry. While processing speed and computational flexibility have grown at incredible rates, our displays, the most human-facing elements of our digital lives, lag behind.

Addressing an audience of information designers, Edward Tufte once explained that the fundamental challenge with presenting information is that the world we live in is high-resolution and multi-dimensional, yet all of our displays are most decidedly not. And while Tufte was initially referring to the problems of displaying rich data on paper, he was quick to point out that digital displays suffer the same problem but to an even greater degree. It may be tricky to map multiple axes of information (time, temperature, dollars, color, widgets sold, etc.) onto a two dimensional representation, but your difficulties are only compounded when you add the considerable handicap of reducing the target display resolution to a fraction of that of an equally sized piece of paper¹.

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