Brad Lauster .com

At this time last year, I was hard at work with a team of extremely talented developers, designing and building the humane computing environment that Jef Raskin described in his book, The Humane Interface.

That project basically fell apart after Jef passed away (for a number of reasons), but some of the developers went on to start a company founded on the principles of humane computing. That company is Humanized.

Today, Humanized released their first product, Enso, which comes in two flavors, Launcher and Words.

Launcher gives you lightening fast, mouse-free access to launching your programs by making use of a quasi-mode that you invoke by pressing the caps lock key. Finally, caps lock does something useful!

Words is invoked in the same way, but is adds a spellcheck that works exactly the same in every program – even programs that don’t have spellcheck built in. Brilliant!

Both of the products do other things as well. I recommend checking out the demos on the Humanized site. You can also download trial versions of both products. You might also want to check out Walt Mossberg’s review of the products.

I’m very proud of what the guys at Humanized have accomplished in less than a year. They’ve carried on Jef Raskin’s work in a practical, accessible way that I’m sure will lead to some exciting innovations in both user interfaces and ways of interacting with your computer.

—

Side note: Some of the work we did is still available at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces website.

Ran across the new Canon Powershot SD10 today. According to the specs, the tiny SD10 is a 4 megapixel digital camera, able to take 3 minute long movies. Nice! Seeing as my old Fuji FinePix 40i is broken at the moment, a purchase might be in order – after a bit of saving, of course!

A potentially historic moment: at 11:33 pm this evening, I ran Chandler 0.1 for the first time.

A couple new digital cameras were announced recently: FinePix F410 and the Nikon Coolpix SQ. Gadget. Lust. Setting. In.

Three Mac OS 10.2 quick hits this evening:
Chimera (now at ver. 0.5) is getting really good.

Ken Bereskin, the product manager for Mac OS 10.2, has a blog (thanks Thomas).

I downloaded iCal today. My life just got a whole lot more organized.

According to CNN, VW is going to release an updated Microbus in 2005.

For more about the Microbus concept, be sure to check out the Concept Cars page on VW.com.

Ben Bederson sent a message to the jazz-announce list today announcing Piccolo, a lightweight library for building interactive 2D graphical applications (with or without zooming). It’s based on Jazz and was written by Jesse Grosjean, with support from Ben.

Lately, I’ve been looking for a way to endulge the programming geek in me. I’ve done a pretty good job of hiding it these last few years (most of the people I work with at Stanford don’t even know I used to be a programmer). This toolkit looks like it might be a nice, digestable, way to start playing around in the oh-so-interesting world of ZUI’s.

The Stanford Report is running a short story about a decanting cradle designed for a 27 liter bottle of wine from the Charles Krug winery. There is also a short video of the students at work. Neat!

(click on the image to view the related video)

The Amiga lives!

That’s right, coolest OS from “back in the day” is still alive and still being developed.

Amiga recently published a preview of AmigaOS 4 containing screenshots of the upcomming OS.

At this point it looks largely like most Linuxes, save Intuition’s snazzy menus. Also, there are no descriptions of how a user will interact with the system, but that’s (unfortunately) to be expected from an OS company at this stage of the game.

If you poke around the Amiga website a bit, you’ll find some of the principles guiding the development of the new OS. Quite interesting…

Truly wireless ‘blogging is now closer than ever with Handspring’s announcement of the Treo 270.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to thumb one of those tiny keyboards. When I worked for Intel, everyone I knew had a Crackberry. The Treo keyboards look about the same size as the Crackberry’s, but it’s hard to tell from the pictures. I can’t wait to play with one.

I wonder if our friends at IDEO had anything to do with this little gem? I know they worked on the original Treo.