Here’s a great little prototype keyboard someone is proposing for the iPad. I’d love to see this in a future iOS release. The only thing it doesn’t address is the complex problem of autocorrect, which it strangely points out early on. Even still, it’s a great improvement to text selection. Apple should hire the person behind this for some UX work.
There’s are 2 prototype iPhone’s on eBay. Apparently two models from late (49’th and 50’th week) 2006. It looks like the primary change from the two batches was trying a plastic and glass screen. I suspect at this point most of the internals were pretty close to final though they may have swapped vendors for a few of the more interchangeable parts.
Most interesting is the iPhone screenshots as one of them is operational. To keep people inside clueless as to what they are actually working on Apple minimized the number of people who knew the entire product. They allegedly did this by giving disguised software to hardware people. Since the OS is just a stripped version of OS X running on an ARM CPU software folks didn’t really need hardware to do their work. As far as I know this auction is the first time the faux iPhone OS has ever been publicly seen.
Also intersting is some of the subtitles in the UI (precursor to wallpapers). Not sure if this was entered by the hardware tester or just an internal joke by OS developers:
[Skank is the new black]
[Nine parts perspiration]
[Say hello to the Newton MessagePad 3000]
[Skankphone]
Apple prototypes do occasionally end up on eBay, it’s not that unusual for them to slip out.
Daniel Glazman is at it again, this time with Fuller Screen Mode. This has serious potential for anyone who ever has to do a presentation. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a while. With a copy of Firefox, you now have full screen presentations that look great. For presentations on the go, consider a USB Drive and Portable Firefox if you’re using Windows. Very easy, very compatible, very usable. Combine it with jQuery and the Interface Elements or script.aculo.us (with included prototype.js), and you can even have some fancy transitions and everything. Not to mention it can print out very well, and is very compatible to share on the web.
Of course you’ve seen that S5 is a great way to make presentations. Still waiting on someone to make an extension for NVU/Mozilla Composer that makes S5 presentations a snap for average Joe who doesn’t want to code.
Google’s Personal Homepages allow for some really neat widgets. Interestingly, there are quite a few by Google Inc, that even provide source code, so you can see exactly how they were made (super cool!). There is something that concerns me though. No mention on licensing, or how it would even work.
Say, someone wanted to create an open source framework of code for making widget creation easier (such as copy paste of great libraries such like prototype.js, or jslib among others). How would licensing be noted?
Say someone else wanted to create a project under an open source license, and collaborate to create a widget. Again, how would that be handled? Are you limited to purely a <!-- --> comment to display the licensing block?
Some talented Google employees wrote some great widgets, but there’s no license on how they can be used. Ideally they would be under a very liberal license, so that their code could be included under virtually any circumstance to build derivative works.
Looks to me like the Module Preferences need to have a “license”.
I’d be curious to know Google’s intentions/position on this topic.