I went to the grand opening of Scotland’s first Apple store today!

I joined the queue at about 8am (which is a miracle for me on a Saturday morning). Some even bigger Mac geeks had been there overnight.

Anyway, it was totally worth getting up early on a Saturday. The interior is amazing and the glass staircase is pretty impressive. I got my free t-shirt (which is way too big for me ) and I got to try out the new Imac.

The Technology Review published by MIT wrote an article about our work on tactile feedback for touchscreens! Woohoo :-)

‘For all its designer appeal, Apple’s forthcoming iPhone is lacking. While the touch-screen interface looks beautiful, it will most likely suffer from the same drawback that plagues many other mobile gadgets with touch screens: no tactile feedback. A button on a flat, slick display simply doesn’t feel like a button, and as a result, people are prone to making errors with them.

Brewster’s team is using specialized, somewhat expensive actuators to explore how people respond to different types of vibrations. Research conducted by Eve Hoggan , a PhD student in Brewster’s group, has shown that people can distinguish among different types of vibrations. A vibration can feel rough or smooth depending on the shape of the electrical current used to power the actuator.

…..within the next couple of years, vibrational feedback will be much more common, and people will be able to pick out the different types of vibrations they want to use on their phones, much as people now choose the wallpaper on their phone’s screen.’

The paper published at CHI 07 which mentions some of my work on this is here.

The rest of the article

You’re never too old to get dressed up!!

I went to see Muse play as part of T on the Fringe at Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh. They were amazing!!!!

My Chemical Romance were the support act, they were awful. Anyway, Muse opened with Knights of Cydonia which is my favourite song on the album. They played most of the songs from their new album as well as some classics like Plug In Baby and New Born.

Managed to get quite near the front of the stage but I was too short to see anything So all my photos are of the images on the screen instead.

Welcome to my brand new site!