Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

Google Reader in Plain English

If you don’t use Google Reader or don’t know what it is, then you should watch this video:

This video is by the people at Common Craft, who are experts at explaining technology. One of their best and most popular videos is Twitter in Plain English. I actually think that video helped increase Twitter usage!

Olympic Medal Visualization

The New York Times continues to impress me with their online visualizations. For the Olympics, they created an Olympic Medal Count Map, which shows results from the first Olympic games of the Modern era (1896) to the 2004 Athens Olympics.

[via Neatorama via Digg]

Where the Hell is Matt? @Yahoo!

Yahoo! has been under a lot of pressure recently, and I think this video proves they’re alive and well. Plus, I think this made me smile more than the original Where the Hell is Matt video. Good work, Yahoo!, great idea. But, next time, allow embedding on your videos.

iPhone Tip: Enable Caps Lock

Here’s a quick tip for all of you iPhone users:

Settings > General > Keyboard > Enable Caps Lock

Now, when you quickly tap the Shift key twice on the keyboard, it will turn blue and become a Caps Lock!
Why wasn’t this enabled by default? I have tried, on numerous occasions, to figure out how to enable [...]

Smart Dust Leads to Smart Parking

It’s always cool to see presentations from CHI (and related conferences) end up in commercial products. At the time they are presented, they usually seem far-fetched or appear to have no real-world application (but, of course, we need crazy ideas and unconstrained thinking).
Smart Dust (CHI 2002) is being used commercially by a company called Streetline [...]