From Wikipedia, “The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system that enables financial professionals to access the Bloomberg Professional® service through which users can monitor and analyse real-time financial market data movements and place trades.”
Design firms thehappycorp, IDEO and Ziba design were asked to redesign the terminal, and the above is IDEO’s proof of concept. I like this a lot.
The Crystal Weather Station from Oregon Scientific sports a kick-ass form factor. It has laser engraved 3D icons of sun, clouds and rain in crystal and a radio controlled digital clock. You can even change the display mode between the time and indoor temperature with a wave of the hand.
What’s the best way to show a time series? A static plot only goes so far, and it’s actually very bad for presenting long timelines. Fortunately, designers have come up with creative uses of rich platforms such as Flash for interactive interfaces. All of these interfaces enable “zooming” to capture the level of detail.
The new Google Analytics platform uses elements from Google Finance. You can click and drag a “window” to focus on a period of interest.
BBC recently released an interactive Flash program to explore British history from the Neolithic (nothing much to see here) ages to today. This is very useful to our history discussions we have often in the lab.
At a conference last week, Google releases a couple of new interfaces to its engine. The timeline view plots the frequency of occurrence of search keywords. (I was talking to a friend about nanotechnology last week, and used this feature to show him when the hype peaked.)