I recently took part in a debate at a conference about whether crowdsourcing was worthwhile or not. For the record, I was pro-crowdsourcing but if the shortlist here had have been announced at the time, I’d have been all over it as an example of how crowdsourcing can generate really good ideas and not just a bit of short-term hype. Open Planet Ideasis a project being run by conservation charity WWF and Sony....
Designers have many quirks, and one of the more common ones is getting giddy over an attractive ampersand. This one character seems to rouse the spirit of typophiles more than any other. Dan Cederholm of the design studioSimpleBitsonce spent 445 words extolling the benefits ofusing the best available ampersandin your designs. Unfortunately, using your favorite ampersand on the web hasn’t always been practical, given that it’s unlikely your preference is going to be from a web-safe font....
I think you can card this one up as one for only serious wine freaks. The Bosch IXO Vino is a cordless drill with a corkscrew attachment. So it’s basically stolen right from one of my late-night Pinot-soaked invention sessions. The IXO Vino comes with a cordless drill, a corkscrew adapter and a charging dock, all packed into a charming wooden wine box. The drill has a light for those classy candlelit dinners when you’re opening bottles so fast you can’t bother with a standard opener any more....
If you’ve ever felt your noisy open-plan office makes you cranky and sends your heart racing, our new research shows you aren’t imagining it. Prior to the pandemic70%of office-based employees worked in open-plan offices. Employee complaints about this design arerife. Yet there is littleexperimental researchinvestigating the effects of office noise on things like cognitive performance, physiological stress , and mood. The results ofour study, in experimentally controlled conditions using heart rate, skin conductivity, and AI facial emotion recognition, shows the effects of that noise are very real....
A new open-source project entitled“In The Box”hopes to make the job of porting Android applications over to Apple’s iOS platform much easier by providing tools that can take a ready-coded Android app, execute and test it on different iOS devices and then submit the binary to Apple’s App Store. In The Box operates by taking the Dalvik virtual machine from Google’s Android operating system and allows it to run alongside tools provided for iOS apps, requiring little or no changes to the code to get the apps in the App Store....
