Idle Bites (13 March, 2007)

1// Adobe is reporting that Flash Lite will now support video.

2// Wired has posted their interview with John Maeda, who spoke at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA this week. When probed on his favorite manmade designs, he offered this:

“I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn’t have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn’t have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

I think if you’re a young designer now, you’ve got the internet and you’ve got screens all over the place — it’s awful hard. Technology is just so powerful now. You can do so much with so little. You can shove it into the size of a quarter. For designers to design great objects where technology is concerned, that’s hard.”

Too true. (Thanks Nancy.)

3// Last weeks’ Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, yielded some interesting discussion, like the keynote on networked mobile gaming.

4// File under: alternate desktop metaphors. Check out “BumpTop,” a desktop UI paradigm that uses physical behavior to aid organization of files. Whether or not the desktop metaphor is appropriate to mobile UI, could this type of physics and motion apply to mobile touch screens using a finger tip or thumb as the stylus?

5// Opera Mini. At most it looks like a strike against the operator content foothold. At the least it may be a reason not to have to buy a smartphone. (Thanks Christian.)