It’s Ugly, But It Gets You Thinking…

(via Autoblog)

the GINA Light Visionary Model’s outer skin, which is made entirely out of textile fabric that’s pulled taut around a frame of metal and carbon fiber wires. The skeleton of the car is controlled by electro-hydraulic devices and can actually move and change shape beneath the fabric skin. For instance, the headlights of the concept can be exposed or hidden by the car’s skin just like blinking eyes, and the hood opens from the center as the fabric parts to expose the engine. This idea extends to the interior, where BMW designers have made visible only those instruments that are required at a certain time, while the rest of the time the same fabric interior “blinks” them out of view.

Adobe Connect

The functionality and promise of Adobe Connect is mouth-watering. The idea of what this thing could be isn’t an application, its a revolution. Collaborative screen-sharing, web-conferencing with integrated audio, video and text chat, file-sharing, the cure for blindness and cold-fusion. Great where do I sign up? Oh – its FREE?! We’re saved.

Then you load the application itself up, load the required plug-in and invite a colleague to join your virtual meeting and it all goes to shit. I’m really starting to hate Flex apps. Chuggy. Chuggy. Chuggy. When will the makers of these apps stop trying to be cute with animated fly-outs, pulsing, glowing buttons everywhere and (most likely procedurally generated) gradients and bevels and when will they start making web-applications that are snappy, zippy and responsive. Adobe Connect feels like I’ve just dipped a baseball bat in ink and I’m trying to write a love-letter. It’s cumbersome and unresponsive and generally kills my vibe.

Now there are some great things about Adobe Connect – the feature-set, oh the feature-set. I’m sure on someone’s computer somewhere in the world works like a charm. And that’s a sight I’d want to behold.

But for now, I’d prefer it to look like crap and function well. And I guess that’s what’s really at the heart of this rant. I’m tired of beautiful things that don’t DO ANYTHING (and I’m not calling Adobe Connect beautiful, but it’s certainly nicer than goToMeeting). Maybe Air will change things by running processes locally. It better, because as it exists now, I can’t use Adobe Connect (on a MacBookPro with 4(!) gigs of ram and a Core2Duo 2.4). It just doesn’t function properly.

OLPC XO-2

OLPC XO-2. Touchscreen, haptics, below $100 price-point. I love the dual-screen folding-display form factor but only if the touchscreen keyboard is better than the iPhone’s. I assume the addition of haptic feedback will help greatly in this regard. Anotehr thought – with a decent processor, dual touchscreen folding design (readable in direct sunlight) what’s to stop DIYers from picking one of these up and making whtever they want out of one? I mean, its a completely progammable, versatile, cheap platform. Sounds pretty fresh to me…

Mapping the Blogosphere

CR Blog has a few more really nice images from Matthew Hurst’s effort to map the blogosphere using Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Digg Labs

(thnx Daily Exhaust!)

The folks at Digg Labs have some pretty sweet data visualizations on their hands utilizing Digg data sets. Fans of data viz go check it out. Fans of digg – stick to the lighter, more usable, straight-up digg, no rocks, no salt.

Em Tech ’07

This looks great this year and I’m super-psyched to go. Hoping Roundarch pays for it. Anyone going?

Exercise Your Brain

(via the NYT):

Alvaro Fernandez, whose brain fitness and consulting company, SharpBrains, has a Web site focused on brain fitness research. He estimates that in 2007 the market in the United States for so-called neurosoftware was $225 million.

Mr. Fernandez pointed out that compared with, say, the physical fitness industry, which brings in $16 billion a year in health club memberships alone, the brain fitness software industry is still in its infancy. Yet it is growing at a 50 percent annual rate, he said, and he expects it to reach $2 billion by 2015.

NOVA 3D Display

This is NOVA, a 3D LED display, developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich to celebrate their 150th anniversary. Here are some numbers: it is build with 25000 lightballs, each containing 12 LED’s. It can display 16 million colors and 25 images per second. It measures 5 by 5 by 1 meter and it is 3.3 tons heavy. It will be there till September 2009.

There are some more photos in tom29ger his Flickr set.

Bridging the Physical Digital Divide

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