Mailroom, innovative mail client for small businesses.

Interesting post on why blog comments often suck. In searching for a picture for this post, I also came across this awesome comment design showcase.

Greg Linden’s thoughts on Microsoft and Google’s search strategies. Also see Don Norman’s comments on Google’s simple interface.

A creative director makes a stab at redesigning the Ebay homepage. I agree with him that Ebay has horrible usability, but it would be interesting to see how his design compares. While we designers may prefer the clean and simple layout, it could be that the more cluttered one leads to more sales.

Recreating Google from memory.

Blendie, a voice-actived blender – growl louder to make it go faster. This may seem like a frivolous project, but it investigates some interesting emotional connections between user and product. From the MIT Media Lab, of course.

IBM’s speech recognition technology. Speech recognition has been steadily improving and is finally starting to become usable. My favorite example: my friend can tell his Prius “I’m hungry”, and it will show him the restaurants in the area.

This multipoint touch screen is incredible. The video does a great job at showing how this sort of technology can revolutionize UI design. I can’t wait to see this stuff go mainstream. (Apple tablet anyone?)

Ning.com uses the left-border of text-fields to indicate required information on their signup page. Very clean design solution.

Update: As my roommate who works for Apple points out, this doesn’t work in Safari because Safari won’t let you style form elements. I guess that’s why they still have the stars there…