Although Comic Sans is typ­i­cally mis­used when try­ing to make sig­nage and fly­ers appear friend­lier, I actu­ally love it here in this ATM inter­face. The user expe­ri­ence of most ATMs is so poorly designed that the fact that this ATM’s cre­ator gave at least an ounce of thought to type­face selec­tion (even though they went with old C.S.) gives me hope. (Plus, the trans­ac­tion fee is only $1.49 -- a steal!)

Since post­ing on the ori­gin of the Apple key, I dined at an estab­lish­ment that found a com­pletely new use for that com­mand pro­peller symbol:

I was about to run out to the store for some toma­toes, hop­ing to make my first batch of sum­mer gaz­pa­cho, when I remem­bered the sal­mo­nella out­break. I checked the FDA’s web­site for the sta­tus, and encoun­tered these photos:

The first thing that I noticed is that these look like per­fectly nor­mal toma­toes. Salmonella, a bac­terium, is invis­i­ble to the naked eye. So why is the FDA show­ing me absolutely use­less pic­tures of infected tomatoes?

The sec­ond thing I noticed is that the cap­tions seem to attribute blame -- and, there­fore, agency -- to the toma­toes them­selves, as though they actively con­spired to spread dis­ease among the human pop­u­la­tion. The images now look more like police lineup pho­tos, like some­thing on the FBI’s most wanted list:

I’m sure every­one and their moth­ers have already blogged this, but here are the lin­ger­ing ques­tions I have fol­low­ing today’s WWDC keynote:

• A new remote “erase” fea­ture was alluded to dur­ing the enter­prise por­tion of the pre­sen­ta­tion. How will this work, and who con­trols it? If I’m late pay­ing my AT&T bill, try to break my con­tract, or try to unlock the phone for use with another car­rier, will the phone self-destruct?

• Apple announced a new push noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice for devel­oper use, but I’m guess­ing it ain’t free. How much will it cost, and who can use it? Will small, inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers be priced out of the pic­ture? And is it part of the new Mobile Me ser­vice, or can it oper­ate on its own, serv­ing users who don’t have $99/year Mobile Me accounts?

• How much will my monthly 3G phone bill cost? (More, presumably.)

• Is 3G ser­vice even avail­able in my area? How can I find out before pur­chas­ing a new phone?

• Will Mobile Me’s push email ser­vice work only with me.com email accounts? (I’m guess­ing yes, which means I wouldn’t be able to use it with alignedleft.com.)

• How does the new Mail app’s UI for multiple-message delete/move work? This is new func­tion­al­ity for iPhone, but it won’t be use­ful unless it’s also usable.

• Same ques­tion for the mul­ti­ple lan­guage sup­port: How does the UI work for switch­ing languages/keyboards? And can the hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion used for Chinese char­ac­ter input be expanded for use with other alphabets?

Also, Jobs men­tioned that the audio qual­ity had been improved sig­nif­i­cantly. It will be inter­est­ing to hear if that’s really the case.

Update: I also want to add one obser­va­tion that I haven’t seen made else­where yet:

• It looks like iPhone 2.0 sup­ports mul­ti­ple iCal cal­en­dars, which was not men­tioned in the keynote (nor on Apple’s site). This will be great, as it brings my iPhone cal­en­dar more in line, visu­ally, with my desk­top iCal cal­en­dar. (I hope this also elim­i­nates the bug/feature of hav­ing new events entered on the phone sync unpre­dictably into the last cal­en­dar in iCal’s list.)

My last project of the semes­ter was a response to the con­cept of ges­ture. This is my second-ever installation-ish piece, and it was well-received. When some­one moves in front of the cam­era, the motion is detected and rep­re­sented on-screen as the spin­ning of hun­dreds of tiny discs. Faster motion makes the discs spin faster and change color more rapidly. The effect is even more inter­est­ing when using a pro­jec­tor to cover a whole wall with the spin­ning discs.

From watch­ing peo­ple inter­act with this piece, I learned that every­body loves to see their actions inter­preted and expressed in an alter­nate form. Although I find this project visu­ally inter­est­ing, I was con­cerned about the fact that it doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate any explicit infor­ma­tion. That turned out not to be a prob­lem from the user’s per­spec­tive, as every­one I’ve shown it to imme­di­ately starts wav­ing their hands around, jump­ing up and down, and mak­ing all sorts of strange motions, becom­ing entranced by the pat­terns that “they” are cre­at­ing on the screen.

After a cou­ple min­utes, though, the col­ors become such a hodge­podge that they cease to exhibit inter­est­ing pat­terns. So, fol­low­ing one of the great pieces of feed­back I received, I added a timer that resets the grid once a minute. That reset encour­ages fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion and allows peo­ple to “take turns.” Users seem to get more invested in their motive exper­i­men­ta­tions when they can claim full own­er­ship of the visual result, as tran­sient as it is.

Watch a video here: