UP by Jawbone (press photo)

Review: Jawbone UP

Three weeks ago, I bought a Jawbone UP. It’s a movement-tracking bracelet that can be plugged into your iPhone (or Android device) once or twice a day to transmit your activity to a mobile app. (You can also download your … [read more]

Upgrade icon by Oxygen Team (GNU license)

Why I’m not upgrading

“My name is Carsten, and I don’t like upgrading.”—”Hi Carsten!” I’ve become that guy. I never used to be that guy. You know, the guy who’s content with the technology he has because it’s working fine for him. The guy … [read more]

Don Norman

Complexity and emotion in design

  I like some of Don Norman‘s (now slightly older) theses about complexity and emotion in design. In an online essay entitled Emotional Design: People and Things he writes, Products differ in their appeal on the three design dimensions, but … [read more]

Why Apple’s iPad will be very, very successful

Sometimes, the prevailing discourse on the Internet makes one want to despair. Blog post after blog post of the same drivel. It often feels as though the ‘blogosphere’ is a little like The Island, a 2005 movie where Ewan McGregor … [read more]

Thoughts about 10/GUI

Robert Clayton Miller has done an excellent thing: he’s re-imagined the personal computer GUI and associated input devices in a practical, achievable, realistic way. It’s no small achievement, this: we’ve essentially been using the same lineage of human-computer interface metaphors … [read more]

Why I bought a Mac

Picture by Benjamin Nagel, via Wikimedia Commons Apparently, I’m a hipster now. According to my friend Bryce, who calls everyone a hipster who uses a Mac. Though I feel a certain kinship with PC in the “Get a Mac” commercials … [read more]