John Peel's Record Collection

One of the things I have always believed in is the importance of tangible objects that we can hold in our hands and experience.

As much as I love my music being collected digitally and held on a hard drive. I have always found it a far more enjoyable experience to count and collect my CDs and spend time organising them into perfect patterns that have some intrinsic value to me. Think Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and the importance of organising record collections, (here's a clip from the film to illustrate the point). One of many projects I have done like this is organising my DVDs by colour.

Creating an experience like this in a digital world is never going to be possible. But there are steps that can be taken to make the most of the medium.

Have a look at this experiment to recreate John Peel's record collection online.

Browsing through records, it is possible to pull records out, have a look at the artwork and even look at the notes John Peel made about them.

There is talk of the API for this being released in the future. Even if that can't be done there is inspiration to be had from playing in this record collection.

With the added functionality of Spotify playback you can always use it to discover some new music if nothing else.

One handed soft keyboard

Interesting idea Microsoft Research, and I like the thought process

Two things that strike me initially ....

1. It takes up a lot of screen space replying to texts and emails where you have to check what has already been said might be difficult... but if you are just typing something off the top of your head that's not going to be a problem
2. It's at an angle if you look at what you type while you are typing you have two things to look at that both require different perspectives

You can read a little bit more about the keyboard at Gizmodo and The Verge the images have been leaked from a presentation and published online by WMPowerUser.com