I’m excited about some promising first steps in the developing mobile eCommerce field, mCommerce. This video shows an early release of an iPhone Optimized Theme for eCommerce sites built with Magento — an open-source eCommerce platform. Because Magento is open-source, I expect to see many improvements in this interface that will ultimately make it as smooth and slick as buying from the iTunes Music Store or the App Store. (Note: The “Tony” in the video is not me, I’m a lot shorter.)

I’ve grown fond of WordPress, my wife probably is even a little jealous at all the attention WordPress gets–especially in the middle of the night as I tweak something or other on the dozen or so WordPress-powered websites I manage for my clients.

Check out the newest features in WordPress 2.6. This is quick release shortly after the 2.5 upgrade. A lot of good security features have been added, including HTTPS support for admin, and the ability to move the main content (wp-content) to a user-specified directory.

Some of my favorites:

• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

(And my favorite feature is back: “Press It!”– the bookmarklet-powered posting thing-a-ma-jig–is now called Press This! and has been made over with super-human powers.)

Check out the screencast video of the new WordPress 2.6 features:

YouTube – Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net

Visual search, with an iTunes-like visual scrolling (Cover Flow), seems like a the logical next step in the user-interface of search. searchme.com shows off an excellent demo of their visual approach.

Is this the next killer app? Should Google be concerned? It’s too early to tell how this will work in real life settings. Like the, thumbnail-focused www.pixsy.com, searchme believes that the future of search is visual.

The history of visual approaches to search, including 3D flythroughs and other graphical models, has been littered with failure. VRML comes to mind, in the 1990s this was going to be “next-gen” the 3D web. In early-2008, with broadband and ubiquitous dual-core cpu power, we still have not seen a visual approach to user-interface gain much traction in the marketplace. (The desktop metaphor–invented at Parc in the early ’80s, popularized by Apple, and copied by Microsoft–has been the last major epoch in user-interface development. We really haven’t moved much past overlapping windows in the past 28 years.)

Enabled by Adobe’s® Flex 3® software Searchme emphasizes that their technology is more than a slick UI.

“The Searchme visual search engine, which leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex, is an innovative rich Internet application that could help fundamentally change the Internet search experience,” said Chris Rogers, West Region Leader, Adobe Consulting at Adobe. “It’s more than a slick UI; it’s an engaging search experience that emphasizes relevance and usability to help users more easily find what they’re looking for on the Web.” [press release]

I believe that people think primarily in verbal concepts, our brain has uniquely evolved to the complex task of reading in ways that cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Maryann Wolf are just now discovering. While, plain text is not as sexy as animated flipping thumbnails, I believe that relevance and simplicity are still king.

Cupertino, CA — The following scene took place at lunchtime in a crowded Cupertino sushi bar.

Mighty Mouse: Waiter! Who’s that at my seat?

Waiter: Hey Mouse! That’s the new guy in town, that’s iPhone, with multi-touch.

Mighty Mouse: I’ve had that seat since 1983 when Steve hooked me up with Lisa.

Waiter: I know. You had a great ride. You were the King.

Mighty Mouse: WTF! I AM the King! I’m calling Steve right now!

Waiter: He has a new number, Mouse, he’s got an iPhone now.

Mighty Mouse: iPhone! Who cares about some friggin’ iPhone! I’m on hundreds of platforms — Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, every major operating system uses a mouse and pointer. Everyone rides the mouse train. I’m wireless, I’m Mighty. I lost my big ball, but I have a new one now — see here on top?

Waiter: That’s great, Mouse. It’s really cute. But the new guy, he doesn’t need a sidekick — no Arrow — he stands on his own.

Mighty Mouse: No Arrow! WTF! How do people know where they are pointing?

Waiter: That’s just it, Mouse, they just point and touch right on the iPhone screen. The Finger needs no arrow. Hey, you were the first direct manipulation user interface, the “people’s interface”, but The Finger’s got some tricks up his sleeve. You’re sliding on the desk, telling Arrow to do her stuff, but The Finger is already up there on the screen hiding behind each pixel, waiting to be flicked, tapped, and pinched. The Finger is just an infant right now, but he’s got papers, 200 patents in fact. The Finger redefines “direct manipulation.”

Mighty Mouse: Who are you kidding? You call that a screen? It’s tiny! Whose going to surf the web on that thing?

Waiter: Mouse, I hate to break it to you, but more iPhones will be sold today than all the Lisa’s ever made. At this pace, iPhone sales will top all Mac sales in 528 days. My sources tell me there’s a deal in the works for The Finger on the big screen too. Multi-touch is the real star today.

Mighty Mouse: No! This can’t be! You mean…ma…ma…mmaa…Mac?

Waiter: Oh yes, OS X “Leopard” is already running inside the iPhone. In October, the new machines may be running with multi-touch, and maybe even no Mouse in the box! Isn’t that Steve’s way? Look what he did to Mr. Floppy.

Mighty Mouse: No! I don’t believe this. This isn’t happening!

(Mighty Mouse sobs uncontrollably)

Waiter: I’ve got a nice quiet table in the back. It’ll be OK, I’ll get you some saki — on the house.

(Waiter takes the sobbing Mouse by the hand and walks him, to a dark corner of the restaurant where he joins a forlorn Flashing Green Cursor, aka “DOS prompt”.)

This column inspired by the talented John Gruber, whose UI anthropomorphications make me laugh out loud.
Photo courtesy, Incase Designs

Jeff Han’s multi-touch demonstration at TED illustrates that natural interaction and direct manipulation are possible and desirable on workstations. Direct touch interfaces are a natural evolution of Doug Engelbart’s mouse/pointer GUI invented in 1968 and popularized by Macintosh in 1984.

multi-touch

Amazing overview of how technology permits the interlinking of minds.
How does this change who we are, and how does it change our civilization?