Romaji[1] seems like a fun place to plunder exciting sounding words from.
Anime and Manga became mainstream popular X years ago, where X is long enough for those early fans to become old enough to start naming products.
As far as I can tell it's simply because Japan (and the Japanese language) is perceived as exotic, futuristic, and cool, which are exactly the image the tech industry wants.
My perception is that in the '80s, it was done even more randomly ("pick cool-sounding word off of sushi menu"), and people are a bit more sophisticated now and more likely to actually consider the meaning, but the root cause seems the same.
I suppose the image of "futuristic Japan" might be waning these days, but the mainstream popularity of Japanese anime/manga in other countries probably picks up the slack...
It's funny, because anyone who's actually been to Japan can tell you that it's not the least bit futuristic anymore. And I'm not talking about traditional culture - I'm talking about an entire country stuck in the 70s/80s, technologically speaking. There are rare pockets of fresh air, mostly provided by the outside world (like smartphones), but the Japanese have by and large failed to understand or grasp the digital revolution.
Tell me something - is there a single internationally famous Japanese software company that you can name? Even if you want to talk about famous Japanese programmers, the only one I can think of is Matz, but he's Mormon and has 4 children - not exactly your average Japanese guy.
Anyway, I think it's a neat concept. It runs correctly for me in FF (slow, but FF seems to be having problems taking advantage of my hardware in general for 3D stuff).
On Chrome and Midori it's fast, but the swinging effect gets clipped to the straight edges of the menus, and the text only shows up in the menu headings, rather than for the menu items themselves.
If I change the 'line-height' property for '.list dd' to 0, I can just make out the tops of the menu item ext, so I'm guessing that this is a positioning problem.
I wrote another library that relies heavily on 3D transforms to do folding effects (http://oridomi.com) and it's frustrating seeing the same issues you see in Makisu in Firefox.
Mozilla's been iterating quickly, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.
i wonder what the cause is however. 3D stuff may go more or less fast on FF, but that one is particularly super slow.
It's a neat demo, I just fear what developers will do with it.
In any case, a neat concept. Works great on Safari.
It'd be cool if you could make them flutter a bit by moving the mouse around or by grabbing and dragging the edges (or some other means).
Think of them as like curtains.
Or perhaps it could be like there is a constant slight breeze, making them move like a curtain in a gentle breeze.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
EDIT: Grammar.
I agree with some others that the animation speed is a little slow to give that suspension of disbelief, and the menus are a little too static once the animation has finished, but I have useful suggestions there because they would stop being very useful if they moved around. Maybe the effect would work best in the form of a dropdown menu?
But this might not be usable for a Web App, but there may be some situations.
