Having been deep in the workflow design of the new version of the KMT lately, I've been thinking a lot about how users naturally interact with applications like ours. Obviously I've been thinking about this for a while, which is partly what prompted my audit of the Human Computer Interaction seminar last year. But no matter what workflows or UIs we develop, the users are always going to be constrained by the basic infrastructure- a web application running on a standard PC with a keyboard.

So check this out- Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University's Media Research Lab. In this video, he demonstrates his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

His demo is awesome- forget a tablet PC, I want one of these interfaces today. I can already imagine scanning an overview of the knowledgebase, shifting around piles of technical documents, sorting them by hand into categories, zooming in on the older ones for a quick edit (with a virtual keyboard), and then pushing them down a pipe toward publication.

And while we're at it, where's my flying car?