The A Future of Information Interfaces for Emergency Management

The video The Future of Information Interfaces for Emergency Management is a good envisioning of the very possible with the possible exception of the "grab and drop" transfer of visualizations between physical machines. The front line responders all have head mounted video and, I would assume, other environmental sensors. The amount of information given to the front line was less than what I would have expected. That is, there was too much emphasis on centralized management and control when distributed management and localized control is a better approach. Other interesting features in the video include

* big displays with three-heads being common
* virtual whiteboard+touch screen that shows the distant participant as if on the other side of the device.
* pie menus are finally (!) showing their strengths in a touch-screen world.
* more direct touch interaction with specialized virtualized controls.
* heads-up display on the truck's windshield.

MonoTouch and Apple's Section 3.3.1: Two Theories

I do believe that Mono has meaning for developers. Everytime I listen to the Mono folks I hear them saying the right things. Here is another one of the right things:

MonoTouch and Apple's Section 3.3.1: Two Theories

"[...] MonoTouch has been misrepresented, initially by Gruber and by most people covering the debate over section 3.3.1. Probably because few of them have actually used MonoTouch or because they are not familiar with .NET. Probably folks think that MonoTouch is .NET, and .NET is Microsoft's Java and draw their own conclusions.


MonoTouch brings the C# language and the core of .NET to the iPhone, but does nothing to provide a cross-platform UI experience or for that matter any sort of mobile device cross-platform APIs.

We bring the C# language, garbage collection, a type safe system that help reduce errors, make programmers happier and more productive on the iPhone while getting access to every single iPhoneOS API that they want to.


We have also been able to expose new APIs that Apple has exposed in record time thanks to the fact that we are not really an abstraction layer over the iPhoneOS, but merely a compiler that talks to the native APIs. [...]"