Article on Yanko Design
On 25 January Asymptote Architecture, a New York based architecture practice led by principals Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, has been awarded the Millennium Tower World Business Center (WBCB) in Busan, Korea through an international competition organized by the Busan International Architectural Culture Festival (BIACF) and sponsored by the Municipality of Busan City and the Solomon Group.
The announcement was made on January 23 in Busan after a unanimous decision by jury members selecting Asymptote’s ground breaking design of three separate tapered towers rising out of a robust and powerful base. The Solomon Group, a private Korean developer, intends to move forward with Asymptote’s design for a 560m tall tower, which upon completion will be the tallest building in Asia.
Another interesting article on Design (dot) fr
“Those who stay in apartments crave for spacious bungalows and those who live in landscaped acres dread the maintenance and wish they had lesser rooms to clean! So what really is the ideal size for a home?”
Interesting article on Make Use Of that show you how to install application on flash drive. If you have presentation for your client and they don’t have the software on their computer, then you can run your show on your flash drive without any hassle. Really handy!
“Over the past few years, USB thumb drives have become popular. They transfer files relatively fast (compared to CD’s), happen to be extremely small and unobtrusive, and plug into almost any computer with a USB port. Thanks to the convenience of the modern thumb drive, I can copy files onto a small drive that fits in a change pocket, and transfer them to another computer.
Sites like PortableApps actually have pre-packaged applications that you can install directly to your USB drive. These apps, games, and utilities will run from your USB stick when you plug it into a computer(provided that they’re on the operating system the programs run on). Aibek compiled an excellent list of 100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick that I would recommend checking out if you’re looking for pre-packaged programs to put on your thumb drive.”
“The innovative plant perf concept aims to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables to the consumers which eliminate using chemicals that are harmful for health. The plants are get attached with the device right after being cut from the field to get the nutrients from the perf. The body of the device is made from corn starch plastic and features three main parts, the main body, bottle top and nutritious liquid. The long top end of the bottle remains locked when the farmer collects it and during harvesting, the farmer cuts the fruits and insert the stem inside the bottle and locks it by pulling the top upward. Not only fruits, it can also be used to keep flowers fresh for longer period of time according to the user’s need.”
Envisioned by AGENT, a strategic intelligence embassy, the “CTRUS” is a see-through soccer ball that imitates the bounce of an inflated pneumatic soccer ball, but without losing the air, giving transparency to the game of soccer. In fact, it does not need air to recoil and perform. The hybrid soccer ball comes integrated with an interactive detection system that communicating wirelessly with control stations at the stadium changes its color to display the critical game situations, such as goal, offside, kick force, travel speed and if the ball is over the goal line or outside the field of play, via a GPS/RFID inner light.
Electric Bike by Yuji Fujimura
“The key purpose of the EBIQ Electric Bike concept is to complement the environment by reducing the amount of CO2 unlike traditional cars or motorcycles and offering a battery powered bicycle to ensure convenient short distance commuting in city/metro areas. To make it even more functional, the bike enables the rider to charge their laptop, cellphone and other personalelectric gadgets. Moreover, the built-in screen at the steering can provide direct access to the user’s laptop to gain necessary information at any moment. To make it space efficient, all the extended components can be folded down, resulting the bike to fit in narrow spaces.”
“Every web designer and developer should have a good and reliable wireframe (mockup or prototype) tool at there disposal. The importance of such a tool differentiates amongst web designers and developers, some use them, some don’t. Personally, I use them. It is in this initial stage of development that makes web design enjoyable, the coming together of the clients needs and your own creative ideas onto a blank canvas, allowing you to plan effectively the visual arrangement of the sites content.” Read full article on Speckyboy
Pencil Project
A free and opensource Firefox addon tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping with a multitude of features. With its built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping, the option for multi-page documents with background pages, its on-screen text editing with rich-text support and with its new cababiltity of exporting to HTML, PNG or Openoffice formats, makes this addon essential for any developer or designer.
fluidIA Web based tool allows for rapid refinement and exploration of concepts using an object-oriented approach to design. The big idea behind this experiment is whether a group of interaction designers, IA’s, UX professionals and developers can create there own prototyping tool in an open way.
Lumzy An online application creates prototypes of how the site or application will function by adding events within your Lumzy controls. You can create Message Alerts, Page navigation or Links to external content, when your client interacts with your Mockup, yet with the hand drawn feel of a sketch.
Currently being realised in Singapore, Crystal Mesh is a new media facade which is the result of a collaboration between WOHA architects, Singapore and media architecture specialists realities:united, Berlin.
Google worked with 1stAveMachine’s Aaron Duffy to craft a series of elaborate analogue vignettes to tout the features of its Chrome browser. Some of the ideas work better than others, with the obvious crowd-pleaser being the Speed demo. The subtext for all the vignettes is a celebration of DIY ingenuity, of making something seemingly simple through the complex combination of unlikely components.
Article on Inhabitat
Google.org worked with Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon in order to fully develop the program. To evaluate deforestation in a certain area of the world, the software relies on past, present and future models of satellite image data. Under this program, richer countries would provide financial incentives for poorer nations to protect their forests. By protecting said forests, these nations would help eliminate deforestation, a major contributor of the world’s carbon emissions.
“E-book reading devices are not a great achievement nowadays, but how many of them can really give you the feeling of reading a traditional book? The innovative LIBRARY e-book reader concept effectively meets the issue with its mechanical rollers along with lively page flipping animation on the screen that gives readers the feel of flipping through pages with their thumbs. The multi-touch display allows the readers to underline the book’s content with their fingers and can make bookmarks with simple gestures.”
After more than one and a half years of development, the world biggest multitouch multi-user wall has now been launched at Nürburgring
The two-piece ring°wall consists of a LED display and a multitouch information-wall and impresses by its size: a total surface of 425 square meters, which equals more than 6000 computer displays, is the biggest of its kind. An interactive World emerges out of 34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors and is supported by 30 directional speakers. Multitouch sensors basing on laser technology, convert the usage of the natural user interface into an experience. More than 80 users can simultaneously get informed about news and activities around the ringworld.
Adobe released the beta editions of Adobe Air 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, the next two major releases for both technologies. The most major feature added to both is the support for multi-touch input, however which cannot be used without having a device that support multi-touch such HP TouchSmart or a Dell Latitude XT2 running Windows 7.
Air 2.0 can support for the detection of mass storage devices, access to raw microphone data, the ability to open a file with its default application and other new improvements. Flash Player 10.1 is meant to be the first step for creating a consistent Flash experience across desktop and mobile platforms, however, the beta for this edition of the player is now only available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems.
Drawing inspiration from the personal solar charging device by Fandi Meng, the Sunny Flower, which charges your gadgets on the go, designer Mac Funamizu has come up with a solar charger called “iPetals”. Full article on The Design Blog
Adobe Flash Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for creating expressive interfaces and interactive content without writing code. Create interactive portfolios, product guides, microsites, site navigation, interfaces for RIAs and more, including transform artwork created in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks into interactive designs, create interactive prototypes with the ability to leverage them in the final product, publish a finished project as a SWF file ready for distribution, also work more efficiently with developers who use Adobe Flash Builder 4 to create rich Internet applications (RIAs). Designers use Flash Catalyst to create the functional user experience then provide the project file to developers who use Flash Builder to add functionality and integrate with servers and services.
New Beta 2 release adds support for video, sound effects, motion easing, AIR and more. Create the user experience through an approachable interaction design tool for designers with no coding required.
Photoshop CS5 will be released soon and it introduced some amazing tools and technique which will blow up your mind. Below is a demostration by Russell Brown “from the labs” – the painting and warping technology.
“Actually, it’ll only be rotating if you use it on a laptop that has a built-in accelerometer, similar to the one found in the iPhone. But still, the fact that the new version of Firefox (Firefox) (3.6) can recognize your screen orientation and adapt accordingly is awesome and signifies that we’ll see more and more accelerometer-equipped lappies in the future.” Read more on CNET news
The thin-film solar cell featured in the e-book measures 10 centimeters in width and length, it was developed to perfectly fit the 6-inch display panel for e-book currently mass produced by LG Display. The solar cell measures 0.7 millimeter in thickness and weighs a mere 20 grams, the less thickness of a credit card and the weight of a fountain pen.
The thin-film solar cell is produced by placing electrodes onto a glass or plastic substrate. Contrary to widely adopted crystalline solar cells that employ silicon wafers, the thin-film solar cell is generally light-weight and easily adjustable in size and form for applications such as e-books or mobile phones.
The current energy conversion efficiency rate of this product is approximately 9.6 percent. Exposure to sunlight for about four to five hours would extend the running time of the e-book’s battery by a day without the need for additional charging. This would allow longer outdoor use of the e-book and lessens worries about battery discharging.
Adobe Air is a framework which allows building desktop applications. Adobe Air applications are based on two technologies: Html/Js and Flash. Developers can choose to build desktop application via Html/Js, Flash or Flex. After a brief overview of the architecture, we will build a simple application using Html/Js.
Step 1 – Architecture of an Air application
Step 2 – OS level functionalities
Step 3 – Installation
Step 4 – Configuration
Step 5 – Project creation
Step 6 – Running the application
Step 7 – Deploying Air application
File Syncing
You also want to make sure that all of the most recent changes to those files are with you. You can do this by “syncing” (or synchronizing) them. Here on MakeUseOf, Shankar has written an article showing how easy the process can be. Just make sure that when you return to your computer, you sync the USB files and the originals on the computer.
Portable Applications
Portable applications are programs that you can install on an external hard drive to be run on almost any computer with a USB port. All parts of the program are typically located in one folder and therefore it is portable.
Virtual Operating System Mojopac offers a solution you may like. It’s almost like Windows XP installed on your external hard drive. This means that you can have your OS settings, programs, and files just the way you like running on any computer that has an external hard drive
Operating system boot from external drive
Making your computing portable is to install an operating system that can be booted straight from your thumb drive.
