Monthly Archives January 2007

I was looking at the One Laptop Per Child project — that’s the initiative that has to goal of designing a computer at a price less than $100USD, particularly targeted for education in third world countries. There are some really smart and creative people working on making the vision of an education project real. In fact, I’m impressed that there seem to be some features for a product targeted for children that I typically don’t see on my business-class computer.

1. Neighborhood mode

Image: Neighbourhood view mode from laptop.org

In the Stadia class yesterday, I played the first 15 minutes of the iPhone introduction to open up some discussion. Today, I watched the entire keynote address at Macworld San Francisco 2007 by Steve Jobs. (There’s a quicker digest on Engadget, if you don’t want to watch Quicktime). Upon reflection, there’s technological innovation, business innovation, and a potential Achilles heel.

On technological innovation, Apple is a master in user interface design. The most important invention — that surely is patented — has to be the accelerometer. Steve Jobs inferred that using a stylus (as in Palm PDAs, and in the original Apple Newton) would be obsoleted by using a finger, but this really all has to do with pointing precision. If the icon is large enough, a finger works fine on the Palm user interface. However, when we get to large amounts of scrolling, the accelerometer is a huge advance over a windowed slider and is an arguable improvement over a mechanically simpler jog dial (as in Sony devices).