pinching an image on an iPad

Photo by arabcrunch on Flickr, CC 2.0

I am enjoying my new iPad tremendously.  I’ve gotten the hang of sliding my fingers to scroll, as well as pinching and unpinching to zoom in and out.

Yet twice yesterday I turned to my lovely computer flatscreen on my desktop computer with the absentminded control action of sliding my hand or tapping.  A few seconds each time would pass before I realized that I’ve already tried adapting that behavior to my oh-so-last year tried and true computer.

I chuckled.  Part of my amusement was my slow recognition of the gaffe itself as I stared blankly at the screen.

My mental glitches also reminded me of the days of my first digital video recorder, now many years ago.  I caught myself at movie theaters trying to grab the DVR remote to rewind to see a scene again.  I caught myself doing that five times before my brain caught up and adjusted my user interface context expectations again.

I’m also amused at the sight of my teenagers tinkering with my iPad’s user interface, though with different assumptions.  They expect the iPad to ride along in their lap like their cellphone does while they are on the laptop at the same time.  They love the slick shifts between elements, but have voiced frustration that it can’t multitask on the same screen like their traditional computers.  Having to focus on one screen at a time for them is their cognitive break.

Pardon me while I tap on the screen again to publish this post…

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Augmenting My Mind

How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away? I'm now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I...

From Music in LA to Digital and Music in Austin

We've just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital...

Playing with Facebook Stories Camera Effects

My Facebook friends must be thinking I'm nuts (again).  I've been tinkering with Facebook Stories and its Camera Effects.  In fact, I've been playing so much I'm also looking into the Camera Effects and AR (augmented reality) developer group. First, here's some of the...

Craft, Process, and Thinking of Becoming

Today I'm working on taxes for our two college students' FAFSAs and watching "Abstract: The Art of Design" on Netflix in the background.  Christoph Niemann is both in his story and telling his story about craft and life.  He is a character and an animated...

HUD: Stories on How We Work and Decide

Gigi enjoyed sharing thoughts over YouTube and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Series.  This session was recorded in January and ran as a webinar on March 17.  You can find it now...