Technologizer

This change butts up against what I think is a fundamental, unsolved UI issue. Power users often don't realize how much if an issue "getting lost" is for novice users. Dave Worthington's Mom said[1] of the iPad:

Well, it’s too touchy. Even though I’m better with it now… if you happen
just to move your hand or something, you know, then all of a sudden you’re
out of what you’re in. That’s bad I think.

Notice she doesn't say "you go back a page" or "you've opened something" she says "you're out of what you're in". Anyone whose done some usability testing knows that users all the time get "out of what they're in" and are completely lost. And as the designer you are screaming in your head "You've just gone to your Account page! Just click the huge red "Back to my movies" link at the top of the page you ninny!" All. The. Time. Bless us, designers and users both.

I call this an unsolved problem because the options are equally bad:

1) Have one panel where you replace the contents frequently. Like a web browser. Unfortunately, as the article points out, prevents doing two things at once. And it forces people to learn often complicated mechanisms for navigating from state to state.

2) Show multiple panels at the same time. Takes up a lot of space, especially when there are lots of panels. Can be confusing at first.

3) Show multiple panels, but with the ability to close panels. This introduces the UI problem of reopening them. You can allow people to shrink/move…

You could build a twitter search app, which searches and returns real time news. It should be capable of categorizing tweets about an event as headline(MJ's dead), more info at(latimes.com), comments.

In short it should search twitter for real news and display it in a traditional blog style. Perhaps, it could even display excerpts from the info source site.
The comments display should be real time so that you can in effect discuss the news with totally random people without having to follow them or anything.

A killer feature would be an up/down voting system, so that any noise in the news items gets immediately voted out.
Btw killer domain name. Perhaps use "What's tweetin now?" as a tag line.

EDIT: Why it would be valuable: Ask Jeff Goldblum :P ( http://technologizer.com/2009/06/25/twitter-the-fastest-way-to-get-informed-or-misinformed/ )

EDIT2: You could also add a user rating system like the one at stackoverflow, in order to get the bots out and give more weightage to more popular users.

To better understand the role of Steve Jobs, I recommend reading this excellent article from Technologizer (that got buried on HN as some good submissions do) about Edwin Land of Polaroid and the innovative product of the time, the SX-70.

"Edwin Land was brilliant, prescient, prickly, and demanding, and hounded his employees into doing great things they might never have accomplished otherwise. That sounds like Steve Jobs. Land described photography as “the intersection of science and art.”

Jobs likes to cite Land’s quote and says that Apple’s work sits “at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology,” a location which is surely in the same neighborhood. Land demoed new Polaroid products himself at corporate events that were famous for their hypnotic effect. Jobs carries on the tradition.

And both Land and Jobs were forced out of the companies they founded, in two of the more preposterous decisions in business history."

http://technologizer.com/2011/06/08/polaroid/

On the other hand, I believe we did see exponential growth in our ability to both automatically drive cars, to automatically translate text, and in voice recognition.

If we consider 1958 to be a good starting point for self-driving cars (http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars/), might we say that Google's car is orders of magnitude more powerful than those of 1986?

If we consider 1954 a starting point for machine translation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation), again might we find that Google Translate is similarly in a different league than SYSTRAN of the 1980s?

I do not really have the knowledge and sources to back those claims up, so I have to frame them as opinions for now. Could someone with experiences or deeper knowledge about these areas weigh in?

There was an excellent article by Benj Edwards about Computer Space and Dabney's contribution to video game history, including the invention of the "slipping counter" circuit that moved onscren objects on this game and Pong: https://www.technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-of-the-arcade-video-game/

“Nolan came to me one time and he said, ‘On a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV, the picture will go up, and if you turn it the other way, it goes down. Why does it do that?’ I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sync and the picture timing. He said, ‘Could we do that with some control?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we probably can, but we’d have to do it digitally, because analog would not be linear.'”

It matters because people writing angry blog posts because apple leaves someone out has happened at every iteration of every apple product ever.

Apple removing the firewire port was the end of the world.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/16/jobs_responds_to_outrage_over_macbooks_missing_firewire

Apple removing the matte screen option was a the end of the world

http://www.macworld.com/article/1136061/matte_laptops.html

Using USB instead of ADB, SCSI and GeoPort and ditching floppy drives was the end of the world

http://www.technologizer.com/2008/10/17/firewire-isnt-alone-a-brief-history-of-features-apple-has-killed/

I don't think I even need to link posts about powerpc, flash player, or the 30 pin connector