Hacks

Direct video manipulation interface

Direct manipulation of video is one of the more uncanny HCI concepts I’ve ever seen. Instead of manipulating time with a traditional scrubber bar, the user can drag objects in the video across their path of movement. Nothing in the video actually changes, but the perception is that you can directly manipulate the objects in […]

Make a record player out of LEGO

A paper cup, a sewing needle, and a simple LEGO Mindstorms robot make for a nice little record player. This might be a fun project to work on with the kids this 4th of July weekend. You know they’ve been wondering about the boxes of vinyl frisbees in the basement. Aside from anything else they […]

Swurl – scrapbook your digital life

Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he’s been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digital life and assemble them into a sensible whole. You could call it an aggregation tool—which, deep down, it is—but it does a little more than other things I’ve […]

Objective-J and Cappuccino: Cocoa for the web

There’s a neat article over at Ars Technica that takes a look at 280 North’s 3-person development team, their recent release of a keynote-like web application called 280 Slides, and the framework that they constructed to make the application. Some time before 280 Slides was developed, the team created an Objective-C-like superset of the Javascript […]