One of the oldest and most relevant user interfaces is the book. Books generally include page numbers, blocks of text and if you’re lucky, a built-in book marker. Generally you navigate a book in a consecutive manor via chapters or sections. What’s not to love about books?

Enter the dictionary

Webster and friends seem to have this notion that words need no relevance to a given subject. Your average book usually associate and gather paragraphs into a given chapter or section. It puts the sentences and words in a specific context. A sentence talking about love in one chapter may not have the same meaning when used in a different chapter.

In the case of dictionaries, contextualizing a word would benefit its usability and overall usage. If I had a dollar for every time I used a word out of context, I could be a venture capitalist. Grouping words that share a given context could benefit their use in speaking and writing. Our literature would be cleaner, concise and smart. Our verbal communication would make more sense and help communicate meaning effectively.

If it ain’t broke

I know, I know. Why fix the dictionary? So I ask, when was the last time you enjoyed readaing the dictionary? As far as usability for the dictionary, the process of actually reading it as both reference and literature is painful, if not unbearable. Also, the thesaurus is not much help in this regard. Words with the same meaning have equal chance of being used out of context.

The dictionary would be enjoyable if I could find words based on context and or subject. These subjects/contexts could include subject-matters, social situations, greetings, etc. Instead of it being a pile of word puke, it could be a tool that evolves with verbal and written communication. When someone uses the word “suck”, what is it communicating in a given context such as when someone fails a test or vacuuming a floor.

Conclusion

All in all dictionaries are nothing but tolerable. Words based on context would evolve our literature into something that all can understand and learn quickly. I’m not demoting the dictionary as relevant tool in and of itself, but its usefulness could be increased simply by grouping words into contexts. You’ll find that a lot of words overlap contexts. I’ll go as far as saying that the english syntax would be more succinct if it were all based on contexts. Viva la revolution for the dictionary!

Check out some of what Adobe’s got planned for the next Flash Player release. Will we be able to compete with “Microsoft Sparkle” (aka Silverlight) ?

For those that like Video

I’m familar with most of the pros/ cons of PNG and have utilized them for their benefits in gradients and tackled the whole IE transparency issue. The question is, would you bother with PNG?

“‘People who like cheddar cheese are inherently better than people who like gouda.’ Now that’s obviously silly.” – Dave Winer

The only thing I take issue with is the word “users”.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

They need to be told the difference between a message, link, file, and event.

Jeeeeez. I’m not a computer and I know the difference between those things. A message is words, a link has a clear structure (’http://’ is generally a good hint), an event has dates in it (same with grandma’s cookies), and a file is a something I upload.

If Pownce.com bought smarter computers, the top of you page might look something like this:

Go Pro, if only to contribute to their Smarter Computer Fund.

John Gruber talked about the difference when he compared iCal to the calendar in 37signals’ Backpack.

My company is hiring.

I’m particularly keen to see the Web Designer position filled by someone with IA and usability interests and skills.

Feel free to contact me privately at peter at peknet.com about my experience at Atomic Learning.

The interface itself is pretty – and seemingly powerful and simple. Reminiscent of Microsoft’s Visual Basic or Apple’s Automator. But in the end, Pipes is chartjunk – or as Dave Winer said, “[a] visually appealing but information sparse IDE”.

If the goal of Pipes was to simplify the process of mashing up and filtering feeds – they left all the hard parts in; the geeky terms (”Base”, “Position”, “Query Parameters”, “Debug”, “Truncate”, “For Each”) and the URLs themselves.

Seems to me, the same functionality could be achieved with any number of the other feed aggregators out there (My.Yahoo.com comes to mind).

If you’ve been able to do something cool and useful with Pipes – let me know. I’d like to be proven wrong here (and move this post from ‘useless’ to ‘useful’).

ELSEWHERE:
Alex Iskold says Pipes has turned the web into a big database…I think we already had that with XML-RPC, RSS, SOAP, and REST.

Eric Rice asks if Pipes is a competitor to Gliffy.com

Everything you’d expect in a comic is there; wizards, Buffy references, overall-wearing Rhinoceroses, cubicles, pie charts.

I quite like how subtle the ‘Download trial’ link…and all the non-navigational links are.

via Experientia

“This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is – boring and unoriginal.” – Mike Hearn