Microsoft’s Courier digital journal (Courier cancelled, April 29, 2010)
Here are videos and stills about Courier from engadget.
I think Courier looks very good, particularly its sense of hand and physicality. Courier appears to manage gracefully all kinds of information inputs,
has an excellent metaphor (a notebook, a journal), and is crisp and clean. And it is all about content.
With its double-page spread design, the Courier metaphor is also the book, with obvious promise for electronic books (which will require a
reasonably high-resolution screen).
It looks like a useful tool for artists and designers, and thus Courier should communicate with the Apple desktop. Courier will be pretty lonely
if it is exclusive to Windows. Or maybe the cloud, which one hopes is OS agnostic, will cause appropriate communication and
integration.
Probably the greatest challenge in interface design today is a journal notebook. For years, Microsoft, Apple, and many classes in industrial design have attempted
to design a good journal notebook. I hope that Courier survives intact, coherent, and focused during its journey through Microsoft, a journey with lots of possibilities
for messing it up.
But how close is the relationship between what is shown in the videos and the actual product in use?
I’ve seen many concepts that I’ve enjoyed as well, but it’s very important to remember: they all were ‘concepts’ just like
these images of the Courier.
I’m having trouble imagining a device like this actually making it out Microsoft’s doors.
The videos seem to have numerous instances where ambiguous user gestures are interpreted by the device reading the
user’s mind. Why does a swipe sometimes turn the page but other times cut a column out of a spreadsheet?
The video does show magically fast and accurate stylus-handwriting.
What struck me the most about the concept videos was the notion that copying and pasting images from the web and adding some scribbles constitutes some kind of expression of creativity. I’m sure some designers would want exactly this, but I would feel much better if they showed a photographer sorting their photos, making notes and actually creating art instead of just taking good ideas from others.
It’s what marketeers and commercial artists believe is creativity.
Because of the uncertain credibility of the Courier videos, our discussion here has now wandered off into a discussion
about the pitch rather than the product. That’s not what marketing should provoke. Videos of continuous live use of the Courier by one of the interface designers or project leads would have more credibility than well-polished pitches.
Hope I didn’t get fooled by the Courier videos.
The live iPad demo by Steve Jobs, which went on for a long time and even showed
the Flash-blackout icon at the NYTimes homepage, is a presentation method with more credibility than the highly-crafted Courier video.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/03/05/microsoft-courier-the-third-weak-link-in-a-miserable-mobile-
strategy/
Both Daring Fireball and RoughlyDrafted suggest that the Courier videos are concept demonstrations, and do not
represent a real operating interface. Who knows?
Hands-on for iPad application design:
http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/05/ipad-application-design
http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project