Image credit: Timo on Flickr.
Here’s another example of the past becoming absurd.
The new Apple Powerbooks – actually since the beginning of last year – have motion sensors built in. They’re supposed to be used to switch off the hard-drive if you drop the machine. If the machine senses sudden acceleration, it makes the drive safe.
But hackers figured out how to expose the numbers, and you could use the numbers as a tilt sensor, to see how the computer is oriented.
I wrote a small application called bumptunes which watched out for me smacking the side of my computer. I would smack the side to move onto the next piece of music, like jumping a jukebox. Smacking the other side would return to the beginning of this music.
It’s nothing special, but it’s compellingly natural to use.
When my friend took his new computer away, I was sitting with my own laptop, which has no motion sensor, idly smacking it on the side when a bad tune came on, confused as to why it wasn’t skipping the track, smacking it again trying to get it to work, smacking it again…
It now seems absurd that I should mutely point on the screen to what I want my computer to do, following its rules.