The brilliant man-behind-Muxtape Justin Ouellette has also written a great minimalist interface for Flickr called I Hardly Know Her (thus answering the age-old question, “Flickr? I hardly know her!”). Details here.

For a preview of what IHKH can do, check out Peter Baker’s wonderful square-format landscapes.

Kevin Kelly has an interesting writeup on a new kind of keyboard interface using hexagonal keys and a more spatial, geometric relationship between intervals. It’s used on a MIDI Controller called the AXiS and Kelly’s post links to a video of Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess noodling around on it. Rudess points out the piano keyboard proper has only been with us 200 years or so. Is this what’s next? I’m not convinced yet. The AXiS certainly compresses the layout of the keyboard and standardizes fingering for scales, both very useful additions, but I have yet to really see anyone play the thing. Every video reminds me of a two-year old at the piano, all glissandos and simple Chopsticks intervals. The best explanation and demo probably comes from Peter Davies, the AXiS’s inventor, but even he seems to struggle with some of the simpler tunes he tries to play as he strays from the basics of the scale. Maybe it’s a new kind of tool for a new kind of music, waiting to be invented.

Two great ideas from Kevin Kelly’s CT2 blog: drawing on the beach and gravity as your password.

As a devoted Gmail user, I really appreciated Khoi Vinh’s wonderful post that suggests a simple second look at Gmail’s spacing, leading, and alignment issues would make a world of difference. Update: Mike Bingaman has created a Greasemonkey script that does the trick in Firefox. Download it here.

While I was in Amsterdam for New Year’s I had the pleasure of having coffee with designer Laurenz Brunner, whose work bridges art, design, editing, and much much more with confidence and grace. (He’s also responsible, via his work with Cornel Windlin for Vitra, for the ITC Grouch revival.) Laurenz is so busy with great projects like Tate ETC that his own site is just a holding page at the moment—but even that is spot on. His choice of image? A chart from the Poynter Institute’s study on the average eye movement of web users. Maybe the first holding page I’ve ever seen that I don’t want taken down…

In a recent NYT interview with Steve Jobs, Jobs points out the way a multitouch display shifts software from a “point-verb” model to an “action” model: “There are no ‘verbs’ in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or ‘verb,’ to do something to it.”