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Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at design firm Schematic, spoke today at the XML Auckland conference. Herigstad worked with Steven Spielberg on the conceptual design for the film Minority Report, including designing the hologram screens on which Tom Cruise used his hands to navigate.

The subject of Herigstad's presentation today was new forms of User Interfaces for Web, TV and other media. Examples of the interfaces he discussed were touch screen and "distance gestures" - the latter being what Cruise was doing in Minority Report. Herigstad showed some real world examples of distance gestures, mostly from the TV/movie industry.

FriendFeed opened up a new beta today that introduces a completely revamped real-time user interface, as well as a number of interesting new features, including direct messages, the ability to share posts more selectively, better searches and filters, as well as a number of other smaller changes that make the new user interface very different from its predecessor.

FriendFeed has regularly made changes to its UI, but this new design is clearly the biggest change yet.

Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman celebrated his birthday today by releasing a plug-in for Dreamweaver that checks for and alerts users of web standards shortcomings in their design. Jeffrey Zeldman's Web Standards Advisor costs $49.99 but Zeldman says even he found some embarrassing errors in his own blog's code - something that can effect search engine visibility and thus the bottom line of any business on the web.

Though Dreamweaver catches a lot of flack from cynics, many people still use it and the design software is said to be much improved in recent years. Zeldman's new tool is worth checking out.

Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.

We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.

We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.

That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.

Netvibes, one of the many personalized homepage products available today, has just announced a new feature which allows users to share anything from their Netvibes pages - not just tabs, but also articles, widgets, and RSS feeds. This new feature allows those items to be shared via integration with two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook, the latter being powered by Facebook Connect. What's not to love? As it turns out, based on the comments found on the Netvibes blog, users are not happy about this change.

Yahoo today announced that it is bucket testing a new design of its front page. The new design was built on top of the latest version of Yahoo's UI Library, which, according to Yahoo, will accelerate performance and give third-party developers the ability to easily create applications for the new front page. It is not clear when this new design will become widely available, but for now, it is only available to a random subset of Yahoo's users.

When Google radically changed its iGoogle homepage a little while ago, many of its users were up in arms about these changes. By updating its homepage today, AOL ran a similar risk, but instead of making radical changes to the design of the page, AOL managed to include a lot of new functionality on the new homepage without shocking its users with a completely new layout. The new features of the AOL homepage are mostly centered around adding support for third-party social networking services.

Earlier this month we asked if Facebook was becoming more like MySpace. We noted that there were new apps cropping up that were making Facebook look a lot more like MySpace. MySpace has started to open up alpha testing for its Profile 2.0 service. We caught a sneak peek and it seems that now MySpace is now taking a few visual cues from Facebook.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that FriendFeed had released a new beta version of its site to test a new design for the popular lifestreaming service. Today, FriendFeed released a significant update to this design, which adds some much needed enhancements to the user interface. Specifically, the navigation of the FriendFeed beta site has now been switched to the left, and the post form can no longer be confused with the search form.