Smarter design, and an awareness of how people /want/ to work, will lead you to design better interfaces with the basic elements at hand: HTML widgets. Even with this limited set of options, an enlightened designer can take make an intuitive interface that pleases everyone.

10 minutes later its still loading titles and my browsers CPU usage has just shot up, im presumbing because of the flash plugin. Plus it doesnt seem to offer any pop up advice untill its loaded, which aint yet :)

Both cool tools though, but I dont think many people will stick around, it might actually be faster to goto amazon and browse :)

Beeing that obsessed by text, I quicky loose orientation when confronted to approaches like newsmap. There’s nothing to guide the eye, and words are even wrapped on several lines. Every attempt to quickly read the headlines will fail. So it actually takes me more time looking through the news for something that interests me on newsmap than it does on the google news page. I don’t care about importance, as you may have noticed, but think I’m not alone with this.

When it comes to news, most people read just the headline or the first paragraph. And news are written by descendent relevance, so you grap the most important stuff quite at the beginning. This is why google news quotes the beginning of an article, which keeps you quite informed when just scanning through this single page – newsmap requires you to move your mouse over an headline to watch a (rather short) abstract as a tool tip. This is a step back, I think.

Anyhow, I know there are a lot of people out there who are thinking different, in a more visual style, perhaps. As far as I know recent researches, I may even be a minority… So other people may find things like newsmap helpfull and a step forward, like they do with mindmaps and graph-like search results (it has been done, but I cannot remember the according site).

Me personally likes to stay with well formatted text output, anyhow.

The CPU/memory usage drops significantly while you’re zoomed on a book…

You’re missing the point – these projects are about experimenting with UI design and interaction. Yes, HTML forms the majority of the web’s documents and controls, but there’s also plenty of room for richer and more immersive experiences like these two. They may not trounce ol’ king HTML but they’re taking the same problems and attempting to find/discover a different solution. Both fail in some regards but so does HTML – again, it’s this type of experimentation which keeps us all moving forward instead of just kicking back and saying, “well, I’m happy with where we’re at. Let’s stop here”.

geof

I’m not sure how it would catch on with mainstream web users.

A great example of innovation, though.

The continual addition, or moving, of book covers is confusing. The covers are too small to see well. I guess if you like checking out books in a brick-n-mortar in the middle of an earthquake – well than this would be perfect – otherwise just a gimmick.

I think the main reason that we haven’t seen a huge jump in interface design is similar to the reason that most newspapers, magazines, etc all have a similar format that is essentially the same as 100 years ago. While the Internet is a new medium, you are still conveying data – which has established best practices. I’m not saying that nobody is going to come up with something better, I just haven’t seen it yet.

I think both examples need relatively fast computers and connections to work well. While 5 years ago that wasn’t even a vaguely realistic expectation, it’s something you could expect in more savvy audience sectors now.

10 minutes later its still loading titles and my browsers CPU usage has just shot up, im presumbing because of the flash plugin. Plus it doesnt seem to offer any pop up advice untill its loaded, which aint yet :)

I think that is the biggest usability issue with Amaztype. As Cailean already pointed out, it loops forever, though that fact isn’t immediately obvious. We noticed it quickly because we saw our own books appearing again and again, but I can imagine many users would be waiting for it to finish.

The continual addition, or moving, of book covers is confusing. The covers are too small to see well. I guess if you like checking out books in a brick-n-mortar in the middle of an earthquake – well than this would be perfect – otherwise just a gimmick.

True, you can’t see the books perfectly presented but the same can be said of a standard book shelf. The shape of books means that they are most often stacked with their most interesting and informative sides facing each other. We usually choose which ones to examine more closely by judging it’s a book by it’s spine, rather than it’s cover.