So busy the past few weeks I haven’t come up for air. Needed to post this though:

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Now for some commentary: When I first saw this I was extremely excited. As someone who carries their Moleskine around everywhere I’d love a more powerful and web-connected digital replacement. In fact I’ve debated buying a Modbook pro for a while, but in the end it’s just too large to effectively replace my small-format Moleskine. And the iPhone doesn’t have a stylus so UI sketches with my fat-finger on a bouncing subway is out of the question as well. So the courier seems to be the right format and size and seems to offer functionality I could put ot use right away. But the more I watched the demo, the more I realized though those page-flip metaphors have to. Have we not outgrown this yet? This was cute in 2002, old in 2005 and I feel has no place in future computing. Yes, even future computing that seeks to directly mimic and replace things that do page-flips in the first place (books/magazines/newspapers). I mean even the new google magazine browser is called flip. Cool name. Tired metaphor. I made a point a while back that the NY Times Reader AIR application hitched it’s wagons too heavily to the newspaper format reading experience and didn’t innovate in new, more powerful ways to organize content in a composition beyond the “page” layout paradigm currently in play. I feel the exact same about Courier and almost all page-flip paradigms out there. Because in the end, if flipping the page really more useful to the user than something that’s quicker, requires less gestural input from the user and taxes the graphics engine less?

Now I understand this is a pre-production demo/leak/PR piece so the more sex the better. Hence all of the juicy flipping and spatial blurring, etc. I get it. But in the end, I’d love to see Courier’s UI team look beyond the limitations of a “page/page-flip” metaphor and onto a paradigm/metaphor that is more efficient/powerful/useful than any physical analogue.

We’re ready to break the shackles of digital-metaphors-that-map-to-the-physical-world-because-we-wouldn’t-be-able-to-understand-how-to-use-the-computer-any-other-way. Recycle bin get off my digital desktop and back onto the floor next to my feet.