Instead of being tethered to your hardware, WorldKit is designed to make access to computing instant and mobile by making the world your touchscreen. Right now, the system involves a ceiling-mounted camera and projector that record hand movements and then project onto the surface of your choice. Some potential uses include TV remote controls, which can be accessed by rubbing the arm of a sofa, or calendars that can be swiped onto doors.

With projectors and depth-sensing cameras (the current system uses a Kinect) getting smaller, the researchers envision a system like WorldKit could eventually fit into a light bulb. Any room thus equipped could become a smart environment, where objects and walls become display surfaces. One member of the research team, Chris Harrison, previously worked on the Skinput device that allows users to turn their own arms into touch interfaces.

In the future, users should be able to design their own interfaces with WorldKit. The system currently allows for things like buttons, multitouch drawing (akin to a whiteboard), and counting the number of object within an interaction “bubble.” The existing prototype still has limited resolution and input dimensions, but hardware advances and future research could allow voice commands or even interaction in free space rather than on surfaces. The CMU team will be presenting their work at CHI2013 on April 30.

Image via Chris Harrison/Carnegie Mellon University

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Research into optimal keyboard layouts is as old as QWERTY itself, a legacy inherited from 19th century typewriters. Thumb typing with QWERTY is notoriously inefficient on touchscreen tablets and phones. Starting from the basics — how a touchscreen device is held in one’s hands — an international team of researchers drew on user behavioral data and computational models to develop the new layout. The lead investigator, Antti Oulasvirta of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, will officially unveil this research at CHI2013 on May 1.

Theoretically, the model predicts that users should be able to reach 49 words per minute with KALQ, and because the study’s subjects were non-native English speakers, typing speed could conceivably be even better in natives. KALQ was designed so the most commonly used letters are clustered, which means the travel distances are short and both hands work roughly equally and alternately. Most of the vowels are positioned near the space bar and are handled by the right thumb, while the left thumb takes care of most of the consonants and most of the first letters of words. For lefties, the orientation can be reversed, and the key size can even be scaled for different hand sizes.

For KALQ to work, tablets should ideally be gripped horizontally, with the corners cradled in the valley at the base of the thumbs. On a 7-inch tablet (the researchers used the Samsung Galaxy Tab), test subjects had the fastest movements times and best thumb mobility with this configuration, though the grip gave them access to less tablet surface area overall.

Based on this tablet gripping strategy, the researchers used computational techniques to determine the optimal key assignments. Their model of thumb movements was trained on millions of English-language tweets that originated from mobile devices. The end result, KALQ, minimizes movement times, and worked even better when users were trained to move their thumbs simultaneously and anticipate moves by hovering the thumb over the next letter.

Novice tablet users reached typing speeds that eclipsed those achievable with QWERTY after about 10 hours of training, and continued to improve, reaching 37 words per minute. This is the fastest thumb typing speed ever reported, according to Oulasvirta and colleagues, and is 19 percent faster than typing speeds found in previous studies. The end result represents a 34 percent improvement over baseline QWERTY performance in this study’s subjects.

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Enlighted says its customers include Google, LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. The sensors can detect light level, occupancy, temperature and power consumption in the 100 square feet under each light. The company says it’s saved some 15 gigawatts of electricity since it began installations two years ago.

Enlighted’s first customer was green carpet company Interface Global, which used the lighting management system on its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Interface says it was able to cut its lighting power by 70 percent, and achieved a return on investment in 18 months.

Big data analytics and sensor tech — IT — is appearing as one of the bright spots in cleantech startups these days. Some investors call this the so-called Clean Web, or using digital tech to manage resources from energy to water to food. Check out our 20-page premium research report on Building Energy Management Systems: Overview and Forecast, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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In addition to the always-attached keyboard, the Eee Pad Slider adds a full-sized USB port and microSD card slot for memory expansion. Adding these ports and the keyboard adds some bulk and weight, however, two things I’d say actually reduce the portability of the tablet. The slider is larger overall than the iPad or Galaxy Tab 10.1, for example, and at 31.3 ounces, weighs just under two pounds.

Yes, that’s still lighter than a notebook or netbook computer, but it is noticeably heavier than comparable tablets. From a design standpoint, Ritchie says the sliding mechanism on the tablet works well. It’s a spring-loaded design that Ritchie claims is “very smooth action.” The screen angle is a fixed position, however; don’t expect to tilt the screen at different angles.

Maybe I’ll feel differently once I get an Eee Pad Slider to look at, but I’m not sold on the design for my personal needs. Honeycomb is a touch-driven interface, so your hands will be moving back and forth between the keyboard. Even though the distance looks small, it’s not ideal from a usability standpoint. With either the USB port or Bluetooth radio, you could add a mouse to address that problem, but that’s more to carry, which reduces portability even more. And the added weight of the keyboard and sliding mechanism is something buyers will be carrying the whole time, although they do gain a stand out of the design.

Again, perhaps the heavy slate will impress me when I see it for myself. And I’m not suggesting the Eee Pad Slider is a nonstarter: It will surely appeal to some who don’t mind carrying a larger device in order to gain an integrated keyboard. My concern is that I’d be “carrying” the extra weight and size for the keyboard all the time, yet I’d likely be using the keyboard for a very limited amount of time. Folks that are supplementing a true slate with some type of wired or wireless keyboard would likely feel the opposite and for them, the Eee Pad Slider might press all the right buttons, assuming Google Android is their platform of choice.

Keyboard or not, I haven’t been impressed enough by any Android Honeycomb tablet to buy one for myself. I actually still prefer Android 2.3, or Gingerbread, on my lighter 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab. And that’s a problem that no keyboard will fix.

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Tablets and other mobile devices acting as unique, flexible control surfaces that can act with or without direct connection to their parent programs is an area that so far has only been lightly explored. Perhaps that’s because much of the focus so far has been on whether or not post-PC devices can truly operate independently of traditional computers. In our haste to prove they can, we may have overlooked the fact that sometimes, hardware codependence is a beautiful thing. Other software companies should take a close at what Adobe is doing here and see if something similar wouldn’t benefit their own products. Even Apple’s Final Cut video editing software cut definitely benefit from something similar.

Photoshop Touch will first be implemented in three official Adobe apps scheduled for May release, called Eazel, Color Lava and Nav. Each app essentially transforms your iPad into an additional control device or surface for your desktop-based installation of Adobe Photoshop. Adobe certainly isn’t the first to attempt this (there are apps that act as control surfaces for video and audio editing software, too, and even apps that work as game controllers), but it is probably the largest and most influential company to do so, and it has also gone a step further and made these tools available to third-party developers for use with its software.

The apps Adobe showed off work in a couple different ways. Nav allows you to create a custom tool palette, and also use a color picker and zoom controls. You can flip through open Photoshop files, and open files directly from your iPad in your desktop Photoshop installation. Nav is pure companion app, and doesn’t exist independently of Photoshop on the desktop.

Eazel and Color Lava, on the other hand, can work both with or without Photoshop itself being open. Eazel is an independent iPad painting app that very accurately simulates physical paint media (if the demos are any indication). It works independently, but allows you to transfer your paintings to Photoshop at any resolution, which means you can resize for print without any loss of quality. Color Lava, as its name suggests, is all about creating color palettes and swatches. These can later be synchronized with your desktop Photoshop, or it can be used in real-time with Photoshop open.

There’s also a video demo (see below) of one third-party Photoshop Touch app by Shawn Welch making the rounds (via MacRumors). It looks to act as a high-level management tool for all Photoshop installations on a given network. For example, you can open images simultaneously on all connected computers, and you also have very granular control over every individual running instance of Photoshop. Looks like a very handy tool for design studio art directors.

The apps previewed by Adobe show the company has been thinking carefully about how to extend interfaces to mobile devices in a way that makes sense. Each of the apps seems to work particularly well with a touch interface, and they do much more than treat the iPad as just another keyboard or mouse. These apps may leave some design professionals wishing the iPad had pressure-sensitive input (I know I was thinking wistfully of the Wacom-penabled Axiotron Modbook), but to dismiss them because of those kinds of hardware limitations is a mistake.

Adobe announced the Photoshop Touch apps and SDK alongside its CS5.5 paid mid-cycle upgrade, but according to the company’s official press materials, Touch apps will work with existing installations of Adobe Photoshop CS5 thanks to a free patch available May 3, 2011. I’m happy Adobe isn’t limiting the availability of these new features to CS5.5 customers, and I can’t wait to see how they work in an actual photo-editing workflow. Does anyone else think Adobe’s on the right track here?

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Vertical Buttons

I’ll start with the most obvious UI tweak: the close/minimize/maximize buttons. I understand why Apple made this change: it saves space. When you hit the maximize button in iTunes, you get the mini-player, which has vertical close/min/max buttons in order to save space. Apple used the same reasoning with the main iTunes window.

There is a way you can disable it. Fire up Terminal and enter the following code:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES

That will put the buttons back horizontally. You can change it back if you want to by changing the “YES” to a “NO”.

I don’t mind this change that much. I usually use the keyboard shortcuts to close or minimize iTunes anyway, and the vertical buttons do save space (if only a little).

Monochrome Sidebar

This one really irks me: Apple completely did away with color in the icons in the sidebar. To show you why this was such a dumb idea, I’m going to quote from Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines:

Making each toolbar icon distinct helps the user associate it with its purpose and locate it quickly. Variations in shape, color, and image all help to differentiate one toolbar icon from another.

Making all the sidebar icons monochrome makes it harder to identify them, especially since they’re all similar in size. Back in iTunes 9, you could easily tell where the iTunes Store was because its icon was green. In iTunes 10, you have to distinguish between the shapes, which is harder for us to do and takes more time.

There are currently a couple of hacks available to address this.

Show/Hide in the Sidebar

Another change made to the sidebar is getting rid of the triangle buttons on the left of list headings. These have been replaced by “Show/Hide” buttons that only appear when you’re hovering over a list name.

Album List View

Album list view is basically list view, but with albums on the side. A version of this existed in iTunes 9, but Apple tweaked the functionality of it as well as added a new toolbar button for it.

The New Icon

The new iTunes icon isn’t bad, it’s just not terribly interesting. I think Apple should have used a color other than blue, because, as Josh pointed out, there’s already a surplus of blue icons in OS X (Finder, Mail, Safari, iChat, QuickTime, etc). Purple would’ve worked nicely.

Apple chose to change the icon as the former “CD” icon has become less and less relevant in the age of digital downloads. But Apple could have taken it a step further. It could have changed the name as well, seeing as iTunes has long been for more than just music. My current favorite is “iMedia,” but that’s a little too broad; media can be images, as well. Also, “iMedia” doesn’t sound as good as “iTunes.” I think Apple will eventually change the name (and the icon to reflect that).

If you’d like tou can change the icon yourself:

1. Open your Applications folder in Finder and highlight iTunes.
2. Right click on it and select “Show Package Contents”.
3. Go to Content -> Resources and replace the iTunes.icns with a new one. There’s already some great replacement icons coming out, like this one from Mattias Ekstrom. Of course, you can also just use the old iTunes icon.

Conclusion

It seems to me like most of the changes in iTunes are changes for change’s sake; just to make it look newer. The only really new feature in iTunes is Ping, and that’s basically just a link in the sidebar.

Do you love or hate iTunes 10? What other new names might work for it? Tell us in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: With Ping, Apple Builds a Social Network Inside a Walled Garden

But when is touch too much? The latest rumors, coming from the Chinese-language Commercial Times newspaper, as reported by DigiTimes, suggest that Apple will be launching a brand new addition to the iMac line in 2010 with a touch-enabled display. If the report is accurate, the new iMac would have a 22-inch screen, in between the current 21.5-inch and 27-inch models.

The report is based on a supplier called Quanta supposedly receiving the outsourcing contract to make the machines, with Sintek Photronic supplying the necessary touchscreen panels. The rumor is at least plausible, and even a likely next step coming from a manufacturer like Apple that has consistently done touch well and introduced it across much of its product line in some form or another. The question isn’t whether or not Apple will do it, it’s whether or not it should.

I get a tablet computer. I understand what that’s for, how people will use it, and how, thanks to mobility, touch controls make sense. I can’t say the same thing for touch-enabled desktops, except in special cases. For retail, sure, and for restaurants and other similar industry applications where touch has been used because it makes an exceeding amount of sense to do so, that I understand. But as I sit at my home office typing up this post, I wonder if I would derive any benefit by being able to control my iMac by touching the screen versus using my mouse.

In fact, I already sort of have touchscreen computing capability in my iMac, via a connected Wacom Cintiq monitor. Admittedly, you have to use a stylus, so it isn’t exactly the same, but I still finding myself abstaining from using it for anything but drawing and photo editing. Even the Sony Vaio L (check out the second “Con”) and other PCs already on the market with the tech built-in strike me as fairly silly. I’ve used them on display in Best Buy and the like, but that’s an entirely different thing from sitting at a desk and using it for many hours at a time.

Touch control will also be shoehorned into a number of different applications. Unlike the more expensive versions of Windows 7, Snow Leopard isn’t designed to work on a touch-enabled machine, and neither are any of the Mac apps you’d be using with your computer. I can see flick scrolling and image browsing being a bit of a boon, but not enough to merit the inclusion of the tech, especially when it would mean constantly having to switch from using the mouse to interacting with the screen in all likelihood.

Where touchscreen desktop computing has been introduced, it has faced questions about how truly useful and effective it is. Galen Gruman at TechWorld describes his disappointment with the Windows 7 implementation of touch in a piece that soberly addresses the tech’s current shortcomings. In this excerpt, he discusses some UI and feedback problems with the idea:

[O]n a touchscreen, your hand and arm obscure your view of where your fingertip actually is, making it hard to actually touch the intended radio button, close box, slider, or what-have-you. It doesn’t help that these elements are often small. And there’s no tactile feel to substitute for the lost visual feedback.

It’s far from his only strike against touchscreen desktop computing, but even on its own, it describes an issue so annoying as to set me against the concept of a touch sensitive iMac, at least until the next generation of OS X takes touchscreen computing as its focus instead of as an afterthought or add-on.

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Writing in the New York Times last week, Nick Bilton quoted two unnamed sources (so we really only have his word to go on) in a piece that definitely got Apple fans’ hearts racing and wallets twitching;

…the icing on the cake comes from a current senior employee inside Apple. When one of my colleagues here asked if the rumors of the Apple tablet were true, and when we could expect such a device, the response from his source was, “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

When El Jobso is happy, Apple is happy. When Apple is happy, they release stuff – shiny, sexy new stuff. And when Apple releases new stuff, we all get a little poorer. Financially. Obviously the emotional and spiritual gains of owning a shiny new gadget with a glowing fruit on it far outweighs the usually crazy-high asking price set by the Cupertino mothership.

Bilton also added;

Yet another recently departed Apple employee tipped me: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

So, aside from Steve’s happiness, what’s this ‘surprise’? MacRumors points to a patent application published on Christmas Eve that might provide a clue about what’s to come. I wouldn’t want to spoil any potential surprise, so if you don’t want to read about “Keystroke Tactility Arrangement on a Smooth Touch Surface” it’s best not to read-on.

Still here? Good. Patent #20090315830 is actually an extension of sorts, fleshing out an earlier patent filed in 2008, which described a method for a “Momentarily Enabled Electronic Device” (#20090315411 for those of you keeping a record). The short of it is that these patents together detail the major drawback of smooth-surface keyboards – they’re not user friendly. Apparently, users prefer actual physical keys to perfectly flat “virtual” keys.

But the problem with physical keys, as Señor Steve so eloquently explained at the iPhone announcement in 2007, is “…they get in the way.” The solution, then, would be some sort of temporary physical keyboard that comes to life when we need to type, but magically vanishes when we want to swipe. And when I say “vanishes” I really mean it goes away, completely, returning the full surface area to us for touchy-feely operations.

It sounds like science fiction, but these patents essentially describe methods for providing just that – a temporary, malleable physical keyboard that “pops up” through the normally-smooth touchscreen surface and slinks away again when it’s not needed.

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty awesome. It sounds a lot like a piezoelectric keyboard to me, a technology that’s been around for decades but not very successfully implemented in consumer electronic devices.

I’m not going to spend time speculating much on other potential interaction surprises; voice control, for instance, would be a natural extension of technology already found in iPods and iPhones (and, to a far more limited extent, Mac OS X itself) but voice control is almost always cumbersome and unrewarding despite occasional flurries of excitement around the concept. Eye tracking or gesture-tracking are possible, but even less likely (though they would certainly be surprising!)

No, at this point, we have reasonably compelling evidence for only one big surprise, and it’s buried in the patents linked above. And while piezoelectric keyboards (or however Apple achieves this technology) aren’t too new or surprising for geeks as long-in-the-tooth as me, you can bet your iMac it’ll leave the general public stunned.

Especially when Steve Jobs takes the stage and makes the announcement in inimitable Jobsian style. Just twenty nine days and counting…

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A nice feature is the streamlined description area, which has been “tamed” for the developers who tend to abuse the area, filling it with excessive information and keywords in an attempt to gain favor in the App Store search results. The new system truncates the description past a certain point, allowing the rest to be disclosed upon clicking a “more” link.

New App Store Look

Also highlighted along the left side is a more organized view of the specifics of the app (version, developer and rating) as well as a quick way to see the most popular apps also by the same developer.

Recommendations based on other user’s purchases are now along the bottom, augmented by the inclusion of the app’s icon, which is a nice addition.

New Visual Recommendations

At the moment, featured apps that have custom designed pages (like Twitterrific) still use the original look, but it’s likely that Apple will migrate them over to the new style soon.

For comparison, check out the screenshots below of the same app. What do you think of the new look? Does it highlight the app better? Do you find it more useful or usable?

iTunes 8 & Earlier App Store Interface

iTunes 8 & Earlier App Store Interface

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The one thing many people did not expect with a new version of iTunes was that Apple would use the opportunity to cause dissent among its fanbase by introducing another new user interface. Some classify the new styling as “needed” and “elegant and refined” while others have resorted to a variety of hacks to return to the UI of yesteryear.

We’ve gone through every corner of iTunes we could find and dug up all of the major changes in the interface. Here’s what we found.

Welcome to iTunes 9

The first thing many noticed is that iTunes 9 now launches with a Welcome to iTunes screen, offering quick links to videos showcasing some of iTunes features. Similar to apps like iPhoto and iWeb, users can disable this by ticking a checkbox.

iTunes Preferences

iTunes Preferences also featured a few notable changes, specifically adding support for grouping iTunes U content.

iTunes 9 General Preferences

iTunes 8 General Preferences

Parental Control also received a new icon (matching the icon in Snow Leopard) as well as some slight rewording.

iTunes 9 Parental Controls

iTunes 8 Parental Controls

Removed from iTunes 9 are references in the Store section to “adding to shopping cart” versus buying with Amazon’s licensed 1-Click technology. Added is an option to use the full window when browsing the iTunes Store.

iTunes 9 Store Preferences

iTunes 8 Store Preferences

Browsing Content

Browsing content within iTunes has also received a refresh. While browsing music in List Mode, the artists have been grouped along the left, making it easier to narrow down your selection rather quickly.

iTunes 9 Music List Mode

When browsing in Grid View, the first thing you will notice is that the dark black background is gone and now albums are scattered amongst an off white background. Badged content, such as Podcasts, TV Shows, iTunes U and Movies feature blue badges instead of the original red. Gone from this view are the tabs to sort content within an area (such as Music) by Albums, Artists, Genres and Composers. This can be re-enabled via the View menu.

ITunes 9 Podcasts

Cover Flow view is pretty much the same, with the refining of the “full screen” icon.

iTunes 9 CoverFlow

The iTunes 9 Equalizer also received a refresh, styling the control knobs with blue accents.

iTunes 9 Equalizer

iTunes 8 Equalizer

Icons & Buttons

Buttons and displays in iTunes 9 have been overhauled to give them a more glossy, shiny three dimensional look. The toolbar has also been realigned, removing the ‘View’ label and moving the ‘Search’ label instead the Search field. The information area has also been updated, providing more useful information during syncing and downloading of content from the iTunes Store (such as time remaining).

iTunes 9 also brings about many refreshed icons, including many of the icons in the sidebar. Specifically, playlist icons have gotten the most attention, while TVs, Movies, Audiobooks, and Applications have seen slight refreshes as well.

Syncing

Syncing is by far the area that received the most attention in this revision. Specifically, users now have the ability to sync content more selectively. When choosing a TV show, for instance, they can sync specific seasons or specific episodes. When syncing a podcast, they can choose to sync specific episodes. When syncing photos, users can take advantage of the iPhoto ’09 Faces and Places aspect to sync photos of particular people or a particular place. Many of these areas also provide a search field, making it easier to quickly narrow down and select the specific content you’re looking for.

Syncing TV Shows

Syncing Ringtones

Syncing iTunes U

Syncing Music

Syncing Photos

The biggest feature in the redesigned sync options is the ability to organize your iPhone and iPod touch apps directly within iTunes. Check the ones you wish to add, highlight to select them and drag them to whichever home screen you desire. Selecting multiple apps is a cinch and moving them between home screens is equally easy.

Syncing Apps

Everything Else

Upon a user’s first visit to a section, such as creating a new Playlist, or visiting the Podcast area, they are greeted with a new UI that discusses how that particular concept works.

iTunes 9 New Playlist

While this overview is fairly exhaustive, there are likely many other features that users will continue to discover. If there’s one we’ve missed, please use the comments to let us know!

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