Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad : know your history

One of the main thought threads going through work and through design as a whole is to know your history. Things have been designed, created, used, and not used over the years. It is of being a good scholar and being a good designer, to know your history. Give credit where it is due.

This is of a video of Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad from 1963. Yes, let that sink in. He was using a pen on a screen in 1963, which is a full 20 years before Macintosh and about 12 before Microsoft came to be. It was a seminal paper when he wrote it, and it was way ahead of its time. Even today’s programs do not encompass all the features that he had.

Here he is on Wikipedia.
Here is a link to his paper, “Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.”

I love seeing things I have designed in use

You know, there are not that many things greater than seeing something you worked on being put to practical use. I think the only bad thing would be if they were complaining about it. Here, they are absolutely loving it. Granted, I only did a little bit of the work and there is a large team of great designers responsible. I was in on it and loved being able to contribute.

I think the visuals are stunning as well. I love seeing how fluid the animations are. Lovely!

I have been off of the Surface Team for months but I talk to the current members almost daily. I’m still doing Natural User Interface work, just not directly for them. Its so great to see what is still coming out of that great team over there.

N-Trig’s excellent hardware demo apps

This video demonstrates a number of new multi-touch software applications, designed using N-trig’s DuoSense® technology, in collaboration with some of N-trig’s ISV partners, including FingerTapps, Natural User Interface Europe AB, and SpaceClaim. The applications show full multi-touch utilizing up to four fingers, and range across areas of interest from consumer gaming, multi-media management, retail shopping and high-end engineering applications. More info on www.n-trig.com.

The most important thing to pull out of this hardware is that it is dual-mode, which means it can handle touch with fingers as well as with a pen. This is exactly what I am hoping for in the future of all hardware.

3d modeling with Spaceclaim’s prototype multi-touch

A preview demonstration of modeling in 3D using a SpaceClaim’s prototype multi-touch user interface that will be added to SpaceClaim this fall. Also includes clips of ANSYS Workbench, Blue Ridge Numerics CFdesign, and Bunkspeed Hypershot, showing some finger dancing that you can do without multi-touch.