ReadWriteWeb

University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a "brain wave monitor" to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.

Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.

Is this the future for the Firefox UI?

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

When researching FuseCal this morning, one of the things that made it so appealing to try was the fact that you could just enter in a URL and see the service in action right away. No sign-up forms, no logins. This got us thinking about UI design as it applies to today's web services. Lately, it seems that less and less services are using sign-up forms...at least, they aren't requiring you to sign up right away in order to try them out. Instead, the trend seems to be to let you jump right in and get to work. This is definitely a good move, in terms of usability of the site, and it's not the only UI trend we've noticed lately.

People who in the next few years solve big problems in Information Overload are going to be very important, and some of them are going to be UI and UX (user experience) designers.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?